(RNS) — This previous Shabbat, I delivered a sermon at Temple Israel in Miami, musing about my early days there and tying that trip to the congregation’s strengthen of HIAS, formerly is called Hebrew Immigrant Attend Society.
It’s a ways terribly acceptable that I used to be there for HIAS’ seventh annual Refugee Shabbat, seen from Friday, Feb. 28, to Saturday, March 1, to acknowledge the major affect of the world Jewish motion to attend refugees, asylum-seekers and displaced folk.
The events that unfold before us on a every single day basis and the instances on this nation have faith made HIAS and not utilizing a waste in sight relevant. The organization places it this methodology: “We veteran to rob refugees attributable to they were Jewish. Now, we rob them attributable to we’re Jewish.” From Jewish interests to Jewish values, it is glaring that our most gentle interests are the lively pursuit of our values.
Temple Israel holds a various space in my coronary heart. It used to be where I began my profession as a rabbi in 1981. In my sermon, I expressed gratitude to the congregation’s most stylish non secular chief, Rabbi Barbara Goldman-Wartell, and the congregation’s diverse leaders. Potentialities are you’ll well moreover see the final sermon right here, starting up at the forty five-minute value.
I procure myself smiling, as my first Excessive Holy Days sermon I delivered as an ordained rabbi used to be on Yom Kippur in 1981. Whereas digging through my recordsdata, I figured out that sermon, and the resonances with this day are uncanny, ironic and instructive.
Let me remind those that were no longer yet born, or who were too younger to take into account, what Miami used to be love back then. It used to be a 12 months after Cuban President Fidel Castro opened his prisons and mental hospitals, flooding this city with refugees at some level of the Mariel boatlift.
At the identical time, Haitians were coming to those shores, many drowning within the technique. For the duration of my time at Temple Israel, I used to be one in every of two white clergy — the diverse used to be my correct buddy Rabbi Robert Goldstein, who served at Temple Beth Am — who eulogized the tedious Haitians at a church in Miami’s Minute Haiti neighborhood.
The influx of immigrants had overtaxed our sources, our persistence and our kindness. A journal published a half of murky humor predicting Voodoo drummers would rep on the roof of Dadeland, a super browsing mall in south Miami. Potentialities are you’ll well aquire bumper stickers that plaintively asked the final American in Miami to rob the flag with him when he leaves. Too many had spoke back to the rising tide of immigration in south Florida by partaking in what our prayer ebook called the sin of xenophobia, the pathological agonize of foreigners.
I began my Yom Kippur sermon by interpreting the blasts of the shofar as being, concurrently, a moan and a wail of warning. I didn’t bid as a liberal — though I used to be and am. Reasonably, I appealed to the suitable exact database I hold: Jewish authenticity as a appropriate roadmap. I prayed that by retaining onto that plot, we could well moreover steer previous the xenophobia abyss.
I invoked the Jewish contribution to the Civil Rights Movement. I positioned before us the memory of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. I believed of Jewish civil rights activism and the dilemma of immigrants, attributable to of the hereditary liberalism of the Jewish group, attributable to it harked back to our immigrant duration and/or the sense that an global in which any group is oppressed is within the waste an global that could oppress Jews as neatly.
I invoked the words of Torah: “Worship the stranger, for you were strangers within the land of Egypt.” It’s the most cited commandment within the Torah, and rumor has it we can procure that injunction in a single bear or one other 36 times within the Torah.
These are also these words: V’ahavta ha-ger kamocha — you shall adore the stranger as yourself. I counsel we read it as: V’ahavta! Ha-ger kamocha! You shall adore! The stranger is love you!
We must leer the stranger within the face and ask ourselves.
When I used to be assistant rabbi at Temple Israel from 1981 to 1983, it used to be less than 40 years for the reason that Shoah ended. The congregation, and Miami itself, had many survivors interior it. An elderly couple within the congregation had been on the St. Louis, the ship that had carried Jewish refugees out of Germany. It used to be turned a ways off from Havana, crusing nearby of the lights of this city. Some acknowledged they had jumped off the ship and swam ashore. I cease no longer know if that is exact, and yet, that used to be the parable they told.
On this previous week’s Torah half, we procure the description of the cherubim — those angelic creatures who sit upon the passe ark, their faces turned in direction of each and every diverse. That’s who we’re with each and every diverse, and no doubt the stranger in our midst.
The gradual French Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas taught that our societal duties commence the moment we ask anyone else’s face. The mere act of residing in group constitutes duty.
These were my exact words back in 1981. They were exact then, and they’re exact now.
Reasonably priced folk can fairly disagree about the challenges immigration poses to this nation. But we need recordsdata, and recordsdata requires nuance — of which there could be a severe deficit on this nation this day. And we need several measures of compassion.
One month ago, the Trump administration terminated transient safe protest for cease to 350,000 Venezuelans who’ve faith exact protest to live and work within the United States. The termination of TPS for these folk will space them at drawing near near risk of deportation after April. To return to Venezuela is to near back to the gates of death. Their lives are at stake.
Many of them are our neighbors.
Some years ago, Jewish organizations were mad about the continuing dilemma of Jewish refugees from the earlier Soviet Union, a amount of whom wanted to be resettled within the U.S. A coalition of refugee teams joined Jewish organizations in Washington to strengthen the motive within the back of Jewish refugees. Among those teams used to be a Mexican refugee group.
Their representatives turned to the Jews who were there and acknowledged: “We’re right here this day to strengthen you. We attach aside a query to that one day, you are going to return the prefer.”
To cite the gradual Julius Lester: “I must learn to lend a hand my suffering as if it were a protracted-stemmed rose that I offer to humanity. I cease that by residing with my suffering so intimately in snarl to never cease something that could intensify the existence of rotten within the universe.”
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