Go Forth

This morning I want to tell you about Rosa Maria Hernandez, a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, who came to the United States with her parents when she was three months old. All of them are undocumented immigrants. Rosa Maria was detained this week by federal immigration authorities in Texas on her way to undergo emergency gall bladder surgery-- accompanied by her cousin, a US citizen. 

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Traveling on Tuesday morning by ambulance from Laredo to Corpus Christi, the two were stopped at an interior Border Patrol checkpoint and followed by agents to the children’s hospital. ​After surgery, Rosa Maria was taken into custody and sent to a detention facility designated for migrant children who arrive alone to this country. Rosa Maria is still being detained as of today, 150 miles from her parents, and may face deportation.
 
Lekh Lekha m’artzekha u’meemoladetkha… Go forth from your native land, from your birthplace…
 
100 years before Rosa Maria’s story, my great grandmother Sarah who we called bubbie, escaped persecution in Lithuania. Sarah left her homeland on the backs of strangers, making her way from her birthplace, ravaged by pogroms, to the shores of this country. She hoped for possibility when she crossed at Ellis Island, thankful to arrive before Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Not knowing a word of English and facing the nativist fears of her US-born neighbors, bubbie lived to 97. Bubbie was proud to the day she died of the country that became home, the family she raised, and her favorite sport, boxing, that she watched religiously on TV-- she never competed, but I wouldn’t mess with bubbie.
 
Lekh Lekha m’artzekha u’meemoladetkha… Go forth from your native land, from your birthplace…
 
Two years ago, a Haaretz piece, For U.S. Jews, a Double-Edged Holocaust Precedent to Syrian Refugee Clash, reflected on the political climate that met European Jews trying to escape Nazism.  In it Chemi Shalev recounts:
 
Even as the Nazi campaign against German and then Austrian Jews reached fever pitch, Congressman Louis McFadden, Republican of Pennsylvania, still claimed that Jewish refugees were part of a plot to instill a ‘Jewish Communist Regime’ in America. As Howard Sachar recounts in his epic A History of the Jews in America, Senator Robert Reynolds, Democrat of North Carolina, wondered whether Jews would have been forced out of their lands ‘if they had not impoverished those lands or if they had not conspired against their governments.’
 
Shalev then describes the influence from the very top of then President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, through an interview with Professor Peter Schulman of Case Western University:
 
Many Americans felt that Jews had too much money or too much power. Schulman says, ‘Jews had also long been associated with socialism, communism, Bolshevism, anarchism, and labor agitation…Moreover, the Roosevelt administration, from FDR on down to key officials in the State Department, saw a potential flow of Jewish refugees as liable to bring Nazi spies and saboteurs, or perhaps Jews extorted by threat to their families remaining in Germany to serve the Nazi cause. Those fears about security were felt very strongly.’
 
Finally Shalev gives us a sense of the tone in the country as a whole in the 1930s and 1940s:
 
For many Americans, the Jews were not refugees running for their lives or simple people looking for save haven. They were Communist agents if they came from Russia, Nazi saboteurs if they hailed from Germany and Austria, criminals, lowlifes, swindlers and scavengers if they arrived from anywhere else. Decades of nativist, anti-Semitic incitement that had started with the arrival of waves of Jewish immigrants at the end of the 19th century had left Americans fearful of the hordes of Jews that were coming to take over their livelihood and their lives.
 
Lekh Lekha m’artzekha u’meemoladetkha… Go forth from your native land, from your birthplace…
 
I can only imagine the fear that bubbie felt when she came over. I can only imagine the fear that Rosa Maria feels now. I can only imagine the fear that so many Jews who tried to escape Nazi persecution felt as they tried to reach these shores and find safe haven. Each of their stories is different, the outcomes different, the historical time periods different. But what Rosa Maria, my bubbie, and Jewish people fleeing Nazis share is the same human resilience to step from the known into the unknown, to strive for, to build toward, to have faith in. It is the same human resilience we find in this week’s Torah portion, Lekh Lekh. It is the same human resilience we hope to find every time we open Torah and teach our children. Not because our stories match those of our ancestors. They don’t. But because what we learn from their struggles, their victories, their shortcomings, invariably influence our own. When people ask how the Torah can be relevant to their lives today, that’s what it means.  Linking ourselves to something or somebody greater than ME FIRST might actually enrich the path we make in this world.
 
We come to Lekh Lekha and to the story of Abraham and Sarah year after year, hopefully knowing we didn’t just plop down in Minnetonka. The Torah sensitizes us to our own histories. The Torah sensitizes us to the ongoing saga of people still trying to enter this country, with legal status or not, as we know, legal immigration is under assault. Federal efforts were announced in August to cut legal immigration in half.
 
We come to Lekh Lekha and the story of Abraham and Sarah not to keep us comfortable in our seats year after year, our heads buried in the pages of the siddur—don’t bother me with the events of the world. We come to Lekh Lekha to muster the necessary spiritual courage and translate the words of prayer into deeds of action. To become better educated. And, at the end of the day, to say that protecting our great nation need not come at the expense of Rosa Maria’s humanity, or my bubbie’s, or mine or yours. To know that at one time our people were accused of being spies and lowlifes and anarchists, and to bring together people of good will now, on all sides, to build what is good about America.
 
We come to Lekh Lekha not as a trip down biblical memory lane or as a gulp of Jewish nostalgia that tranquilizes us to feel all warm and fuzzy on this cold October day. We come precisely because of the two words that begin our reading, which the commentators pick up on: Lekh Lekha. Go forth. The Sefat Emet teaches:
 
The human being is called a walker, always having to go from one rung to another. For habit makes things seem natural, and this sense of ‘nature’ hides the inner light. This is true even of Torah and the commandments: when we do them out of habit, they become our nature, and we forget their inner meaning. ‘Get out of your land’ – a person should always keep walking, Whoever stands still is not renewed… (The Language of Truth, pp. 22-23)
 
Here comes the Sefat Emet, prescient as he was over 100 years ago, in Poland, to tell us not to use Torah as a crutch to justify complacency, to promote habit. The Sefat Emet, living where he does when he does, channels the very context in which he was interpreting Torah in Poland and watching his students be sent off to fight in the Russo-Japanese War.  
 
Lekh Lekha, go forth from your land- a person should keep walking- is the Sefat Emet’s way of teaching those of us who are comfortable. Do not grow complacent in reading Lekh Lekha. To those of us who are safe and secure, he is saying, “wake up.” We have to keep walking, we have to keep doing, and we have to keep acting.
 
And Lekh Lekha, go forth from your land- a person should keep walking- is the Sefat Emet’s way of teaching those of us who are like Rosa Maria, or my bubbie, or Abraham or Sarah: you are in good company in our tradition to be an immigrant, to be a wanderer, to be walking, to be in search of a home.
 
The Sefat Emet is warning us that, when we stop moving, we no longer live. When we stop coming into contact with our own privilege to help others, or when we stop moving to find a safe haven for ourselves, we stop truly being alive.
 
I want to suggest therefore that Lekh Lekha is as much a wake up to those who seek a place of new possibility as it is a call to those in the comfort of where we sit, pray, and eat. We must take the command Lekh Lekha to go forth, to rise up, to live not out of habit but out of concern for humanity.
 
We might imagine in the encounter between those who walk to possibility and those who walk to greet them; in the encounter between those who enjoy privilege and those who don’t—we find the elusive promise God states right after Lekh Lekha, in verse two:
 
“I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; and I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.”
 
Slogans of greatness don’t stick because we shout them or shut others down with them. The Jewish people, this nation will be great and blessing will abound when those who go forth to find new possibility encounter those who go forth to embrace it. We need that encounter. For the sake of those like Rosa Maria and for the sake of my bubbie, for the sake of those who tried to make it here, and still others who come to this country for a better life. And for the sake of those who let Torah’s wisdom quench those who thirst, not drown out their problems for a “more convenient time” that delays their humanity.
 
Lekh Lekha. Go forth in your comfort and go forth in your discomfort. Go forth Abraham and Sarah, and Rosa Maria and bubbie, and you and me. Go forth conservatives and go forth liberals. Go forth all of us. Lekh Lekha. When we go forth, in the possibility of that encounter -- that is where true greatness and blessing is found. May we merit that for ourselves, for our people, and for our country.
 
And let us say: Amen.