(RNS) — This past Shabbat, I delivered a sermon at Temple Israel in Miami, musing about my early days there and tying that experience to the congregation’s support of HIAS, formerly known as Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
It is especially appropriate that I was there for HIAS’ seventh annual Refugee Shabbat, observed from Friday, Feb. 28, to Saturday, March 1, to recognize the major impact of the global Jewish movement to assist refugees, asylum-seekers and displaced people.
The events that unfold before us on a daily basis and the conditions in this country have made HIAS eternally relevant. The organization puts it this way: “We used to take refugees because they were Jewish. Now, we take them because we are Jewish.” From Jewish interests to Jewish values, it is clear that our most tender interests are the vigorous pursuit of our values.
Temple Israel holds a special place in my heart. It was where I began my career as a rabbi in 1981. In my sermon, I expressed gratitude to the congregation’s current spiritual leader, Rabbi Barbara Goldman-Wartell, and the congregation’s other leaders. You can watch the whole sermon here, starting at the 45-minute mark.
I find myself smiling, as my first High Holy Days sermon I delivered as an ordained rabbi was on Yom Kippur in 1981. While digging through my files, I found that sermon, and the resonances with today are uncanny, ironic and instructive.
Let me remind those who were not yet born, or who were too young to remember, what Miami was like back then. It was a year after Cuban President Fidel Castro opened his prisons and mental hospitals, flooding this city with refugees during the Mariel boatlift.
At the same time, Haitians were coming to these shores, many drowning in the process. During my time at Temple Israel, I was one of two white clergy — the other was my good friend Rabbi Robert Goldstein, who served at Temple Beth Am — who eulogized the dead Haitians at a church in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood.
The influx of immigrants had overtaxed our resources, our patience and our kindness. A magazine published a piece of black humor predicting Voodoo drummers would perform on the roof of Dadeland, a large shopping mall in south Miami. You could buy bumper stickers that plaintively asked the last American in Miami to take the flag with him when he leaves. Too many had responded to the rising tide of immigration in south Florida by engaging in what our prayer book called the sin of xenophobia, the pathological fear of foreigners.
I began my Yom Kippur sermon by interpreting the blasts of the shofar as being, simultaneously, a moan and a cry of warning. I did not speak as a liberal — though I was and am. Rather, I appealed to the only true database I possess: Jewish authenticity as a moral roadmap. I prayed that by holding onto that map, we might steer past the xenophobia abyss.
I invoked the Jewish contribution to the Civil Rights Movement. I placed before us the memory of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. I thought of Jewish civil rights activism and the plight of immigrants, because of the hereditary liberalism of the Jewish community, because it harked back to our immigrant period and/or the sense that a world in which any group is oppressed is ultimately a world that will oppress Jews as well.
I invoked the words of Torah: “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” It’s the most cited commandment in the Torah, and rumor has it we can find that injunction in one form or another 36 times in the Torah.
These are also these words: V’ahavta ha-ger kamocha — you shall love the stranger as yourself. I suggest we read it as: V’ahavta! Ha-ger kamocha! You shall love! The stranger is like you!
We must stare the stranger in the face and see ourselves.
When I was assistant rabbi at Temple Israel from 1981 to 1983, it was less than 40 years since the Shoah ended. The congregation, and Miami itself, had many survivors within it. An elderly couple in the congregation had been on the St. Louis, the ship that had carried Jewish refugees out of Germany. It was turned away from Havana, sailing within sight of the lights of this city. Some said they had jumped off the ship and swam ashore. I do not know if that is true, and yet, that was the story they told.
In this past week’s Torah portion, we find the description of the cherubim — those angelic creatures who sit upon the ancient ark, their faces turned toward each other. That is who we are with each other, and certainly the stranger in our midst.
The late French Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas taught that our societal obligations begin the moment we see someone else’s face. The mere act of living in community constitutes obligation.
Those were my exact words back in 1981. They were true then, and they are true now.
Reasonable people can reasonably disagree about the challenges immigration poses to this country. But we need wisdom, and wisdom requires nuance — of which there is a serious deficit in this nation today. And we need several measures of compassion.
One month ago, the Trump administration terminated temporary protected status for close to 350,000 Venezuelans who have lawful status to live and work in the United States. The termination of TPS for these individuals will place them at imminent risk of deportation after April. To return to Venezuela is to return to the gates of death. Their lives are at stake.
Many of them are our neighbors.
Some years ago, Jewish organizations were concerned about the ongoing plight of Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union, many of whom wanted to be resettled in the U.S. A coalition of refugee groups joined Jewish organizations in Washington to support the cause of Jewish refugees. Among those groups was a Mexican refugee group.
Their representatives turned to the Jews who were there and said: “We are here today to support you. We expect that someday, you will return the favor.”
To quote the late Julius Lester: “I must learn to carry my suffering as if it were a long-stemmed rose that I offer to humanity. I do that by living with my suffering so intimately so as to never do something that will intensify the existence of evil in the universe.”