Rabbi Ari LEv: What Shows us our Face in a Stranger
Rosh Hashanah Day 1 5779
September 10, 2018
As many of you know, about a month ago I had the opportunity to travel to Arizona on delegation of clergy called Faith Floods the Desert to deliver humanitarian aid to migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. I was there with 60 other clergy, including four other rabbis, and about 20 local samaritans who regularly bring water to the desert in this region.
I traveled from Philly to Tucson, by way of Phoenix. And then drove about two hours to Ajo, Arizona, an old mining town in the remote desert southwest of Tucson that has become home base for Border Patrol in this region. Ajo rests between 100 miles of barren wilderness and 100 miles of Native Reservation. There are Border Patrol checkpoints on every highway leading out of town. Sitting about 50 miles north of the border, Ajo represents a halfway point in the migrant's journey. It is among the most remote places I have ever been.
We spent the first day of the delegation learning and preparing for action.
The facilitators wanted us first and foremost to connect with our humanity. To know on a human level that the thousands of people disappearing in the desert are not nameless, faceless people. They are human beings with families who love them and are looking for them. Dehumanization is a tactic of immigration policy. The anonymity keeps many people, especially many white U.S. citizens, from the pain and suffering that is perpetrated.
In an study of news coverage in multiple borderlands newspapers, Jane Zavisca, a cultural sociologist at the University of Arizona, surveyed 10 years' worth of reporting to determine the most common metaphors used about migrant deaths. Economic metaphors were predominant...Death is a price that is paid, a toll collected by the desert...Violent metaphors were the second largest category, depicting death as the vengeful punishment of an angry desert...Dehumanizing metaphors followed; migrants depicted as animals, something hunted. Another subcategory of metaphors most ironically enlists water imagery, describing migrants as dangerous waters threatening the nation...a flood that overwhelms Border Patrol agents and medical examiners. Zavisca concludes his study by quoting Otto Santa Ana, a sociolinguist who explains, "Such metaphors dehumanize migrants by representing them as an undifferentiated mass." [1]
In the words of the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab-Nye:
"Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive." [2]
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone.
Over the course of the past month since returning, I have read several memoirs about the borderlands, written by journalists, border patrol agents, and humanitarian aid workers. I have lost sleep. I have cried. And I have felt called to connect to a hope that knows no limit in the face of desperation. The violence and suffering in the borderlands is immense, as is the unshakable courage and strength of the people crossing the desert.
One person who lived in the U.S. for decades and had been recently deported, separated from his wife and three children, writes:
"You see, each time I cross I risk my life. When you step into the Mexican consulate, you see pictures of the missing. All of us who cross are exposed to this possibility. We know there are dangers in the desert. La mafia, la migra. There's mountain lions, snakes. There's cliff and deep canyons. There is no water...
The judges in the United States know they are sending people to their death. They are sending people to commit suicide. I will do anything to be on the other side. To be honest, I would rather be in prison in the U.S. and see my boys once a week through the glass than to stay here and be separated from my family. At least I would be closer to them. So you see, there is nothing that can keep me from crossing. I will walk the through the desert for five days, eight days, ten days, whatever it takes to be with them. I'll eat grass, I'll eat bushes, I'll eat cactus, I'll drink filthy cattle water, I'll drink nothing at all. I'll run and hide and pay whatever I have to. I will keep crossing, again and again, until I make it, until I am together with my family. No me quedo aqui. Voy a seguir intentando pasar. I am intent on crossing." [3]
Now I want to take us back to another story about desperation in the desert.
Just moments ago we heard the words of Genesis 21, which tells the story of our earliest ancestors, Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac.
The 48 hours I spent in the Cabeza Prieta Wilderness learning history, listening to testimony, and delivering water to the migrants literally dying of thirst in the desert transformed my experience of this morning's Torah reading.
These ancient words, once mythic narrative, now read like memoir to me:
Abraham started early in the morning
He took some bread and a skin of water
And gave them to Hagar--placing them upon her shoulder--
Together with the child and sent her away.
She went off and roamed in the the desert of Be'er Sheva
Now when the water in the skin was at an end, she threw the child under one of the bushes,
And went and sat by herself, at a distance, as far away as a bowshot,
For she said to herself:
Let me not see the child die!
So she sat at a distance, and lifted up her voice and wept.
But God heard the voice of the lad,
God's messengers called to Hagar from above and said to her:
What ails you Hagar? Do not be afraid.
For God has heard the voice of the lad where he is.
Arise, lift up the lad and grasp him with your hand,
For a great nation will I make of him!
God opened up her eyes, and she saw a well of water;
she went, filled the skin with water, and gave the lad to drink. [4]
On the second day of the delegation we, like Abraham, started out at sunrise beneath the brilliant waning moon and ventured into the desert with 70 clergy and humanitarian aid facilitators.
Together we delivered 125 gallons of water. On each of the jugs we wrote messages of love and hope. We journeyed to some of the most remote parts of the Western Desert of Arizona which involved 1.5 hours on a dirt road by car and then another 1.5 hours by foot. I could never have imagined the bio-physical intensity. The desert was devastatingly hot and the elements were relentless. Several people experienced heat exhaustion after an hour of exposure. Like Hagar and Ishmael, we too took shelter in the limited shade, creosote bushes and ironwood trees.
The words we just chanted from the Torah are the story of Hagar. And they are also the story of HaGer, of sojourners and border crossers, of refugees and immigrants.
36 times the Torah instructs us to be gracious to the Ger.
It is the most repeated teaching in the whole Hebrew bible.
It is mentioned in some way in every book of the Torah.
It is at the core of our Passover narrative and seder experiences.
וַאֲהַבְתֶּ֖ם אֶת־הַגֵּ֑ר
You should love the stranger,
Why?
כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם
For you were strangers!
In the past I have wanted to generalize the story of Hagar. I have taught, al tikrei Hagar--don't read the Story of Hagar as a story of Hagar, ela HaGer, but rather the story of the ger, the sojourner, the stranger, the migrant. For most of my life I have seen the story of Hagar as a story about immigrant and refugee experience.
But this year, I am hearing it differently.
I was transformed by my experience in the desert and this year I want to reclaim Hagar as a character rather than a concept.
One contemporary feminist midrash writes:
Al tikrei HaGer,
Don't read these 36 verses in Torah as referring to the Ger, to the sojourner specifically,
elah Hagar.
but rather to Hagar, the biblical character.
Then the midrash asks:
V'yadatem et Hagar?
Do you know the experience of Hagar?
I know the answer to this question is different for each of us; some of us in this room have been more personally impacted by immigration policy. And many of us in this room have family members and ancestors who themselves were and are immigrants and refugees.
What is happening in the western desert of Arizona is an exodus of biblical proportions. Within hours of arriving in Ajo, while learning about the search and rescue efforts of local samaritans, our facilitators let us know that they had just recovered the body of a border crosser just outside of town. His name was Sal Salazar. He had been a resident of the U.S. for 30 years and was recently deported. He was crossing to reunite with his children and grandchildren in Phoenix and died in the desert. This was yet another tragic, completely unnecessary death. Desert-aid workers have named this the crisis of the disappeared because just about every phone call to the search and rescue lines begins, "I am looking for my disappeared...brother, uncle, child." We gathered in prayer and collected money for his burial. Twice in the 48-hour period that I was in Ajo, we read the list of everyone who had died in the surrounding region in the past year. A few actual names are voiced, scattered amongst a long list of: "'desconocido, desconocido, desconocido,' the disappeared whose names are still unknown."
Our prayers begin, Eloheinu, v'elohei avoteinu v'imoteinu, Our God, and the god of our ancestors. The God of Abraham and the God of Sarah. With the help of the insights of Feminist scholars, this morning let us call on the God of Hagar. Feminist bible scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky writes: "The story of Sarah and Hagar is not a story of the conflict between 'us' and 'other,' but between 'us' and 'another us.' Hagar is the archetype of Israel: She is us." Frymer-Kensky continues, "This story forces us to realize that the destiny of Israel is not utterly different from that of the people around it." So too for all of us living in the U.S. The story of the borderlands is not a story of us and other, but rather us and another us.
In her groundbreaking book, Borderlands/La Frontera, Chicana Feminist Gloria Anzaldua, of blessed memory, writes:
"The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [it is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country--a border culture. Borders are set up...to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary...los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short those who cross over, pass over or go through the confines of the 'normal.'"
If we whose namesake is Ivrim--those who cross over--cannot identify with, align with, put our lives on the line for migrants, border crossers, refugees, then who are we?
If our story is the story of a people who crossed the sea and desert in search of freedom. Then our story is the story of Hagar.
In recent months I have experienced in myself and in both personal and pastoral conversations a growing sense of despair and fatigue. Understandably so. When we are not being directly assaulted by the state, we are bearing witness to its assaults done in our name and it calls us to question who we are and what we ought to do.
In his book What Have We Done, veteran war reporter David Wood describes the concept of "moral injury." Long confused with PTSD, moral injury is a more subtle wound, characterized by sorrow, bitterness, grief, and shame. In its most simple and profound sense, Wood writes, "moral injury is a jagged disconnect from our understanding of who we are, and what we and others ought to do and ought not to do...Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong." [5]
One does not have to be in combat to suffer from moral injury. War is something that reaches far beyond the battlefields, something that leaches out into proximate geographies and relationships, seeping deep into the individual and societal unconscious. To be in war, Wood states, even in this broader sense, is to be exposed to moral injury.
By every measure in these times, we are all living in a state of moral injury.
The facilitators in the desert stressed to us that the entire crisis in the borderlands is human-made. Which means that those of us who are citizens are complicit and we capable of transforming it.
If it is encoded in the story of Hagar, and multiplied in the Exodus story, we are made to realize that people have been crossing dangerous deserts by the light of the moon seeking safety and freedom, hunted by the state and sustained by their faith, for as long as human beings have been alive. Being in the desert, for the first time I realized that perhaps the God of the desert was not meant to be some supernatural miracle worker. Perhaps The Holy One was a humanitarian aid worker, stashing food under shrubs and placing water in the desert.
We are called to see our potential; that who we are and the actions we take every day can be part of the miraculous. In the morning blessings, we say that The Holy One is Malbish Arumim--the One that clothes the naked, and Matir Asurim--the One that frees the captive. But in truth, that is not the work of some supernatural deity. That is the work of being human, ensuring everyone has access to safety, food, shelter, and potable drinking water.
Driving through the vast expanse of desert I simultaneously felt terrified and captivatingly alive. These prayers, this day, is about us aspiring to find the holiness in ourselves. It is about looking out at existence and God and life and realizing that it is awesome and intense and terrifying to be alive.
We are here to connect to our humanity, drown ourselves in awe of all of creation, and draw ourselves out of the morose.
Hayom Harat Olam--Today the world is pregnant with possibility!
What does it look like for you to recommit to the world?
How can you be the hands of The Holy One this year?
In the words of Holly Near:
I am willing and I am open, for to be hopeless would seem so strange
It dishonors those who came before us
So lift us up to the light of change!
Join us in song.
[1] Cantu, Francisco. The Line Becomes a River, p. 110.
[2] "Kindness" by Shihab-Nye, Naomi, from Words Under the Words.
[3] Cantu, Francisco. The Line Becomes a River, p. 241-2.
[4] Genesis 21:14-21.
[5] Cantu, Francisco. The Line Becomes a River, p. 150-1.
September 10, 2018
As many of you know, about a month ago I had the opportunity to travel to Arizona on delegation of clergy called Faith Floods the Desert to deliver humanitarian aid to migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. I was there with 60 other clergy, including four other rabbis, and about 20 local samaritans who regularly bring water to the desert in this region.
I traveled from Philly to Tucson, by way of Phoenix. And then drove about two hours to Ajo, Arizona, an old mining town in the remote desert southwest of Tucson that has become home base for Border Patrol in this region. Ajo rests between 100 miles of barren wilderness and 100 miles of Native Reservation. There are Border Patrol checkpoints on every highway leading out of town. Sitting about 50 miles north of the border, Ajo represents a halfway point in the migrant's journey. It is among the most remote places I have ever been.
We spent the first day of the delegation learning and preparing for action.
The facilitators wanted us first and foremost to connect with our humanity. To know on a human level that the thousands of people disappearing in the desert are not nameless, faceless people. They are human beings with families who love them and are looking for them. Dehumanization is a tactic of immigration policy. The anonymity keeps many people, especially many white U.S. citizens, from the pain and suffering that is perpetrated.
In an study of news coverage in multiple borderlands newspapers, Jane Zavisca, a cultural sociologist at the University of Arizona, surveyed 10 years' worth of reporting to determine the most common metaphors used about migrant deaths. Economic metaphors were predominant...Death is a price that is paid, a toll collected by the desert...Violent metaphors were the second largest category, depicting death as the vengeful punishment of an angry desert...Dehumanizing metaphors followed; migrants depicted as animals, something hunted. Another subcategory of metaphors most ironically enlists water imagery, describing migrants as dangerous waters threatening the nation...a flood that overwhelms Border Patrol agents and medical examiners. Zavisca concludes his study by quoting Otto Santa Ana, a sociolinguist who explains, "Such metaphors dehumanize migrants by representing them as an undifferentiated mass." [1]
In the words of the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab-Nye:
"Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive." [2]
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone.
Over the course of the past month since returning, I have read several memoirs about the borderlands, written by journalists, border patrol agents, and humanitarian aid workers. I have lost sleep. I have cried. And I have felt called to connect to a hope that knows no limit in the face of desperation. The violence and suffering in the borderlands is immense, as is the unshakable courage and strength of the people crossing the desert.
One person who lived in the U.S. for decades and had been recently deported, separated from his wife and three children, writes:
"You see, each time I cross I risk my life. When you step into the Mexican consulate, you see pictures of the missing. All of us who cross are exposed to this possibility. We know there are dangers in the desert. La mafia, la migra. There's mountain lions, snakes. There's cliff and deep canyons. There is no water...
The judges in the United States know they are sending people to their death. They are sending people to commit suicide. I will do anything to be on the other side. To be honest, I would rather be in prison in the U.S. and see my boys once a week through the glass than to stay here and be separated from my family. At least I would be closer to them. So you see, there is nothing that can keep me from crossing. I will walk the through the desert for five days, eight days, ten days, whatever it takes to be with them. I'll eat grass, I'll eat bushes, I'll eat cactus, I'll drink filthy cattle water, I'll drink nothing at all. I'll run and hide and pay whatever I have to. I will keep crossing, again and again, until I make it, until I am together with my family. No me quedo aqui. Voy a seguir intentando pasar. I am intent on crossing." [3]
Now I want to take us back to another story about desperation in the desert.
Just moments ago we heard the words of Genesis 21, which tells the story of our earliest ancestors, Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac.
The 48 hours I spent in the Cabeza Prieta Wilderness learning history, listening to testimony, and delivering water to the migrants literally dying of thirst in the desert transformed my experience of this morning's Torah reading.
These ancient words, once mythic narrative, now read like memoir to me:
Abraham started early in the morning
He took some bread and a skin of water
And gave them to Hagar--placing them upon her shoulder--
Together with the child and sent her away.
She went off and roamed in the the desert of Be'er Sheva
Now when the water in the skin was at an end, she threw the child under one of the bushes,
And went and sat by herself, at a distance, as far away as a bowshot,
For she said to herself:
Let me not see the child die!
So she sat at a distance, and lifted up her voice and wept.
But God heard the voice of the lad,
God's messengers called to Hagar from above and said to her:
What ails you Hagar? Do not be afraid.
For God has heard the voice of the lad where he is.
Arise, lift up the lad and grasp him with your hand,
For a great nation will I make of him!
God opened up her eyes, and she saw a well of water;
she went, filled the skin with water, and gave the lad to drink. [4]
On the second day of the delegation we, like Abraham, started out at sunrise beneath the brilliant waning moon and ventured into the desert with 70 clergy and humanitarian aid facilitators.
Together we delivered 125 gallons of water. On each of the jugs we wrote messages of love and hope. We journeyed to some of the most remote parts of the Western Desert of Arizona which involved 1.5 hours on a dirt road by car and then another 1.5 hours by foot. I could never have imagined the bio-physical intensity. The desert was devastatingly hot and the elements were relentless. Several people experienced heat exhaustion after an hour of exposure. Like Hagar and Ishmael, we too took shelter in the limited shade, creosote bushes and ironwood trees.
The words we just chanted from the Torah are the story of Hagar. And they are also the story of HaGer, of sojourners and border crossers, of refugees and immigrants.
36 times the Torah instructs us to be gracious to the Ger.
It is the most repeated teaching in the whole Hebrew bible.
It is mentioned in some way in every book of the Torah.
It is at the core of our Passover narrative and seder experiences.
וַאֲהַבְתֶּ֖ם אֶת־הַגֵּ֑ר
You should love the stranger,
Why?
כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם
For you were strangers!
In the past I have wanted to generalize the story of Hagar. I have taught, al tikrei Hagar--don't read the Story of Hagar as a story of Hagar, ela HaGer, but rather the story of the ger, the sojourner, the stranger, the migrant. For most of my life I have seen the story of Hagar as a story about immigrant and refugee experience.
But this year, I am hearing it differently.
I was transformed by my experience in the desert and this year I want to reclaim Hagar as a character rather than a concept.
One contemporary feminist midrash writes:
Al tikrei HaGer,
Don't read these 36 verses in Torah as referring to the Ger, to the sojourner specifically,
elah Hagar.
but rather to Hagar, the biblical character.
Then the midrash asks:
V'yadatem et Hagar?
Do you know the experience of Hagar?
I know the answer to this question is different for each of us; some of us in this room have been more personally impacted by immigration policy. And many of us in this room have family members and ancestors who themselves were and are immigrants and refugees.
What is happening in the western desert of Arizona is an exodus of biblical proportions. Within hours of arriving in Ajo, while learning about the search and rescue efforts of local samaritans, our facilitators let us know that they had just recovered the body of a border crosser just outside of town. His name was Sal Salazar. He had been a resident of the U.S. for 30 years and was recently deported. He was crossing to reunite with his children and grandchildren in Phoenix and died in the desert. This was yet another tragic, completely unnecessary death. Desert-aid workers have named this the crisis of the disappeared because just about every phone call to the search and rescue lines begins, "I am looking for my disappeared...brother, uncle, child." We gathered in prayer and collected money for his burial. Twice in the 48-hour period that I was in Ajo, we read the list of everyone who had died in the surrounding region in the past year. A few actual names are voiced, scattered amongst a long list of: "'desconocido, desconocido, desconocido,' the disappeared whose names are still unknown."
Our prayers begin, Eloheinu, v'elohei avoteinu v'imoteinu, Our God, and the god of our ancestors. The God of Abraham and the God of Sarah. With the help of the insights of Feminist scholars, this morning let us call on the God of Hagar. Feminist bible scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky writes: "The story of Sarah and Hagar is not a story of the conflict between 'us' and 'other,' but between 'us' and 'another us.' Hagar is the archetype of Israel: She is us." Frymer-Kensky continues, "This story forces us to realize that the destiny of Israel is not utterly different from that of the people around it." So too for all of us living in the U.S. The story of the borderlands is not a story of us and other, but rather us and another us.
In her groundbreaking book, Borderlands/La Frontera, Chicana Feminist Gloria Anzaldua, of blessed memory, writes:
"The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [it is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country--a border culture. Borders are set up...to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary...los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short those who cross over, pass over or go through the confines of the 'normal.'"
If we whose namesake is Ivrim--those who cross over--cannot identify with, align with, put our lives on the line for migrants, border crossers, refugees, then who are we?
If our story is the story of a people who crossed the sea and desert in search of freedom. Then our story is the story of Hagar.
In recent months I have experienced in myself and in both personal and pastoral conversations a growing sense of despair and fatigue. Understandably so. When we are not being directly assaulted by the state, we are bearing witness to its assaults done in our name and it calls us to question who we are and what we ought to do.
In his book What Have We Done, veteran war reporter David Wood describes the concept of "moral injury." Long confused with PTSD, moral injury is a more subtle wound, characterized by sorrow, bitterness, grief, and shame. In its most simple and profound sense, Wood writes, "moral injury is a jagged disconnect from our understanding of who we are, and what we and others ought to do and ought not to do...Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong." [5]
One does not have to be in combat to suffer from moral injury. War is something that reaches far beyond the battlefields, something that leaches out into proximate geographies and relationships, seeping deep into the individual and societal unconscious. To be in war, Wood states, even in this broader sense, is to be exposed to moral injury.
By every measure in these times, we are all living in a state of moral injury.
The facilitators in the desert stressed to us that the entire crisis in the borderlands is human-made. Which means that those of us who are citizens are complicit and we capable of transforming it.
If it is encoded in the story of Hagar, and multiplied in the Exodus story, we are made to realize that people have been crossing dangerous deserts by the light of the moon seeking safety and freedom, hunted by the state and sustained by their faith, for as long as human beings have been alive. Being in the desert, for the first time I realized that perhaps the God of the desert was not meant to be some supernatural miracle worker. Perhaps The Holy One was a humanitarian aid worker, stashing food under shrubs and placing water in the desert.
We are called to see our potential; that who we are and the actions we take every day can be part of the miraculous. In the morning blessings, we say that The Holy One is Malbish Arumim--the One that clothes the naked, and Matir Asurim--the One that frees the captive. But in truth, that is not the work of some supernatural deity. That is the work of being human, ensuring everyone has access to safety, food, shelter, and potable drinking water.
Driving through the vast expanse of desert I simultaneously felt terrified and captivatingly alive. These prayers, this day, is about us aspiring to find the holiness in ourselves. It is about looking out at existence and God and life and realizing that it is awesome and intense and terrifying to be alive.
We are here to connect to our humanity, drown ourselves in awe of all of creation, and draw ourselves out of the morose.
Hayom Harat Olam--Today the world is pregnant with possibility!
What does it look like for you to recommit to the world?
How can you be the hands of The Holy One this year?
In the words of Holly Near:
I am willing and I am open, for to be hopeless would seem so strange
It dishonors those who came before us
So lift us up to the light of change!
Join us in song.
[1] Cantu, Francisco. The Line Becomes a River, p. 110.
[2] "Kindness" by Shihab-Nye, Naomi, from Words Under the Words.
[3] Cantu, Francisco. The Line Becomes a River, p. 241-2.
[4] Genesis 21:14-21.
[5] Cantu, Francisco. The Line Becomes a River, p. 150-1.