"NEVER IN DOUBT"
"For me it was a God moment.” (Rabbi Steve Foster)
I am pleased to introduce a new series on the Massé Musings Substack platform: EXTRAORDINARY LIVES. Some of these individuals are famous, but most are not. Their lives are extraordinary because of the challenges they have faced, the impact they have had, and the special qualities they possess.
In 2004, Indiana University Press published my narrative nonfiction account of social activism across the U.S., Inspired to Serve: Today’s Faith Activists. The book, which profiles American Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists making a difference in their communities, is listed in the “Selected Historical Bibliography” of author Norman H. Sims’ 2007 book, True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism.
The following profile of Rabbi Steve Foster, Denver, Colorado, is a three-part story of faith in action during challenging times.
“Never in Doubt” (Part One)
“For me it was a God moment.” (Rabbi Steve Foster)
Irish legend states that St. Patrick used a three-leaf clover to teach pagan converts about the Christian Holy Trinity (God as Father-Son-Holy Spirit). Theologically speaking, Rabbi Foster would beg to differ about the trinity. But he could use a three-leaf clover to explain his tri-part mission as a congregational rabbi: activist for social justice, advocate for interfaith outreach, and pastoral leader to the 2000-member households of the Temple Emanuel community, the oldest Jewish congregation in Colorado and the largest one between the Mississippi River and the West Coast.
According to its Web site: “We are a Reform Congregation in the mainstream of Liberal Judaism. Being a Reform Jew (the other branches being Orthodox, Conservative and Reconstructionist) means having the responsibility and freedom to seek and to choose the Jewish way of life most comfortable to the individual.” Rabbi Foster adds, “Reform Judaism today is both a combination of rationalism, intellectualism, religious practice, fervor and emotion.”
Rabbi Foster joined the Denver-based congregation as assistant rabbi in 1970, after receiving his bachelor’s degree and Master of Arts in Hebrew Letters from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. His first Temple Emanuel (“God is with us”) was located in his hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The leader of that congregation, Rabbi Herbert Friedman, was a “giant for social justice issues,” says Foster.
He remembers attending synagogue during the height of the 1950s McCarthy era and the emerging civil rights struggle. By the time of his Bar Mitzvah, Foster was convinced he would one day be a rabbi. But until then he would live a typical “Happy Days” teenager’s life in Middle America. He was a lifeguard and Eagle Scout, played football and baseball, and was a diehard fan of the then-Milwaukee Braves. Decades later he can still recite his home team’s lineup: Spahn, Matthews, Aaron … .
Foster was raised in a loving, hard-working family, according to his older sister, Syril Newman. Their father, Milt (Milton), a first-generation Jewish-American, owned a small printing company. Their mother, Miriam, worked at her husband’s print shop while raising Steve and Syril. Money was tight, but there was an abundance of laughter and lively discussions in the Foster household.
Steve Foster attended the University of Wisconsin, where he would earn a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1965. He was a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) on the Madison campus. During the early 1960s, before protesting the Vietnam War became its raison d’etre, SDS was concerned with the Civil Rights Movement. Foster took part in SDS meetings and rallies. He was also active in the Hillel chapter (the Jewish religious/social organization) at the university. In March 1965 as a college senior, he traveled with a contingent of about thirty Hillel students to Alabama to participate in a historic protest march led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Foster joined thousands of supporters, including civil rights and religious leaders, priests, rabbis, ministers, nuns, students and “ordinary citizens,” who walked the last twelve miles of the fifty-four-mile Freedom March from Selma to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery. The purpose of the march, according to an article by Roy Reed in the March 22, 1965, New York Times, had widened from a campaign to “abolish restrictions on Negro voting in the Alabama Black Belt … to encompass a general protest against racial injustice in the state.” Reed wrote that the Alabama march “appears destined for a niche in the annals of the great protest demonstrations.”
Two weeks earlier, hundreds of protesters had been clubbed with nightsticks and tear-gassed by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River. On this Freedom March hundreds of Army and federalized National Guard troops lined the highway to protect the marchers, who included 21-year-old Steve Foster. His parents, fearing for his safety, had begged him not to go. But he was inspired by the stories of bravery of so many others in the protest movement.
Steve Foster took photographs of Dr. King in the parking lot of St. Jude’s Hospital minutes before the march had resumed down the unpaved streets of the black neighborhoods. Foster wore his yarmulke (kippah) proudly. Along the route he routinely heard taunts of whites calling him a “Jew nigger-lover.” Although he was aware of the potential for danger, he says he was never frightened in his first major social activism.
“God, that was a day,” he recalls in the quiet of his suburban Denver office, sounding nostalgic as he relives the passion of the Freedom March—the watershed event in his life when he “stood taller” than he ever had before. In an August 23, 1996, article by Angela Dire in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, Foster described passing through lines of hostile segregationists: “I remember walking down the street and listening to all the intimidation, the anger, the frustration, the hatred in people, and I knew it was the right place to be. For me it was a God moment, and it wasn’t in a synagogue. It was outside with all of those people, doing what I knew to be the right thing. I suppose I became a rabbi for those reasons.”
His actions over those two days in March 1965 would launch Foster’s deep, lifelong commitment to social justice and Tikkun Olam (Hebrew for the role and responsibility God gives human beings in completing and perfecting the universe). As Rabbi Foster once said in a sermon about his civil rights activism, “I felt that there was a religious demand upon me to help my fellow man who needed help.”
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© 2023 Mark H. Massé
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