Good evening, L’ Shana Tova Tikateivu, Happy New Year to the people of Congregation Beth Ohr, to our teacher and communal founder, Rabbi Michael Roth and his extraordinary family, to my colleagues on the bima, Rabbi Haim Beliak and Chazanit Cheri Paul.
Let’s consider the reasons for our gathering tonight.
For the next two days, we will be celebrating the birthday of the world. Our sages teach that, on Rosh Hashanah, God finished making our world with the creation of the first human, the Adam, and Hava, the mother of all people (some say that these were originally one person who was divided in half, since our Bible also teaches that God created the human in the image of God—male and female [Bereishit Rabbah 8:1, Talmud Bavli Berachot 61a]).
Does this mean that we are obliged to forget everything science has told us about the immense nuclear furnaces in space from which stars are born, the swirling clouds of stardust that make planets and the chemical stews from which life—including ourselves–evolved? No, it does not. Jews do not read our scripture literally. We understand it as a collection of traces, of records that mark points of contact between the human and the Divine, stories and verses in which meanings proliferate like sparks from a hammer striking rock. Records preserved by imperfect human beings with all the risks that implies.
What we acknowledge on Rosh HaShanah is that very imperfection: our creatureliness, the truth that we were brought into being in an already existing world and that, someday, we will cease to be. This is a time to embrace and celebrate our finitude: we are mortal, limited, situated, interested, fallible, and so very vulnerable.
Midrash Rabba 8:5 teaches that the angels contested with God and one another about whether or not we should have been made at all. “Rabbi Simon said: When the Holy Blessed One, came to create the human beings, the ministering angels were divided into factions. Some said, “Let God create the human;” others said, “Let God not create the human.” This corresponds to the verse: “Kindness and truth meet; justice and peace kiss” (Tehillim 85:11): Kindness said: “Let God create the human beings, for they will perform acts of kindness.” Truth said, “Let God not create the human beings, for they will be full of lies.” Justice said, “Let God create the humans, for they will perform righteousness;” Peace said, “Let God not create them, for they will be full of strife…” I believe that this is a story about our claim to glory. The angels start out perfect—they have nowhere to go. As imperfect creatures, we can change. We can surprise ourselves and one another; we can get better.
Notice that all of the human deeds the angels consider are social. Our character is revealed by how we behave in relationships. A key lesson here is that there is really no such thing as a self-made person. Humans are creatures who transform our environment, who create cultures and societies, families and friendships and divisions of labor. We create civilizations. We depend on one another, as well as on God, for our ways of life and our lives themselves. We depend on what the 20th Century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called the interhuman.
Our mitzvot, the imperatives that guide our particular Jewish way of life, are very much concerned with how we treat one another and the rest of creation. Our mitzvot assume mutual obligation and mutual reliance.
Jews have embraced the vulnerability of creatureliness in the way we construct our very identity as a tradition and as a people. Our Tanakh tells us that we were slaves in Egypt until God set us free. Every year on Pesach we retell the story, and we are each to regard ourselves as having been liberated personally from bondage. We are told further that what truly ratified our freedom—made it robust and vital—was the moment when we undertook our brit—our covenant. Only a free people can undertake the honor of obligation such as we assumed when we received our Torah.
We remind ourselves every Pesach that our ancestors—spiritual if not literal ancestors, no need to reify any metaphors here—were wandering Arameans, rough Canaanite Bedouin shepherds who first went voluntarily to the land of Egypt seeking relief from a famine—we proudly claim kinship with economic migrants! We are told further that we settled in the land of Goshen together—an ethnic neighborhood!—where we worked hard and prospered and multiplied, even as our father Josef devoted himself to the Egyptian polity, working hard for the good of his adopted home. We are told to remember that the Pharaohs who followed the one who had trusted Josef began to forget that we were ever invited in. They began to resent our resilient attachment to our God and our culture, our growth and numerousness as a people. They began to wonder if we might not be some kind of 5th column who, should Egypt find itself at war, would join with enemies of the state. They reduced us to slavery, a discriminatory slavery in which our ethnic condition meant exploitation and degradation.
We are commanded to remember that, although we are liberated, we must identify with the slave, not the oppressor. Exodus 23:9 makes it explicit: “You will not oppress the stranger, because you know the stranger’s soul, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” We are commanded to leave a corner of every field we harvest—and later to reserve a portion of any income we earn—to care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger—people who, in a patriarchal society, were without the protection of a powerful man. We are told that we have a connection with and affinity for people who are precisely not of our clan or ethnos or tribe. The text does not say the Jewish stranger. This formula—widow, orphan, stranger—is repeated again and again. Our prophets tell us that the health and strength—the very survival—of the societies we build and to which we contribute depend on how we treat these most vulnerable of our fellow human beings. This sense of human solidarity—of our creatureliness in common—is crucial to the realization of our own best selves. 36 texts in our Torah remind us of our obligation to the stranger. This is a foundational Jewish value.
So, I guess, you’ve begun to suspect where I’m going with this. Today, the world is facing a refugee crisis of hideous proportions. Over 4 million people have fled the war in Syria alone. Most of those people are still in Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan, where their numbers have simply overwhelmed the system. These refugees are now overflowing the camps in the countries closest to their home and are seeking asylum in Europe and in the United States. As most of you know, the USA has been involved, in a convoluted way, with the conflict in Syria and with that in Iraq, which is connected to Syria through its Kurdish population who are now under direct attack from the Syrian government, the radical fundamentalist group ISIS and the government of Turkey itself. We are now engaged in a great national conversation about our obligations in this matter. What do we, as Jews, have to say to our compatriots about this?
President Obama recently said that our country will take in 10,000 refugees from this conflict in the coming year, an increase from the 2000 who were allowed in this year. This is a great beginning, but it doesn’t come close to meeting the need or to matching the European example of hospitality. Germany, the country which forced our own refugee crisis of the 20th Century is making a conscious effort to learn from and rectify its history, taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees. On the other hand, countries like Hungary, which now includes in its government overt fascists who have taken the opposite lesson from German history, are closing borders and turning a blind eye to violent attacks by right wing extremist vigilantes.
We would do well to remember our 20th Century crisis these days, along with our Biblical narrative. Thousands of Jews were forced to flee Germany and Eastern Europe—those who were even able to flee! –trying to escape persecution and, eventually, genocide. There were voices here in the United States who objected strongly to any policy that would offer refuge to those fleeing Jews. Like the Pharaoh who had forgotten Josef, the infamous Breckinridge Long, the Assistant Secretary of State charged with handling refugee and other problems related to the war in Europe, was determined to thwart any effort to let Jews in numbers into this country. He professed a fear that, among a mass of refugees, would be 5th columnists and infiltrators and he also objected to the presence of a group of people associated with free thinking and radical ideas, people who would introduce a vigorous new cultural thread into the America collage. As late as 1940, when the real danger to Europe’s Jews was clear enough, Long’s express policy was: “We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls, to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.” The result of Long’s policies is that only about 11% of those Jewish refugees who were actually allowed to enter the USA given restrictive regulations were ever given sanctuary. We know what happened to those who didn’t make it.
Even the great poet T.S. Elliot—who was actually an American, his Anglophilia notwithstanding—said in an address to a Southern audience, which was published in 1933 under the title “After Strange Gods; A Primer in Modern Heresy,” ''The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.'' During this same speech, Elliot praised Southern culture, in the time of Jim Crow, as an example of the kind of healthy homogeneity he admired. Elliot’s influence within high culture was no less important that of the radio personality Father Charles Coughlin on broader audiences. Father Coughlin not only objected to any welcoming of Jewish refugees; he promised that “When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” Like the more erudite Elliot and Long, Coughlin, whose radio show was heard by millions, associated Jews with radical politics and cultural change.
It is not possible for us to see flimsy boats filled with refugees and not remember the vessels filled with Jews who were turned away from our ports. It is not possible for us to listen to interviews with people who have lost everything, from possessions to beloved family and friends; people who are already learning German and French and English, who want nothing more than to be secure—and productive—in new homes and not remember our own parents, grandparents and earlier ancestors who came to this country looking for a better life and eager to contribute.
Of course our presence did indeed help to change America as has every wave of immigration before or since. We have had the chutzpa to introduce new words into the lexicon, we have—along with the Italians, the Mexicans, the Chinese and many others–helped to turn American cities into international food destinations; we have written novels and poems, achieved scientific breakthroughs; we jumped into the popular culture, and we made it sparkle!
We have found the freedom to observe our religion here while acting on our aspirations to participate in society at large. We are so very American—and we have helped to invigorate the meaning of the word. It was a Jewish American poet who wrote the words that grace the Statue of Liberty, the first sign of home that many travelers to our country ever see: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
And now we are faced with choices. Thousands of people have been made homeless by a conflict in which we are hopelessly entangled. How do we act on the imperative to love the stranger? Lord Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain writes in the Guardian, “…Free societies, where people of all faiths and ethnicities make space for one another, are the only way to honor our shared humanity, whether we conceive that humanity in secular or religious terms.” He adds, “Wars that cannot be won by weapons can sometimes be won by the sheer power of acts of humanitarian generosity to inspire the young to choose the way of peace instead of holy war.”
HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, offers us a way to help. HIAS was founded in 1881 to help Jews who were fleeing the Czar’s pogroms. Now this organization works for a world in which all refugees can find welcome, safety and freedom. HIAS is helping us to extend a hand to those who are now making the journey our ancestors made. At very least, we can all go to hias.org and sign a petition asking President Obama to make room for yet another 100,000 refugees.
One of the great things about being a Jew in this country is that we really do have a voice and the freedom to use it. Our rabbis taught, in Talmud Bavli Shabbat 54b-55a:
Anyone who is able to protest against the transgressions of one's household and does not, is liable for the actions of the members of the household; anyone who is able to protest against the transgressions of one's townspeople and does not, is liable for the transgressions of the townspeople; anyone who is able to protest against the transgressions of the entire world and does not is liable for the transgressions of the entire world.”
In a democratic society, we like to think that we all are able to protest. We will be spending the next 10 days in active introspection, evaluating what we have done and failed to do; what we have said and to say. Have we been faithful to the foundational values of our tradition? We who know the feelings of the stranger; we who are not embarrassed to be made of vulnerable, permeable flesh; we who do not have to turn from the refugee in fear because they carry the reminder that we too would die without enough food, we too can drown, burn, go crazy and lose limbs; that we too depend on artificial shelter to survive and we too could lose it at any time—we who know the feelings of a stranger, because we were strangers in Egypt—have we done what we could—what our 20th Century brothers and sisters prayed that Americans would do?
I wish you a year of blessing; of prosperity, of love, happiness and challenge and profound thought—I wish for us all a year in which peace and justice embrace and increase. Shanah Tovah.
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