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Kol Nidrei Eve Sermon 5767 We Are All Immigrants Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon Temple Emanu-El of Tucson, AZ My friends, it is good to be here with all of you tonight. G’mar Chatimah Tovah—may you be sealed for a good year in the Book of Life. As most of you know, I had the privilege of a four-month sabbatical last year. I am grateful to the members of Temple Emanu-El for allowing me this opportunity, although I must add that for some of you the fact that I was away from Temple for four months last winter and spring will come as a surprise. After all, I was here the last time you came to shul—on Yom Kippur—and here I am again… I learned many things over my sabbatical, some of them quite different from the lessons I thought I would learn. Life is like that, isn’t it? We expect one thing to happen, and another does. As the Yiddish aphorism puts it, mensch tracht und Gott lacht—we plan, and God laughs. But even when things turn out in unexpected ways, there is a great deal to be learned. I learned a lot on my sabbatical, for example, by coaching Little League—something I can’t really do when I am working as a your rabbi. I learned that it’s fun to be called “Coach Rabbi” by 7 year olds, and I learned how differently some people act at a kids’ ballgame than they do in a boardroom, a medical office, or a courtroom. I also learned that some people are exactly the same… for better and worse. I learned it’s possible to spend 6 hours at Mehl Park coaching two consecutive grade-school games on a school night, and I learned that the temperature really does drop 40 degrees in the desert when it gets dark. I learned, in short, what it is like to be a normal dad, not a rabbi dad… I also learned that there are many wonderful, affiliated Jewish families here in Tucson who spend many, many, many hours at sporting events on hot dusty fields or steamy gyms or pools, watching or waiting with their children—even sporting events at something less than the highest level of competitive quality; and yet those same families can’t seem to find the time to attend one family Shabbat service a month. Perhaps that’s something we all might choose to address this year… So I have now been back at work longer than I was away, but sabbatical taught me many things. The most dramatic experience of my sabbatical took place during a trip to New York for Passover with my kids. It was great journey, and an eventful one with real insight. Our first night in Manhattan we left a Broadway show and decided to take a pedicab, one of those human-peddled rickshaws that are prevalent in touristy areas of New York. The young driver was particularly friendly to my children and me, and we got to talking. It turned out that he had been in this country for about a year, having immigrated from the area near Minsk in Byelorussia, White Russia, in 2005. He had been a lawyer in Russia, and was supporting his advanced schooling in the US, and his additional English lessons, by hard manual labor pedaling tourists like us around the badly paved streets and sidewalks of New York. So I told our pedicab driver that my own grandfather had immigrated to the United Sates exactly one hundred years before he had—in the year 1905—and that he, too, had been an educated man who worked at manual labor, carrying furniture up five story tenement walk-ups, before moving on to become a rabbi and a professor at Hebrew Union College. My grandfather, too, had imigrated from a small town outside of Minsk to find success in the Golden Land of America. I asked if he knew of a town called Lohi, on the outskirts of Minsk. He did. He himself was from a place about 10 miles away. We really do repeat the patterns of our ancestors... Our last day in Manhattan included a trip out to Ellis Island, the immigration center through which the ancestors of over 100,000,000 Americans arrived on these shores. And in the New York Times that morning there was a big article about some large protests about American immigration policy that were creating traffic jams in Manhattan that day. So we avoided the traffic, and drove up to the Bronx to see the Yankees home opener—I had to talk a little baseball on the High Holy Days, didn’t I? And then we drove up to the Catskill Mountains—once known as “the Jewish Alps,” to spend Passover at a resort there. There are tour groups that take over a resort property for the holiday of Pesach and make it completely kosher for the festival. For these Passover retreats, the tour operators bring in an entire team of mashgiachs, rabbis trained in supervising food preparation, and basically turn the resort into a kind of Kosher for Passover cruise ship, with all the elaborate preparations of Pesach done for you by the tour group. Making Pesach is not an easy task, and having the privilege of having someone else do it for me in the Catskills was a special gift of the sabbatical. Or so I thought… To set the scene, it was the night before the first seder and we had just settled into our very kosher hotel room and completed our bedtime rituals when the hotel fire alarm went off. Irritated, I called the front desk to see if this was a some kind of malfunction, but they told me to evacuate immediately. I got the kids into shoes and coats, grabbed my cellphone and car keys, and we headed out into the hotel corridor, where people were running towards the exits. We walked out one exit door and saw flames shooting up from the building’s roof—clearly not a false alarm!—turned around and went back through the building to another exit and got out the front, and headed to the parking lot. And then we watched the fire, which had begun in the bakery, spread throughout the main building. Eventually, some 40 fire trucks arrived from all over Sullivan County, New York. It was quite a scene. They couldn’t do much but contain the fire to the central building, but all the elaborate preparations were clearly not going to result in a kosher for Passover resort, or a seder the next night—or, for that matter, a place for us to sleep. So I took my family to a motel in the nearby town of Liberty—I am not making this up; that was the name of the town, Liberty—wearing the clothes on our back and carrying nothing in our hands. And we came back the next morning to find that our stuff had been packed up by hotel employees, and we carried that away in plastic bags. The tour operator, having been first told of the fire by my dad after I called him in Los Angeles on my cellphone—once in a while those silly things actually work—rearranged everything by mid-morning, and the guests were all relocated to another hotel, the Nevele, about 40 minutes away. We collected our baggage from the ruins of our first place, and we arrived as refugees at the new hotel a little tired but in one piece, with all of our stuff, and with no one too much the worse for the experience. Thank God no one was hurt. I have to admit that this wild night could not have been timed more thematically for a rabbi to experience. After all, what is Passover but the remembrance of leaving in a rush in the middle of the night with nothing but the clothes on your back? And what could be a more explicit Pesach experience than to feel like a refugee, carrying your bags on your shoulder as you lead your children by the hand? And what could have possibly been a more appropriate place to spend the night before the beginning of the Festival of Freedom than a town called, I kid you not, Liberty? It brought home so clearly the immigrant experience and its central place in our history and culture. For that very morning we had been on Ellis Island, seen the Statue of Liberty up-close-and-personal, and my children and I had located their great grandmother’s listing on a ship manifest that was four score and seven years old. There were also some ironies, and because there were no deaths or injuries we could also joke about it. The morning before Passover we traditionally burn the chamets, the last of the leavening in our possession. So, this year, we apparently decided to burn the hotel instead. But that hotel fire seared into our minds a clear message that has remained with me ever since: in truth, we are, all of us immigrants, in one way or another. The Jewish lesson is simple: we must remember that our life journeys are, in reality, just another expression of our essential nature as travelers, without permanent addresses. No matter how stable we think we are, we all just passing through. Eleanor Roosevelt, the extraordinary First Lady of the United States from 1932-1945, came from a very distinguished American family. Her uncle was President Teddy Roosevelt, and some of her ancestors came over on the Mayflower—and of course, she married the ultimate patrician, the regal Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our permanent president during the Depression and World War II. With such a distinguished pedigree she was invited to address a huge meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution, then a very important organization politically. And Eleanor Roosevelt began her speech to the DAR with the marvelous words “Good evening, fellow immigrants.” I would like to echo that line tonight, for we are all, in our own way, immigrants, and the children of immigrants. Each of our
lives is, at heart, a journey. And
when those journeys take us across boundaries into new territories we all
become immigrants. To begin, every
one of us is a kind of emigrant first, leaving our childhood homes and
migrating out into the world to explore and discover what life will mean for
us. Over our lives we become
immigrants as well, establishing our place in the world in new locations. Judaism has understood the centrality of the migratory element from the very beginning. Every significant figure in the Torah undergoes a major journey, immigrates from one culture to another, from one land to one or two others. The first Jew, Abraham, begins this process by leaving, at God’s express command in Lech Lecha, “your land, your birthplace, and the house of your father.” The Haggadah reminds us our father Jacob “was a wandering Aramean”. Moses’ son’s very name reflects that he is ger hayiti b’eretz nochria, a stranger in a strange land. Moses himself journeys from Egypt to the Wilderness of Sinai twice: first alone, to meet God at the burning bush, and then in the company of an entire migration of the total population of the Israelites—a theoretical transit of 2,000,000 people, across a desert, to the Promised Land. And as Leviticus tells us, immigrants have a defined status, later confirmed in Talmud. The ger, the alien, and the ger toshav, the resident alien, are accorded protections under the law comparable to those of the native-born. From the days of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE we have been Wandering Jews, living everywhere as settlers and immigrants and, eventually, permanent residents. Until the advent of modernity, however, we were not permitted true citizenship, and we rarely had any sense of permanence in our adopted homes. Our invitations to move to various lands and empires always had an expiration date. 700 years in Spain ended with the Expulsion; 1000 years in the Rhineland ended with Hitler. Every place in the Diaspora was, seemingly, Anatevka, awaiting the Cossack’s sword and the next edict of expulsion. And frequently, too, we were illegal immigrants. From the Jews who thrived in Venice’s Golden Age, to those who lived in Shakespeare’s England, to the refugees the Hagganah snuck into Mandatory Palestine, we broke the law in hopes of finding a safer, more prosperous place to live. Today we thrive in the Goldene Medinah of America, the land we entered in large numbers seeking freedom and success. But we know what it is to come to a new country, to be undocumented, to struggle at the margins of society in an uncertain status, to fear the very authorities entrusted with enforcing law and justice. We Tucsonans know that immigration is a crucial political issue today. In the last month at Temple Emanu-El we have hosted two forums for Congressional candidates seeking to replace Jim Kolbe when he retires this year, and I moderated those forums. We will hold a final debate here on October 24th—by the way, I’d like to formally welcome Gabrielle Giffords, who is running for that seat, who is praying here with us tonight at Temple, as her parents did before her. Immigration was a vigorously debated, and controversial, part of those forums. It will be a big part of the upcoming debate and election. It will be a central issue in our community, and our country, for some time to come. And right now it has become really hot… Last week the US Senate failed to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill, and instead voted to build a very expensive fence on the Mexican border, in theory designed to keep illegal immigrants out of America. What are we, as Jews, to make of all of this? How are we to respond to cries that we are overrun with immigrants, that our security is endangered, that our emergency rooms are drowning in the flood of uninsured illegal immigrant patients? We know that our tradition mandates seeing the stranger, the ger, in the most positive light, of remembering that we were all strangers ourselves, Humorist Tom Lehrer put it well back in the 1960’s—even in Egypt, the Pharaohs had to import Hebrew braceros… And we know that Leviticus also commands us to love the stranger, the ger, the immigrant, as we love ourselves. My friends, we live in the midst of a picturesque but dangerous desert that borders a strange land. Half a million people cross the US/Mexican border near us every year. Many more come across in neighboring areas. I have been in Altar, a central jumping off point for those crossing the border. It is quite different there: for the residents of border areas in Sonora, and for the Mexican economy in general, immigration is a major industry, with no hint of restriction. There is no sense whatsoever that migration to the US needs to be stopped or even slowed. Too many people depend on it for their own livelihood. Most devastatingly, we know that immigrants die in the desert right near here, hundreds a year, crossing illegally. The fact is that this carnage slows the tide of migration not at all. Something needs to change. There are many factors involved here. First, for the American economy, the work force provided by immigrants is essential. No construction site in the Southwest could function without undocumented workers. I do not believe a single roof could be repaired in Pima County if all illegal immigrants were deported. Immigrants are, and have always been, the engine of our American economy, especially our own Southwest. Some send money home to Guatemala and El Salvador and Nicaragua—just as my grandfather, that future rabbi and theologian, sent money home to Minsk. What solution is there to propose? Frankly, the solutions are quite simple, if we are willing to be honest about what we really want, and to support real change with our own commitment. Borders can be closed if the will and the money are there. Health care can be provided if employers are charged a fee for hiring undocumented workers. Those who are here now and wish to stay can be brought into legal status in American society through a process of naturalization. Those who wish only to work and send back money can become guest workers, paying taxes, helping our economy grow, building a better society. I suggest that we promote to our representatives a three-fold policy on immigration: First, that our borders be effectively controlled, and that the cost be born by establishing an enforcement level that truly obligates employers—with appropriately serious fees—to pay the appropriate federal taxes for their many illegal employees. Second, that all immigrant workers currently in America be given the opportunity to naturalize, should they so desire, in an expeditious way. Let us have no more 17 year-olds who have spent their entire conscious lives in the US being forced to hire immigration attorneys to avoid immediate deportation. I had one in my office two weeks ago in that situation—and through the assistance of our members Doug Levy and Alexandra Delgado, helped her find an immigration attorney, Gloria Goldberg, who preserved her status in this country, legally. But that simply should never happen again. And third, for those who do not wish to become full members of our society, let us establish a true guest worker program that permits reasonably free, safe, and secure transit back and forth to their countries of origin. In addition, all laws and labor standards must be applied equally to citizen workers and guest workers. One law for the stranger and the home-born, always, in Jewish tradition.
But most important for us as Jews is how we choose to perceive, and speak about, those who seek a new life in America. For every one of us present here tonight on this Yom Kippur Eve is descended from immigrants to the United States—and nearly everywhere we have and do live. For when we see these immigrants we need to see not “them”—but, a generation or two or three ago, us. In the larger sense, our own lives are really at heart journeys—migrations. And if, as God asks, we can see immigrants as we see ourselves—as Judaism commands us to—we will help create a society of holiness and blessing. May you have an easy fast: and my you be sealed for a good year, and a great journey, in the Book of Life. G’mar Chatimah
Tovah—L’shanah Tovah. |
