From Rabbi Leonard Beerman’s introduction of Jimmy Carter, recipient of the Courage Prize, at the annual luncheon for the Ridenhour Prizes held at the Press Club in Washington, DC on April 4, 2007.

These are the words of Franz Kafka, written not too many years before the birth of the 39th president of the United States.

You can hold back from the suffering of the world and you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back may be the one suffering you could have avoided.

Today, we want to bring yet another honor to President Jimmy Carter, who is most certainly someone who has not held back and who has fashioned a career of extraordinary accomplishment—out of the complex, joyful, and triumphant, and painful elements of his life experience. out of the boundless nature of his energy and his knowledge, and out of what I believe is most important – out of a persistent, moral sensibility, even about the most sensitive and contentious issues, such as the rights of the Palestinians, for example.

Small wonder that the very highest honors have come to him from everywhere—an ordinary person might have gotten lost among them.

I have walked through many lives, Stanley Kunitz once wrote, some of them my own. And I’m not who I was, though some principle of being abides from which I struggle not to stray.

President Carter has walked through many lives. He may not be who he was, but that principle of his being abides, and that is what we celebrate here today. And what is that principle? I dare to say that it is that conviction, for him perhaps drawn from his religious faith, that every human being is a disclosure of the divine. And, to borrow the words of Abraham Heschel, that

Life is not an annuity, but a mandate, and the mandate is that there is no end to what one human being owes to another, can mean to another.

Today, as most of you probably know, is the second day of the Jewish festival of Passover. Jimmy Carter had sort of a preview of Passover in late January when he spoke at Brandeis University. After the talk, he was very vigorously questioned by the students, and the moderator commenting on those questions said, no soft matzo balls here, Mr. President.

Well, obviously Passover is more than a matzo ball, soft or hard. It commemorates the liberation of the ancient Hebrew slaves after 400 years of bondage, and it finds its enduring expression in words certainly familiar to present President Carter, as a teacher and as a student of the Bible:

The stranger that sojourns with you shall be unto you as the home born, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

And in another verse,

You shall not wrong or oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Jimmy Carter has walked up and down the face of the earth, bringing healing and wisdom with him wherever he goes, crossing every green line, every barrier, every fence, every wall. In the geography of his conscience, there are no borders. And in the courage he has displayed, we can ourselves find a confirmation of our own once young visions of the world, a reaffirmation of our sometimes fragile belief that this world, for all of its cynicism and its suffering, for all of its barbarism and stupidity and anguish, is also a place where change is possible, where love and human will can be transforming.

In this endeavor, there is no guarantee of victory, but there is a choice: one either collaborates with the enemy, with whatever is miserable or inhumane, with whatever is unjust, with whatever demeans the life of any human being, even those we call our enemies, or one joins the resistance, and insists upon being among those who strive to diminish the store of insult and agony in the world.

According to an old Jewish teaching, the age of 60 is for counsel, 70 for white hairs. The president has fulfilled that so well I envy him. And the 80s, Shmonim Lig’vurah, the 80s are for strength, for courage. In presenting you this Ridenhour Award, we want you to know that it is your courage, your valor, that brings honor to us all.

And this comes to you with a wish, a yearning, a prayer, one I discovered in the library of Congress while prowling around on the Internet, a fragment of a poem in Walt Whitman’s own hand.

Uncaged in my heart, a thousand new strengths and unknown ardors and terrible ecstasies

That is what we wish for you. May God bless you with a thousand new strengths, Mr. President.

Leonard Beerman (1921-2014) was the Founding Rabbi at the Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles . Throughout his career, he was involved in issues of peace and social justice, co-founding the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race, serving as Vice President of the Jewish Peace Fellowship, the Blue Ribbon Committee for Affordable Housing in the City of Los Angeles and as a board member of Human Rights Watch (California South) and Death Penalty Focus of California.