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Thank you very much, thank you very much. Thank you very much, first of all thank you very much to the Keshet family for allowing me to participate in this truly memorable and inspiring evening. I'm sure none of us will forget it soon. I want to congratulate all of the honorees; I want to wish all of the candidates luck all of you, both sides of the aisle. Whoever you are, whatever you do and whatever happens in the election don't forget Keshet.
I want to thank Tom for that generous introduction. Introductions have come to mean a great deal to me, probably because early in my career I was wounded severely by a couple of introductions. And ever since then I've kind of tensed up at introductions, I really have. And maybe you'll understand that more fully if I share what is perhaps my most memorable introduction ever, and this actually happened.
It was in 1983, it was my first year as governor in the State of New York. Pat Moynahan came to me, he was then our senior senator, and regrettably he stepped down. And he said Mario does President Regan know you? I said well not so that I can say we're intimate, you know I came out of nowhere and I won this thing so I guess the answer is no, he doesn't know me. He said well he should, you're now governor of the State of New York that's Roosevelt, and Roosevelt and Dewey and Rockefeller. I said I know they gave me a list, Pat, I memorized it. He said, are you going to the party at the Blue Room, I think it was in the White House. It was a party for newly elected types like myself. And I said yeah I'll be there, and he said we'll see a proper introduction is made. Now this actually happened.
And so we're there a couple of weeks later and at one point the president appeared to be relatively at ease at the far side of the room. And Moynahan came up to me like only he could you know and took me by the elbow and said, this is the moment. And he took me across the floor and up to President Regan and said, Mr. President I would like to introduce to you, and before he could get my name out of his mouth President Regan cocked his head the way he would. Gave that wonderful smile that melts all of resistance and he said oh you don't have to introduce us, I know Lee Iaccoca well. That's the truth absolute truth. That's the absolute truth.
And you know for one terrible moment there came surging up from the most remote recesses of my psyche the inevitable response to a crack like that, if you happen to be a kid from Queens, which is all I am. And it got to the tip of my tongue and prudence bit it and spat it out, and I didn't say it. But I almost said it, I know Mr. President to some people we all look alike, but I didn't say it. Because truth is, we don't all look alike, we don't all talk alike, we don't all think alike. What we do share however, is our common humanity and that's why we're here tonight trying to express that.
The warmth of Tom's introduction made me think of another compliment I received some time ago in Palm Springs. This is also true; I had just finished debating Pat Buchannan. And an attractive middle-aged woman from New York came up to me after the debate and said you don't know me, I so and so Goldstein. And I said how do you do. She said I'm from New York and I'm a Republican but I voted for you regularly. I said well thank you very much, that's very nice. She said I must tell you this, you were so good tonight you could almost be Jewish. And I said well I've been trying, I've been doing what I could. And then that wasn't far from the truth. My connection to the Jewish community goes, way, way, way, way back, long before I even dreamt of politics.
Mr. Kessler, Harry Kessler, what my father and mother always called Mr. Kessler until the day they died. Both Mr. Kessler and Mrs. Kessler owned a small grocery store in a four-story tenement in a place called South Jamaican Queens, which was maybe the poorest part of Queens in those days, still is. He lived upstairs from the store with his wife; because of a heart attack he could no longer do the hard work that the store required and he brought from Jersey City two immigrants and their two children, from Jersey City. They actually came from Salerno in Italy, neither had been educated a day in Italy, neither was ever educated a day here. He was a ditch digger.
It was the low point of the Great Depression; there was no more construction work. They were desperate, there was no Medicare, Medicaid, Worker's Compensation, Social Security, none of that. And because they had no friends, they had no skills and had no money they were desperate. Mr. Kessler, through a friend who miraculously in South Jamaica was aware of my mother and father and told Mr. Kessler here are people who are desperate for a place just to live, because they're about to be put in the street. And that thing happened regularly in those days, just put them behind the store, give them, you've got one big room behind the store, just let them live there.
There was a big stone sink, toilet bowl, which they partitioned in and a wood stove believe it or not. And you can put cots you know and they'll sleep, they'll work for you, just feed them a little bit, we know you can't pay them because nobody had any money. Well over the years that gave them a place in this country. They worked for Mr. Kessler and some years later they were given the store by Mr. Kessler, a long time later. I was born delivered by a midwife on a table behind the Kessler store. And I remember to the day that my mother and father died they had on their be a little picture of you know Mr. & Mrs. Kessler against a velvet back and a little gold painted frame. And they would have lit a candle to the Kesslers if it wouldn't have been a sin in both religions.
And the Kesslers had a great influence on me as well. I was a Shabbos Goy thanks to them, there was a synagogue on the, no, no, no listen in New York everyone's a Shabbos Goy when they run for office you understand. I won't give her name because I don't want to offend her, although she's out of politics now, but a woman once got up and said I was a Shabbos Goy. I thought they were going to stone here, there were no female Shabbos Goys. But I was indeed a Shabbos Goy. And they synagogue was right on the corner from where we had the store.
And I would do on Friday nights the things that their obligations, their ritual and their way of life made it impossible for them to do themselves. And on Sunday mornings I was an altar boy at St. Moniker's Roman Catholic Church. And looking back I remember that this created just a little bit of confusion for me. There were differences of course, no nuns, no kneeling, no collection plates in the synagogue on Shabbos, but what I remember the most was not the differences it was the sameness, the commonality. The candelabra, the brocaded vestments the Hebrew that I didn't understand on Fridays and Saturdays and the Latin that I didn't understand on Sunday morning.
I could recite it (speaking Latin) I didn't have the slightest idea of what it meant. I often wondered if they knew what the Hebrew meant. And I came to understand that there was a kind of Mystique in both these religions, there was a message that we had in common. That not all clearly understandable, some things must be taken with faith because they're not so brilliantly apparent even to the brightest intellect.
In the end my major impression was that in that struggling multi-colored, multi-ethnic neighborhood, and it was all of that with Portuguese and blacks and Chinese and Greek and O'Rourke the Irish and Jews of course and Italians like our family. But in that neighborhood there was more to hold us together than to drive us apart. We were all in a common struggle to survive in this new land America, which gave us a chance to work hard and to earn a little security or even more.
And so many of our basic beliefs seemed to me to be absolutely the same, most of all a belief that we're all in this thing together. Children of one God who made us deserve our obedience and want us to love one another. And as I grew up and went to school and moved in many different circles and did many different things, my relationship the Jewish people that started on the day that I was born broadened and deepened. I became a member of the Second Vatican Council's Ecumenical committee on Catholics and Jews. I became a Lieutenant Governor who fought a successful three-year battle for the inclusion of Holocaust studies in the New York State curriculum.
Believe it or not this was in the seventies, they wouldn't teach Holocaust. And when I confronted some of the regions and the great liberal bastion New York, I said well why is that? And they said well you know there's some controversy about the extent of the Holocaust, as though someone had created six million deaths as a kind of mirage, some horrible, grotesque mirage. We won the fight only to the extent that they would permit Holocaust, theoretically, never encouraged it. I got to be governor, we passed a bill and it is now the law of the state that Holocaust must be included in the curriculum.
I spent a lot of time in Israel, I spent time with Shimon Peres, spent time with Rabin, visited Israel, had a lot of friends in Israel. Over the years I learned how Jewish Americans have been part of all the great American movements going. Whenever their voices and strength were most needed, those voices were raised.
In a movement for worker's rights, for women's rights, for human rights, or civil liberties, for the right to worship freely. I watched the children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants grateful for what they had received from this country, giving back even more abundantly. Everywhere in the country, building a stronger, sweeter community for the Jewish community certainly, but not just for the Jews, for all of us together as Americans. Supporting education and art and music and research, reaching across the chasm of human need in a hundred ways across the country and beyond. Through groups like Keshet and Federation and the old UJA and B'nai Brith.
Here in Illinois taking homeless people off the freezing streets into warm shelters, providing a decent meal, offering the elderly the consolation of home visits or a residence where they can share their last days securely with friends and the pleasure of shared activities. Lightening the pain and the burdens of the afflicted and sick, the hungry and the disabled. And one of the most admirable expressions of that extraordinary generosity has been and is the work we celebrate, the work we honor tonight with Keshet.
Serving children and young adults with developmental disabilities, Cerebral Palsy, Autism, Downs Syndrome, is there anyone more in touch than the young people and young adults that we've seen this evening? Gentle young persons or young adults filled to the brim with the yearning to play, to run, to work, to laugh, to love, to be just like the family around him, but unable to express it in the way that most people can because they are disabled. As though they were chained, for reasons that none of us fully understand. Denied the simple ability to move their hands or legs or to control their movements, unable to speak clearly, denied all the magic strengths which most of us in this world take for granted and often abuse.
Can anyone love them more or do more to help them than the people of Keshet? I doubt it. Dave Gendel gave me some numbers tonight, over 300 families have children at Keshet programs, there are 65 children and young adults in the day and high school programs and more than 200 in Sunday school and summer programs. They offer vocational and transitional and various other social and recreational programs. Last year it cost about, a little bit more than three and a half million dollars to do that.
And despite the fact that this nation is certainly the richest and most powerful in world history and it's just completed one of the most fabulously abundant periods in our history, despite that most of the money has to be raised from volunteers. Now, there's more than a small irony there I think.
Only about a year ago the President of the United States and the Congress of the United States, both Democrats and Republicans voted a tax cut of nearly two trillion dollars. The president explained and the Democrats did not successfully contradict that statement that we do this because the nation does not need the money and so we may as well give it back to the people who gave it to us. Two trillion dollars 40% of that went to the one million or one percent richest Americans in the United States of America and elsewhere, me and my clients Top 1% that's about 600 billion dollars. Because the nation didn't need it.
The children of Keshet didn't need it, 31 million poor people didn't need it. One out of five children in this country is being raised in poverty; you know what that means in my old neighborhood, South Jamaica, which is worse now than it was then? That you empty out on to the street a toddler at two and a half years of age and she's surrounded by pimps, prostitutes, debasement, and degeneracy of all kinds. She grows up familiar with the sound of gunfire before she's ever heard an orchestra play. She gets to be 14 or 15 and looks around and all the young men are in jail, because of drug addiction or this crime or that crime. So there is no pot in the school PS 50 where I went to school, there's a school called number 50 is the pride of Talford Lawn and it stands for the things that are the best. It made me an American; it can't make anybody anything now. You're lucky if you don't get shot at PS 50, and that's the school that they have to look forward to.
So maybe they make a baby, why? They didn't know about contraceptives? No, out of despair and out of affirmation, at least if they have a child they think in their childish misguided way I'll have something I can love and something that loves me back. That's wrong, of course it's wrong, but tell me you didn't need the money for the school, for the neighborhood, for housing, for guidance, for help. Millions and millions of elderly people can't get prescription drugs and so on and so forth.
That's worse than that, the few government programs that are being used to help many of these young people are actually being cut, so that my clients and I can get that tax break. Now I'm not against tax cuts, I was delighted to hear because very few people in my state will acknowledge that I gave the biggest tax cut in the history of this state, because we needed to. Taxes were too high, business was terrible, I also created a few other ways to raise revenues that we apparently didn't find on the Internet, thank goodness.
But you have to, you have to look at this as objectively as you can, forget about the politics of it, does it make sense? We're investing billions of dollars around the world. We spent after the Second World War, after the Holocaust, after December 7, 1941, we spent billions of dollars to bring Europe back to life. After I saw the women in the old neighborhood you know put up the blue stars meaning that my son, my father, my lover, my brother is off to the army, off to the service. Then saw then take down blue stars and put up the gold stars and then cry and wail and go to the synagogue and cry, and go to St. Moniker's and cry.
Why did we spend all that money, why are we spending all that money on the Russians, why are we where we are all over the world? Because we understand that the world is interconnected, interdependent, we need one another, we have to create markets, we have to put down chaos, and we have to make them productive so that we can profit from their productivity. We can interrelate with them, all of that's intelligent. But why isn't it true in South Jamaica? Why isn't it true here with the children of Keshet? Why aren't we interconnected here in our own country? Why don't you invest in us the way you're investing in some of the rest of the world?
If the politicians are truly speaking America's mind with the policies, then this nation had drifted away from the characteristic that more than any other distinguishes the Jewish people. And I say this purely objectively. And what distinguishes the Jewish people from all the rest of the communities in our society is their togetherness, their instinct of mutuality, their powerful sense of community. So thank God for the Jewish people for their generosity, not only to their own community but to the larger society and for providing us the good example you do through Keshet and in so many other ways.
Today you answer that call again, demonstrating once more your immense generosity and once again offering us all a wonderful example. An example I think that most of the world, including this great country, needs and yearns for more today than it has in a long time.
This year or last year I guess will be reported as the year of 9-11, when terrorists who hated us so much that they would give their own life to take ours murdered thousands of innocent people and demolished the Twin Towers. That began a war that has destroyed hundreds of more lives and that will continue to be fought for years to come. Gradually New York and the rest of the country are drifting back toward normalcy. For some families the grieving continues and will for a long time. But for some the anger is still great and may never be completely dissipated. And some particularly religious people continue to be tormented by a perplexing question, the same question asked over and over by millions of people after the Holocaust. The same question we ask when a child mysteriously dies in a crib, why do these terrible thing happen to good people?
We read Rabbi Kushner's wonderful book and the other teachings but churches, philosophers, my own favorite Kafka and others. And still after reading them we're left anguished, maybe a little bit embarrassed by our inability to understand fully the explanations of so many who are so much more learned and perhaps so much holier than we are. And then as we struggle to orient ourselves to the chores and challenges of life we're still not reconciled.
A lot of us conclude that with all of the sadness and confusion on thing and maybe only one thing remains certain, the greatest treasure we have is the breath we are still able to draw. The life that is still ours, however depleted, however scarred the chance we have still to think, to feel, to act, the opportunity we have to use every precious moment well. Clinging to a gift that we know may be taken from us in the very next instant, as it was on 9-11. Cherishing that gift by satisfying our very best impulses, some of us vow remembering what happened that day to make the most of every moment now, every opportunity. Remembering that while the terrorists hated us so much they would give their own life to destroy ours, hundreds of Americans loved humanity so profoundly that they charged into the smoke and flames willing to give their own life to save the innocent victims.
That was and ineffably powerful expression of the very best we are capable of as human beings. And we are inspired by that, we're moved by that inspiration. And we resolve to do everything we can now to fight hatred, save God our precious liberty, make this world as safe, as strong, as sweet if only just a little bit sweeter than it is. That's a very old fundamental institute, fundamental enough to serve us as the foundation of the nation's three major religions. It's the idea that brings us all together at this event. It's the same idea that has kept the Jewish people alive and strong for more than 4,000 years.
The idea bore in the two principals on which Judaism is found. Tzedaka representing an exquisite intertwining of giving and righteousness. The holy obligation to give to one another, strengthening ourselves as we strengthen the whole community. And the second principle, when the Hebrew God was asked okay we're all brothers and sisters, what do I do with this relationship now? And the answer came back, Tikun Olam, repair the universe. I can imagine someone like Tevya repair the universe, I can't keep my daughters, they're chasing me around the place, I'm out of work. What, I'm a little person. You're little, the universe is vast no one knows better than the voice that speaks to you now.
We're not asking for miracles, just do what you can. In any small way, and you don't need another tablet, I sent you one you followed it all up, Mel Brooks made fun of it, figure it out for yourself. In you heart, you know what is right, what is fair, what is just, what is good, what is bad, do it. In any measure that you can, and there's always something that you can do. If I close you eyes, and they fold your arms over your chest just before you expire, as long as you have consciousness you can pray. As long as you have compassion, do what you can to make the place better.
That is the whole law and the Christian who started my religion, who of course was a Jew, was challenged in the road by a scoffer and a disdainer challenges him by saying you know Rabbi I understand you dazzled them in the temple last night. What did you tell them that made them swoon over your brilliance. And he said in effect, I know you're testing me but I'll go along with it and I'll give you the whole truth in a 15 second commercial are you ready here it is. And this is the first predicate of Christian religion, love one another as you love yourself for the love of me and I am truth. And the truth is that God created the world but did not complete it. And you are to be collaborators in creation. But that's Tekun Olam, but I'm a Jew it is Tekun Olam. And that is the whole law, with some refinements. And that is the central principle of Islam as well.
And that's what you're doing here today, through Keshet you encourage all of us to come together trying to make the world just a little bit better. All of us Jews, Gentiles, black, brown, white, rich, poor, abled and disabled, chained and unchained. Bonded together by a love that's stronger that obligation and greater together than we ever could be separately. Moving constantly upward, in slips and slides yes but always in the long run moving upward inexorably towards something better, towards something greater and better, towards more and more stability. Until we complete the universe's journey, from the slime to the sublime.
As long as we're moving in the right direction, Keshet drives in the right direction. A great Christian believer in the idea of Tikum Olam. My favorite priest and philosopher summed it all up for us with these words, "the day will come after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." That is a wonderful message of the people of Keshet and the people who support them to them delivered to us every day.
Thank you Keshet for that, thank you for having me and thank you for listening- L'Chaim.
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