One of the reasons that America has always been an idea that fit neatly with the moral worldview of the Jewish people is this country’s origin and essential quality of being a destination for people who came from somewhere else. There were the indigenous peoples of this land first of course, but then many waves of migrants came to this place. There were many types of wanderers who came and stayed in North America over many generations: religious pilgrims and tobacco sharecroppers, African slaves and Spanish conquistadors, German and Dutch men seeking fame and fortune, and then the great mass of humanity that came at the end of the 19th century: the Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Russian, and Slavic settlers whose descendants make up a huge proportion of the population of this country today. Most Americans came here from somewhere else, usually because wherever they came from, life was a struggle too great to endure. “Surely” they said “it must be better someplace else,” and that someplace else is America.
Judaism is the religion of the wanderer. In our morning prayers each day, we praise God for creation and the dawn and for our souls. But the first significant mention of the human condition and our origins as a people comes in Pesukei DeZimra, in a verse that I’ve been thinking about a lot the past few weeks. Quoting the book of Nehemiah, our daily prayerbook has us recite each morning: Atah hu Adonai haElohim, Asher bacharta beAvram, vehotzeito me’Ur Kasdim - “You are Adonai our God, the One that chose Abraham, and took him out of Ur Kasdim” - the city of Ur of Chaldea, which would later be called Babylonia or Mesopotamia.
Think about that for a moment. An omnipotent, infinite God could have started the Jewish people with anyone, and anywhere. It would make sense, then, to select a person of good moral character that rises to lead her or his nation in the place they were born - to form the first monotheistic religion with Avram in Ur, and to start it in Ur. Or to pick the king of the Philistines or the Hittites or the Moabites and raise them up to reject the panoply of gods of the ancient world and to choose the one God to obey. But no - God chose a wanderer. More than that - our text says ‘ve’hotzeito’ - God took him out - meaning it was specifically a Divine choice to have Avram go on a journey, as if the journey was an essential part of making Avram the person that he comes to be.
And then he sojourns down to Egypt and back. And Isaac, too, sojourns in the land of the Philistines in Genesis 26. And Jacob wanders after his clash with Esau, and down to Egypt during famine. And Joseph and his brothers wander because of famine, settling in a land not their own. And Moses wanders with the people for 40 years in a land not his own. In fact, the bulk of the Torah - at least 4 and ⅓ of the 5 books, takes place outside of the land of Israel. Many scholars have noted that the Torah ends with the people on the precipice of the land of Israel at the end of Deuteronomy, but outside of the land. The people enter Israel and conquer it in the sixth biblical book of Joshua, which for the shul-going reader, we effectively never get to. Every year we read the story of our wandering migration, and then, right at the moment we arrive at the land, we roll the scroll all the way back to creation. The reader of the Chumash is forever a wanderer.
Add to all that the additional layer of the entire concept for the Jewish people of galut, or gulus - best translated as ‘Diaspora’. After the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE, our people relocated to Babylonia, with small populations taking up residence in Alexandria Egypt and Rome before a large number of Jews returned in 546. In 70 CE and 135 CE, Jews again left their land en masse and took up residence elsewhere - in Mesopotamia until the 900s, and then Europe in 1100s, and then north and south america in the 1800s. What do you think the rules were for these Jewish migrants? Anybody want to a guess as to when the first passports and visas were created? - let people guess -
1921. The passport was invented by the United States because of anti-immigrant sentiment related to the waves of mostly impoverished newcomers from what was seen by some as undesirable countries - Italy, Poland, Russia, etc. Quotas were set on immigrants from these and other countries to limit the number of immigrants that could come in. But how could the US determine where people were born? The passport was invented.
Before the passport, travel and residency for Jews, and for all humans, was basically unrestricted. Afterwards? Tightly controlled.
Now, let me not make it sound like Jews and humans had unfettered freedom of movement in the good old days. In last weeks parsha and the week before - Chukkat and Balak - the Israelites are on their way to Israel, and they have to pass through the lands of Bashan, and Ammor, and Moab. And the three kings of these lands were not thrilled with the idea of maybe a million people traipsing through their fields, livestock in tow, just passing through. The Israelites fight their way through Bashan and Ammor, and only because of Divine intervention with the prophet Bilaam are they able to cross Moab. But the core idea is still that lands didn’t have barriers and boundaries until very recently. Peoplehood was ethnic or tribal, not geographical, until about 100 years ago. And even in our lifetimes, this is on display. If you asked my grandmother where she was from, she’d say the town of Rakov, between Kielce and Schies-takov, in Poland. If you asked her if she was Polish, she’d say ‘absolutely not’.
What I am saying is that restrictions on the freedom of migration of any kind, and restrictions on who can work in a country or reside in a country, is not an idea that exists at all in Judaism. If a non-Jew wanted to live among Jews, and work among Jews, they even had a name in the bible - the ger toshav - the non-resident stranger that dwells amongst you. And of course, most of you know the often repeated idea in Torah that we are not to oppress the ger - and that the Torah tells us to care for the ger or not oppress the ger no less than 36 times. But I want to back up even a step before that and say that the very idea of restrictions on human movement is not a Jewish idea. It is an invention of the modern era, a fabrication of non-Jewish society that was at least partially invented to oppress, reject, restrict, and exclude Jews, among other undesirables.
By this I question and criticize the legitimacy and moral of the entire system of global migration restrictions, and certainly the American system. What purpose does it serve? One could say ‘well we need these rules so that foreigners don’t take jobs from Americans.’ There’s two problems with that idea.
First, it’s not moral. And second, it’s not true. There’s no logical connection between the happenstance of the place you were born in corresponding to the place you are allowed to work. I can move from Denver to Pittsburgh and get a job, but I can’t move to Toronto and get the same job. We can argue about the need to create an orderly system or the rules of taxation or the government’s system of social welfare, but those are all bureaucratic or economic reasons. None of those is a moral answer to why a person can be denied the opportunity to work or live someplace, because there is no morality to restricting human employment based on location. And our society kind of knows that. When the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011, millions of refugees streamed into Turkey and Jordan. And of course those countries accepted them because their plight was so desperate. But the refugees overwhelmingly were not allowed to work, and their migration to other countries was severely restricted. Morally, nations of the world accepting refugees and giving them work rights is the right thing to do, without any doubt. Economically, though, each country behaves in protection of their own interests.
And there’s the second part about work restrictions protecting our jobs not being true. In the United States, there are millions of people working at jobs that folks born in this country simply won’t take. Farmworkers, nursing home employees, food service workers, gardeners, housekeepers, hotel workers – all of these industries are made up of a huge percentage of non-citizen visa holders, or undocumented individuals. If all of them were to be deported, there’s no way we’d have enough laborers to fill all of their positions. This country would grind to a halt. They’re not taking our jobs. They are caring for our mothers and grandmothers, and bringing us our tomatoes, and cooking our hamburgers. To quote one of my favorite authors and chefs, Anthony Bourdain, may his memory be a blessing, QUOTE ‘The bald fact is that the entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board. Everyone in the industry knows this. It is undeniable. Illegal labor is the backbone of the service and hospitality industry.’
Even though I questions the origins of our global immigration system, and even though I question whether such a system that originates in racism and immorality can ultimately be fair, just, or even benign, I concede that the global immigration system we have right now is the system we have, and it is not going away. Within that system, however, it is a Jewish act to expect that the system behave in a moral way. I think you all know that it is not.
Since February of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has aggressively moved to incarcerate and deport folks who were undocumented residents of the United States - including people in the asylum process, student visa holders, and green card holders that the United States had suddenly revoked status from. Additionally, another category of people that came to the US without documentation as children who have grown up here have also been swept up for imprisonment and deportation. And just recently the Supreme Court ruled that ICE and the US government have no obligation to return a migrant to their country of origin, even a country where a person might be tortured or killed as a political dissident.
The case in question was one in which the Department of Homeland Security deported eight men to South Sudan. The men were Vietnam, South Korea, Mexico, Laos, Cuba, and Myanmar. Only one was from South Sudan. They were not given the chance to plead their cases in court. Writing for the minority in dissent, Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard.”
This issue of migration and human rights has always been and must continue to be a critical issue of importance to American Jews, for so many reasons. It is important because our grandparents and great grandparents came to this country from somewhere else searching for a better life, and thus to pay that debt of freedom back to this country, we must stand up for the rights of the next generation of immigrants. It is important because we are a people who wandered for millenia without passports or citizenship rules.
And yes, we must also highlight and remain vigilant regarding this issue because it does directly affect our community. Jews, and particularly Israelis, are also being caught up in the ICE raids and sweeps taking place, and being deposited in ICE detentions centers across the country; including two local privately operated detention centers, the Moshannon Valley Processing Center and the Northeast Ohio Detention Center. But all these people in these places and others, Jewish or not, Israeli or Burmese or Mexican or Afghani, are all somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s parent, imprisoned for no crime and held without trial and in moral and legal limbo, effectively punished for the crime of having been born in the wrong place.
Our parsha this week is a long litany of sacrifices that pilgrims were obligated to bring to the temple at festival times - at each new moon, at Passover, at Shavuot, at Rosh Hashanah, at Yom Kippur, and at Sukkot. These were all pilgrimage holidays - holidays in which individuals travelled a long way, across other lands and over rivers and mountains and even across the sea. And they were asked to present not a passport at the temple, but an offering to God of appreciation and love and gratitude - a bull, a lamb, a ram, a cake of fine flour. We yearn for a return to the time when the free movement of peoples was the norm, and when it was done in its most ideal state as an act of love and community and gratitude. Shabbat Shalom.
Judaism is the religion of the wanderer. In our morning prayers each day, we praise God for creation and the dawn and for our souls. But the first significant mention of the human condition and our origins as a people comes in Pesukei DeZimra, in a verse that I’ve been thinking about a lot the past few weeks. Quoting the book of Nehemiah, our daily prayerbook has us recite each morning: Atah hu Adonai haElohim, Asher bacharta beAvram, vehotzeito me’Ur Kasdim - “You are Adonai our God, the One that chose Abraham, and took him out of Ur Kasdim” - the city of Ur of Chaldea, which would later be called Babylonia or Mesopotamia.
Think about that for a moment. An omnipotent, infinite God could have started the Jewish people with anyone, and anywhere. It would make sense, then, to select a person of good moral character that rises to lead her or his nation in the place they were born - to form the first monotheistic religion with Avram in Ur, and to start it in Ur. Or to pick the king of the Philistines or the Hittites or the Moabites and raise them up to reject the panoply of gods of the ancient world and to choose the one God to obey. But no - God chose a wanderer. More than that - our text says ‘ve’hotzeito’ - God took him out - meaning it was specifically a Divine choice to have Avram go on a journey, as if the journey was an essential part of making Avram the person that he comes to be.
And then he sojourns down to Egypt and back. And Isaac, too, sojourns in the land of the Philistines in Genesis 26. And Jacob wanders after his clash with Esau, and down to Egypt during famine. And Joseph and his brothers wander because of famine, settling in a land not their own. And Moses wanders with the people for 40 years in a land not his own. In fact, the bulk of the Torah - at least 4 and ⅓ of the 5 books, takes place outside of the land of Israel. Many scholars have noted that the Torah ends with the people on the precipice of the land of Israel at the end of Deuteronomy, but outside of the land. The people enter Israel and conquer it in the sixth biblical book of Joshua, which for the shul-going reader, we effectively never get to. Every year we read the story of our wandering migration, and then, right at the moment we arrive at the land, we roll the scroll all the way back to creation. The reader of the Chumash is forever a wanderer.
Add to all that the additional layer of the entire concept for the Jewish people of galut, or gulus - best translated as ‘Diaspora’. After the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE, our people relocated to Babylonia, with small populations taking up residence in Alexandria Egypt and Rome before a large number of Jews returned in 546. In 70 CE and 135 CE, Jews again left their land en masse and took up residence elsewhere - in Mesopotamia until the 900s, and then Europe in 1100s, and then north and south america in the 1800s. What do you think the rules were for these Jewish migrants? Anybody want to a guess as to when the first passports and visas were created? - let people guess -
1921. The passport was invented by the United States because of anti-immigrant sentiment related to the waves of mostly impoverished newcomers from what was seen by some as undesirable countries - Italy, Poland, Russia, etc. Quotas were set on immigrants from these and other countries to limit the number of immigrants that could come in. But how could the US determine where people were born? The passport was invented.
Before the passport, travel and residency for Jews, and for all humans, was basically unrestricted. Afterwards? Tightly controlled.
Now, let me not make it sound like Jews and humans had unfettered freedom of movement in the good old days. In last weeks parsha and the week before - Chukkat and Balak - the Israelites are on their way to Israel, and they have to pass through the lands of Bashan, and Ammor, and Moab. And the three kings of these lands were not thrilled with the idea of maybe a million people traipsing through their fields, livestock in tow, just passing through. The Israelites fight their way through Bashan and Ammor, and only because of Divine intervention with the prophet Bilaam are they able to cross Moab. But the core idea is still that lands didn’t have barriers and boundaries until very recently. Peoplehood was ethnic or tribal, not geographical, until about 100 years ago. And even in our lifetimes, this is on display. If you asked my grandmother where she was from, she’d say the town of Rakov, between Kielce and Schies-takov, in Poland. If you asked her if she was Polish, she’d say ‘absolutely not’.
What I am saying is that restrictions on the freedom of migration of any kind, and restrictions on who can work in a country or reside in a country, is not an idea that exists at all in Judaism. If a non-Jew wanted to live among Jews, and work among Jews, they even had a name in the bible - the ger toshav - the non-resident stranger that dwells amongst you. And of course, most of you know the often repeated idea in Torah that we are not to oppress the ger - and that the Torah tells us to care for the ger or not oppress the ger no less than 36 times. But I want to back up even a step before that and say that the very idea of restrictions on human movement is not a Jewish idea. It is an invention of the modern era, a fabrication of non-Jewish society that was at least partially invented to oppress, reject, restrict, and exclude Jews, among other undesirables.
By this I question and criticize the legitimacy and moral of the entire system of global migration restrictions, and certainly the American system. What purpose does it serve? One could say ‘well we need these rules so that foreigners don’t take jobs from Americans.’ There’s two problems with that idea.
First, it’s not moral. And second, it’s not true. There’s no logical connection between the happenstance of the place you were born in corresponding to the place you are allowed to work. I can move from Denver to Pittsburgh and get a job, but I can’t move to Toronto and get the same job. We can argue about the need to create an orderly system or the rules of taxation or the government’s system of social welfare, but those are all bureaucratic or economic reasons. None of those is a moral answer to why a person can be denied the opportunity to work or live someplace, because there is no morality to restricting human employment based on location. And our society kind of knows that. When the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011, millions of refugees streamed into Turkey and Jordan. And of course those countries accepted them because their plight was so desperate. But the refugees overwhelmingly were not allowed to work, and their migration to other countries was severely restricted. Morally, nations of the world accepting refugees and giving them work rights is the right thing to do, without any doubt. Economically, though, each country behaves in protection of their own interests.
And there’s the second part about work restrictions protecting our jobs not being true. In the United States, there are millions of people working at jobs that folks born in this country simply won’t take. Farmworkers, nursing home employees, food service workers, gardeners, housekeepers, hotel workers – all of these industries are made up of a huge percentage of non-citizen visa holders, or undocumented individuals. If all of them were to be deported, there’s no way we’d have enough laborers to fill all of their positions. This country would grind to a halt. They’re not taking our jobs. They are caring for our mothers and grandmothers, and bringing us our tomatoes, and cooking our hamburgers. To quote one of my favorite authors and chefs, Anthony Bourdain, may his memory be a blessing, QUOTE ‘The bald fact is that the entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board. Everyone in the industry knows this. It is undeniable. Illegal labor is the backbone of the service and hospitality industry.’
Even though I questions the origins of our global immigration system, and even though I question whether such a system that originates in racism and immorality can ultimately be fair, just, or even benign, I concede that the global immigration system we have right now is the system we have, and it is not going away. Within that system, however, it is a Jewish act to expect that the system behave in a moral way. I think you all know that it is not.
Since February of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has aggressively moved to incarcerate and deport folks who were undocumented residents of the United States - including people in the asylum process, student visa holders, and green card holders that the United States had suddenly revoked status from. Additionally, another category of people that came to the US without documentation as children who have grown up here have also been swept up for imprisonment and deportation. And just recently the Supreme Court ruled that ICE and the US government have no obligation to return a migrant to their country of origin, even a country where a person might be tortured or killed as a political dissident.
The case in question was one in which the Department of Homeland Security deported eight men to South Sudan. The men were Vietnam, South Korea, Mexico, Laos, Cuba, and Myanmar. Only one was from South Sudan. They were not given the chance to plead their cases in court. Writing for the minority in dissent, Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard.”
This issue of migration and human rights has always been and must continue to be a critical issue of importance to American Jews, for so many reasons. It is important because our grandparents and great grandparents came to this country from somewhere else searching for a better life, and thus to pay that debt of freedom back to this country, we must stand up for the rights of the next generation of immigrants. It is important because we are a people who wandered for millenia without passports or citizenship rules.
And yes, we must also highlight and remain vigilant regarding this issue because it does directly affect our community. Jews, and particularly Israelis, are also being caught up in the ICE raids and sweeps taking place, and being deposited in ICE detentions centers across the country; including two local privately operated detention centers, the Moshannon Valley Processing Center and the Northeast Ohio Detention Center. But all these people in these places and others, Jewish or not, Israeli or Burmese or Mexican or Afghani, are all somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s parent, imprisoned for no crime and held without trial and in moral and legal limbo, effectively punished for the crime of having been born in the wrong place.
Our parsha this week is a long litany of sacrifices that pilgrims were obligated to bring to the temple at festival times - at each new moon, at Passover, at Shavuot, at Rosh Hashanah, at Yom Kippur, and at Sukkot. These were all pilgrimage holidays - holidays in which individuals travelled a long way, across other lands and over rivers and mountains and even across the sea. And they were asked to present not a passport at the temple, but an offering to God of appreciation and love and gratitude - a bull, a lamb, a ram, a cake of fine flour. We yearn for a return to the time when the free movement of peoples was the norm, and when it was done in its most ideal state as an act of love and community and gratitude. Shabbat Shalom.
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