A version of this Sermon was delivered on 1/27/17 at Temple Emanu-El of East Meadow
Parshat Va’era 5777
Today is a confluence of special
days on our calendar. To start, it’s
Shabbat, the 7th day which God gave us as a gift to rest and revel
in creation as God does in the book of Genesis.
That makes it special. Today is
also Rosh Chodesh Shevat, the first of the month of Shevat. In this month, we celebrate Tu b’Shevat, the New
Year for the trees and the unofficial Jewish start to spring. That makes it special. Today is also special because it is International
Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day
in 1945, January 27, was the date that the Russian army liberated the Auschwitz
prison, concentration, and death camp. Since
2005, the international community, after a UN vote, uses this day to recognize, remember, and hopefully learn from the Holocaust.
I am of two minds about this
day. On the one hand, we Jews already have
a date on the calendar devoted to this, Yom HaShoah, which falls the
week after Passover and which commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Yom HaShoah was established by the Israeli Government
and has been widely accepted by Jewish Communities around the world as a day of
mourning, reflection, and remembrance.
On Yom HaShoah, a siren blasts for 2 minutes throughout Israel at 10am
and everything stops. All cars pull
over. People stop in mid stride to
remember the 6 million Jews who were murdered simply because they were
Jews. This date was chosen to
commemorate those who fought for their lives and freedom, even though they did
not succeed. Israel has a tendency to
focus more on the resistance than on the victims.
On the other hand, another day that
recognizes the enormity of the Holocaust, lest we forget its lessons, isn’t a
bad thing. Remembering the liberation
puts the focus on the armies which liberated the Jews from the Nazis. On this day, the international community, not
just Jews, pauses to reflect on what we’ve learned and how we’ve changed in the
70 years since the end of World War Two.
The world is asked to take a moment and think about how far we’ve come
since those dark days when a minority community was ostracized belittled and
systematically exterminated because of their heritage, those days when the
mechanisms of state were used to divide people and frighten citizens to imaginary
dangers in the quest for power, those days when fear of the other overtook our
God commanded call to welcome the stranger, the orphan, the widow. How far we’ve come since those days and yet
how little we’ve progressed.
Not every act of remembrance has the
same purpose. Sometimes we remember
those who perished, as the siren on Yom HaShoah asks of us. Sometimes we remember those who fought and
those who resisted, as the date chosen for Yom HaShoah asks of us. Sometimes we remember those who sacrificed,
as today’s choice of date reminds us. Sometimes,
however, we must make a point to remember those who stood idly by.
Today, a new Twitter
account has taken up the cause of remembering some of those who perished and remembering
some of those who stood idly by, in recalling a blemish on our nation’s
history. All day today, a twitter
account by the handle St. Louis Manifest has been tweeting the names and many
pictures of the passengers on the St. Louis, fleeing from Nazi Europe, who were turned away from every
country, sent back to Europe and many of whom perished at the hands of the Nazis. Each of them has a name, and each name is
accompanied by the phrase: The US turned me away at the border in 1939.
As a congregation, last May we welcomed
Sonja Geissmar, a survivor of the St. Louis, a steamer ship with 937 people
aboard, mostly Jews, who were desperate to flee Europe. She shared her story, and recalled the people
she met on the ship. She recalled the
captain who worked as hard as he could to get his passengers to safety. The ship made it to the United States, close
enough to see the lights of Miami, but its passengers were not allowed to
disembark. These refugees, yearning to breathe free, were actively
prevented from seeking refuge in the United States, a nation of immigrants. This
came on the heels of the US congress voting against opening the doors to 20,000
Jewish refugee children. The excuses
given were economic, isolationist, and based on a fear that among these Jews would
be Nazi spies. 254 of the 937 people
aboard the St. Louis died at the hands of the Nazis. 254 lives which could have been spared had
there been an abundance of Godly compassion rather than an abundance of fear,
xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Roosevelt and our government chose not to act.
Today, though there is a resurgence
in anti-Semitism, Israel ensures that Jews need not fear that another nation
may prevent them entry. However, the
threat to our adopted nation living up to its highest moral character continues,
and it comes from Islamophobia. The
world is in the midst of the largest refugee crisis since World War Two as
millions continue to flee war torn Syria and Iraq, fleeing ISIS on the one side and Assad’s
cruelty on the other, and we have already forgotten our history. The arguments against welcoming refugees from
Syria go as follows: Some of those coming might be ISIS in disguise. They won’t fit into our country. They bring crime and radical Islam with
them.
This is all too familiar to us and
we ought to stand against it because it wasn’t so long ago that these charges
were levied against the Jews. It wasn’t
so long ago that a lack of compassion for families and children fleeing war and
oppression denied our relatives and families entry into this nation. It wasn’t so long ago that irrational fear
and protectionism condemned those 254 Jews, and countless more, to die. It wasn’t so long ago, and yet here we are
again.
Today, on the date the international
community recalls the horrors of the Holocaust, our nation once again turns its
back on the most vulnerable as an executive order places a months-long halt on
any refugee coming to the United States, and cuts in half the total number that
would be allowed entry in 2017—and there’s no guarantee that that number will
even be met. In addition, there has been
an indication that preferential treatment will be given to Christian refugees
and that visitors from certain Muslim-majority countries will be denied entry. As Jonathan Greenblat, CEO of the ADL put it
in an op-ed today:
Today, orphans and widows in Syria
are trapped, caught between the
Assad regime’s barrel bombs and the
unparalleled brutality of ISIS. Young men and women around the globe are
fleeing for their lives, persecuted because they love another person of the
same sex or because they are transgender. Political dissidents who have had the
courage to speak out in defiance of authoritarian regimes fear for their lives.
And the executive order would send them a terrible message: The United States
will not be a beacon of hope for you. You will not find safety here.
The truth is that refugees from any
country go through the most complicated vetting system of anyone who is
admitted to this nation. The process
takes over 2 years, often, and involves 20 steps of redundant interviews and
background checks involving the United Nations, Homeland Security and US
immigration services. This is not people
getting on a plane and showing up. We are
not talking about an easy process, here.
As was explained to us when Rabbi Rachel Grant Meyer from HIAS, formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, came to
speak last year, the refugees who come into the United States today are the
most closely screened in history and more is asked of them than was asked of
any previous generation of refugee. And
with all that they have to do, they still desperately want to come here, they
still know that this nation has always been a beacon of safe haven and welcome.
They want to experience what we’ve
all experienced since our parents, grandparents or great grandparents came to
these shores: welcome, opportunity, peace, and a place to raise a family. These American ideals are being denied them by
the new administration. Once again our
nation will be forced to answer the question of why we didn’t do more.
As the administration continues to
sow fear of our Muslim brothers and sisters, lumping them all into one category,
let it not be said we stood alongside silently.
Let it not be said that we ignored the plight of those our nation barred
from admission. Let it not be said that
we agreed with this bigoted policy. Let
is not be said that we did not embody the Godly compassion that is so
lacking in our leaders today.
We can and should call our
representatives, donate to causes like HIAS and sign petitions. All of these actions are good, necessary and
important, but the truth is that until and unless the President changes his
mind, his order will stand, halting months of progress made toward welcoming
refugees into the United States.
In this week’s Torah portion, Va’era
we learn something important not from what we find in the Torah portion, but from
what we don’t. This week, we read the
first 7 of the 10 plagues. Now, because
we get to this story every year, both in the Torah and when we celebrate
Passover, we know that three more are coming before Pharaoh finally accedes to
let the Israelites go. But the Rabbis
who divided up the Torah into its weekly readings had choices. They could have divided them equally. Or, what would have made more sense, they could have decided to
put them all in one portion. They are
all of the same narrative, after all.
Why stop this week’s Torah portion after just 7 of the 10 plagues? I think this is meant to teach us that
sometimes, we must wait for redemption. Even
when we know it’s what God wants and demands, we must wait. Sometimes, through forces out of our control,
we cannot get to where we want when we want to get there; we are halted in our
progress. Sometimes it has to wait. But make no mistake, redemption is coming because
we know it and because we believe it.
Shabbat Shalom.
