December 13, 2020
By Rev. Diane Rollert
The Chanukah story originally ended as the Maccabees came down from the hills, having won their religious freedom and reclaiming their Temple. Later, the story of the miracle of the oil lasting eight days would be added. The first version told the story of a human victory. The second added a miracle from God.
In either case, there was this moment of returning to the Temple, of finding everything destroyed, of picking up the pieces. I’ve always pictured shattered glass, and shards of broken pottery strewn across the floor. I imagine a moment of stillness before the messenger is sent to the nearest city to buy oil. There’s a momentary connection to the history of this hallowed place. Before the miracle of light that lasted eight days when it should have lasted one, there is a miracle of peace and restoration.
In this past week, I found myself caught in the middle of a controversy. Well, I wasn’t really in the middle, but people I care about were. You know that I’ve been actively engaged — gratefully with your support — in fighting Law 21. This is the Quebec law that was passed last year banning the wearing of religious symbols by certain people working in the public sector, particularly teachers, lawyers and officers of the peace. The organization I helped to found, Coalition Inclusion Québec, has been party to a lawsuit that is currently being heard in the Superior Court of Quebec.
We are now in the final days of the trial, as the lawyers on each side present their closing arguments. Our side comprises four separate complaints that have been joined together. Our organization, Coalition Inclusion Québec, is representing two Muslim women and one Catholic woman, all teachers. The other parties to the suit include the Montreal English School Board, the Fédération autonome de l’enseignement (FAE), and a group represented by the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association who are also working with the World Sikh Organization.
These four groups have worked together, each focusing on different aspects of the illegalities, injustices and inconsistencies in the law. The other side is represented by the attorney general for the current government, along with the Mouvement Laïc Québecois.
The rights of individual conscience and religious expression are protected by both the Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But these rights were overridden by the current government, which used the “notwithstanding clause,” a legal maneuver unique to Canada that enables a provincial government to override certain sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It was a compromise made when the charter became part of the Constitution in 1981. The expectation was that it would be used very rarely by provinces, and only in times of crisis.
Journalist Yves Boisvert recently wrote that the use of the notwithstanding clause has put our side in the position of being “like a watchmaker working with mittens, or a bear hunter with a butter knife.” However, our lawyers are making strong arguments, and whatever is finally decided in the Superior Court, or eventually in the Supreme Court, is going to make constitutional legal history.
A case like this hasn’t been seen since the time of Duplessis in the 1950s with the Roncarelli case, where the Supreme Court affirmed the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses to distribute religious pamphlets in Quebec. One of my predecessors, Rev. Angus Cameron, minister of the Unitarian Church of Montreal from 1941 to 1959, was instrumental in the groundbreaking Roncarelli case, fighting for the religious rights of a group whose theology was very counter to his own. Angus Cameron’s courage is an inspiration to me. I walk humbly in his footsteps.
A week ago this Friday, our lead lawyer, Azim Hussain, brilliantly presented an argument to the court that the use of the notwithstanding clause cannot be absolute. Otherwise, it opens the door to even more discriminatory laws being enacted by a majority in order to deny minority rights. A conversation ensued between the judge and Azim. The judge referred to wartime rights violations, such as the internment of Japanese Canadians and confiscation of their property during World War II. In response, Azim posed the example of the Nuremberg Laws. He asked the judge: if similar laws were to be passed, could recourse to the courts be possible under the current circumstances? In other words, can the notwithstanding clause be easily invoked any time the majority simply feels like taking away the rights of minorities? Are there limits to the suspension of human rights? This is a big question, a question that needs to be asked.
But by the next day our lead lawyer was being wrongly accused of comparing Quebecers to Nazis. That is not something that he, as a student of human rights and the Holocaust, would ever do. But the reaction, based on misinformation, was swift. Complaints and hate mail started pouring in, and we have been left to pick up the pieces after unfair damage has been done.
We are not facing a war, and what we are going through could never be compared to the atrocities of the Holocaust. But we are in a legal battle as well as a battle to change public opinion. Testimony in court has made it clear, over and over again, that the real target of Law 21 is Muslim women, specifically teachers who wear the hijab. What I hear, as I attend the proceedings online, is fear of the stranger.
Even if we win the court case, even if we go all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court, the road to changing public opinion will be much longer and more arduous. That’s what became sadly clear as we saw Azim cruelly and wrongly attacked. There is a divide here, and it’s going to take a long time for the wounds to be healed.
I recently heard an interview with Karen Murphy, an educator who trains teachers and leads global gatherings for an organization called Facing History and Ourselves. She was speaking about the polarization happening in the US right now, but she could have been talking about Quebec.
“We are standing in the middle of a bridge,” she said, and we “need to decide how we’re going to walk across it together and in what direction.”
She went on to tell a story of running a seminar with educators in Northern Ireland. A little less than a year before, the IRA had laid down its weapons, and peace was finally achieved after generations of violence. The educators who attended Murphy’s seminar came from across the country and from all sides. It was the first time that they would be looking at their history together.
They began with a case study in Holocaust and human behaviour “as a way to create a window and a mirror and to begin to move out.” As a closing activity for this portion of the seminar, Murphy sent the participants home to create toolboxes with found objects that had meaning to them, that represented the tools needed for transitional justice.
The results amazed her. They came back with “things like a mirror, because you have to look at yourself; like a candle, because you have to have hope; like a flashlight, so that you can see your way; like a book, because you need knowledge; a journal, because you need to reflect, and you also need to write history.”
“But,” Murphy said, “one of the things that was so moving to me is, to a person, they included an adhesive tape, glue, [or] a sewing kit.” The group recognized that if they were going to work together in this period of transition from war to peace, there would be times when things would break down, when they would need tape, glue or a needle and thread to mend what got broken or torn. That’s how you begin to build trust, they said. Because without trust, you can’t have a real relationship. Without trust, you can’t agree upon a shared past or build a shared future.
I want to end with a very personal story. I was eight years old when my parents divorced. That year of my life is still vivid in my mind, after all these years. The family that I assumed was eternal suddenly disintegrated. But when the divorce papers where signed and legally sealed at the end of the year, my parents started dating each other. I was nine years old when my mother and father married each other for the second time, in front of my brother and me and two witnesses, all crowded into a rabbi’s study.
We picked up the pieces and we started over as a family. But there was a cost. There were scars. My brother always said that after the rupture he never really came back. But my parents redefined their relationship and went on to celebrate 56 years of marriage (well, they counted it as 57 years, as if the divorce never really happened). It wasn’t a fairytale, but their new relationship was more realistic. It took a lot of glue and thread to hold things together, but they learned how to trust each other.
What I wish for now is a moment of calm here in Quebec, in the US and in our lives, when all sides find their common ground. Stillness may come while standing in the eye of a hurricane. But I’d like to believe that with time this storm too shall pass, and we will emerge ready to bind up the broken together.
