can you pour out your love
upon the ones you do not know,
the ones who mutter their strange
and fearful prayers, who
refuse to call upon god
by your comfortable, familiar names?

can you tear open your robe and
let your compassion bleed out,
swaddling and comforting
those you have been taught to fear
with an indignation that burns
like a devouring fire?

are you ready to mourn
the dead of another family
whose blood is your blood,
the one who looks like a stranger
but is, in truth,
your own flesh and kin?

so throw open the doors,
and if the holy temple is to be defiled
let it be defiled
with unconditional love and grace,
profaned with the unbearably gorgeous
symphony of kaddishes
known and unknown.

In the Book of Genesis, we read about Abraham and Sarah’s journey to the Promised Land. Shortly after they arrive, they encounter famine and head to Egypt in search of food. Foreigners without family or clan to protect them, they are afraid. Abraham asks Sarah to pretend to be his sister in the hope that this will help them avoid trouble – an act of deceit that potentially offered them some protection from harm in the context of their times.

The gamble works out badly. Pharaoh’s courtiers notice Sarah’s beauty, and the king summons her to his harem. Only divine intervention lets Sarah escape without having to sleep with the king.

It’s a pitiable story. Abraham and Sarah lie and humiliate themselves to try to survive in a foreign nation they have not received permission to enter. It’s a story of strangers in a strange land, without protection, without connections and without a right to go about their business unmolested. It is an illegal immigrant’s story.

It’s also a story that Jews have known well many times over in many lands. Jews desperately did whatever necessary to seek a safe haven in different countries after the Spanish Expulsion of 1492. During the great Jewish immigration waves to the U.S., in order to escape poverty and anti-Semitism, some Jews faked their documents or “married” American citizens to gain entry to the country. During the Nazi era, most European Jews couldn’t legally immigrate to other countries. Some weighed their options and chose to try to escape Hitler by making their way to British-run Palestine – but even in attempting to immigrate to their ancient homeland, they had to enter Palestine as illegal immigrants. They used many forms of disguise and deceit to get there.

Abraham and Sarah’s deception is pathetic. As uninvited immigrants, these unwanted Hebrews have no social or governmental structure to protect them – no way to seek recourse against anyone harming them or taking advantage of them financially or, as the sister/bride deception points to, sexually. Years pass, they return to Canaan, and still their marginal status as immigrants continues. They face suspicion from the native citizens and do their best to try to gain a foothold in their adopted country. When Sarah dies, despite the many years Abraham has lived and worked in Canaan, he still has not so much as even a claim to a grave site where he can bury her. He ends up having to go to the country’s citizens, hat in hand, and ask if he can purchase a small cave for her grave. He ends up overpaying for it.

Abraham and Sarah came to Canaan without permission, but they brought blessings to the people of the region. Mexican and Central American farmworkers, here legally or not, bring Americans the largely unappreciated luxury of cheap and abundant produce, and poverty drives most of them across our borders.

As a rabbi, I look to Jewish history and to the Hebrew Bible for insight into the ethical questions about immigrants, labor, and justice. In the Jewish community, we know from our experience that when people are desperate and seeking a better life, and when they are in precarious circumstances, sometimes they lie or break the law in order to get by. It’s humiliating. It’s not what people would prefer to do. We can judge them for it, or we can try to empathize and factor in their circumstances and difficult choices as we try to find better national policy.

Immigration laws are important, and our country is based on the rule of law. Jewish tradition also sees law as sacred and essential to a just society. But alongside law, Judaism also places sacred emphasis on story. The law must listen to the specifics of the stories being brought before it. From a Jewish perspective, good law is not robotic. It responds to people and it recognizes human vulnerability. It resists humiliating people who are swept along by massive forces that put them in the position of needing to take unappealing and dangerous risks to try to help themselves and their families survive. As Jews, we’ve played the part of Abraham and Sarah many times. We know this story.

Leviticus 19:33–34 reads, “And if a stranger dwells with you in your land, you shall do him or her no wrong. The stranger that dwells with you shall be to you as the home-born among you, and you shall love him or her as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Eternal, your God.”

America can do better than demonizing the Abrahams and Sarahs in our midst. Let us remember the heart of the stranger, for we have been strangers in many lands, in many times.

An earlier version of this essay first appeared on Oregonlive.com.

This ritual invokes the blast of the shofar to articulate the plight of refugees. It was created for use at High Holidays in response to the presidential travel ban.

The blasts of the shofar are a wordless prayer punctuated by moments of silence. The stories of courage, hope, and determination of refugees resettling in our communities are punctuated by the silent yearnings of those who are kept out by the presidential travel ban.

Tekiah is the wail of a single mom of three fleeing from the Democratic Republic of Congo who is learning to navigate life in a small midwestern town.

[blow Tekiah]

Silence is the heartbreak of a Syrian-born resident of the U.S. who cannot visit her mom in Egypt.

[pause for silence]

Shevarim is the determined steps of the young Iraqi father who begins working two jobs far beneath his skill level so he can buy a car for his family.

[blow Shevarim]

Silence is journey that is halted because of the new order that only refugees with bona fide relationships will be allowed entry. 

[pause for silence]

T’ruah is the broken sounds of English of two young Syrian girls, born in Jordanian refugee camps and now in public school in the United States.

[blow T’ruah]

Silence is the empty arrivals screen on the resettlement caseworker’s computer.

[pause for silence]

Tekiah gedolah is the blast that holds on when there seems to be no energy left. It calls us to not allow xenophobia, Islamophobia, and nativism to be the new normal.

[blow Tekiah Gedolah]

I am a public defender. I have a client who thanks me, constantly. He thanks me for taking his calls, for answering his letters, for passing on bad news. On some days, his enthusiasm and gratitude buoy me. I hope he believes that I am fighting for him as well as any lawyer could. I hope he knows I hear him. On other days, I rail against my clients’ low expectations. Some of our clients do not expect competent lawyers, do not expect to be heard. They do not expect their lives to matter. More than anything, I cannot accept this. And so I am obligated to show that I do, deeply, believe Black Lives Matter.

The Torah teaches us, over and over, that we shall not wrong a stranger, because we were strangers in Egypt. We are taught from the outset that God brought us forth from Egypt, from bondage. This identification of our own story of redemption with the oppression of strangers among us speaks directly to my work. I try to release people from bondage. It doesn’t even require a metaphor.

Even though freedom from bondage frames our story, the Torah reveals little about prisoners until we reach Lamentations. We read there that imprisonment is lonely and endless, miserable, dark, numbing, humiliating, and like being dead. I spend a lot of time talking to prisoners. The words of Lamentations are as apt today as they were when they were written. Most chilling of all, the prisoner laments: “And when I cry out and plead, God shuts out my prayer” (Lam. 3:8). 

The United States imprisons far more people per capita than any other country in the world. Right now we hold over 2.25 million people in our prisons and jails. We disproportionately incarcerate people of color. One in three African-American men, and one in six Latino men, will be incarcerated at some point in his lifetime. White women like me face a far different likelihood of incarceration: one in one hundred and eleven. 

One of the privileges of my work is the opportunity to connect with my clients, who are in many ways strangers, those with vastly different experiences of living in our country. I defend their liberty and insist upon their dignity, in a criminal justice system that is relentlessly dehumanizing.

When I began practicing law, I imagined my career would contribute toward dismantling systemic injustices facing racial minorities and the poor. Ten years later, I am not convinced we are dismantling anything.  Instead, I see my work in microcosm: in representing my clients and working with their families, I strive to reach across the boundaries of difference and locate our shared humanity. That radical act of extending compassion to a stranger may be the closest my work gets to social change.

The myth of legal training, even for lawyers who wish to serve the poor, is that we practice law to “help” people. For me, the practice of poverty law is a two-way street. My clients open my eyes; they transform me. I learn about resilience and love as much as I learn about trauma and violence.

As I talk with my clients’ mothers, wives, and partners, and as I hear about their children, I understand how our justice system fractures families, creating widows and orphans: 2.7 million children in our country have an incarcerated parent. That is one in 28 children. But again, people of color are disproportionately affected. One in nine African-American children is an orphan of our criminal justice system. One in nine. 

Have you ever watched young children waiting in a prison lobby to visit a parent? On one hand, it is heartening. At least this family is fighting the geography of incarceration: they have somehow reached this prison, no matter how remote, and they are maintaining connection. It is also a source of despair. I see children for whom this routine is obviously unremarkable. Children who have learned to silently, motionlessly wait. Children who see their caretakers, almost always women, endure the humiliation of the guards’ scrutiny. Prison regulations about women’s clothing are talmudic in their inscrutability and can be applied to prohibit almost anything. My own clothing has occasionally been questioned, although as a lawyer I am generally accorded an exception. But there are no exceptions for the underwire bra rule. Bras that set off the metal detector usually must be dismembered, because one cannot enter without a bra (that’s another rule). The guards send visitors out, not always kindly, to remove metal from their bras. Children watch all of this. Children see the state exert control over the body of their incarcerated parent, and over the bodies of their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, too.

Just over three years ago, I was in a Texas prison, in the death row visiting room, to see a client. It was an execution day; another prisoner, not my client, was going to be killed that evening. That prisoner was having a family visit, a farewell visit, on the other side of the same visiting room.

I was very pregnant. After speaking with my client for a couple of hours, I excused myself to use the bathroom. I waited outside the visiting room bathroom. Waited. And waited some more. The delay exasperated me, immersed as I was in the urgency and self-righteousness of late pregnancy.

When the door finally opened a girl emerged. A teenager, bent over double. I realized she was the condemned prisoner’s child, and she had been throwing up. A second too late, I reached out for her shoulder, to comfort her; but she was gone.

What could I do but go back to my client and continue our visit, professional, competent. When we finished, I left; it is always surprising to exit a prison so easily. Guards, unnervingly calm, opened doors for me. I got into my steaming car and called my wife, Abby. I call her from a lot of prison parking lots. But this time, as soon as I heard her voice my veneer of competency dissolved into sobs. She was alarmed: is it the pregnancy? No, it is fine, kicking. It’s just that the child was heaving, and that child will never forget this. It’s just that maybe it was not a good idea to come on an execution day. It’s just that we are so cruel.

When I say that representing my clients opens my eyes, this is what I mean. I leave every prison visit more aware of my experience as a free person choosing to be there; a white, educated, professional; a person who does not have to cultivate the patience of the incarcerated; a wife and mother unlikely to be widowed or see her children orphaned by the criminal courts, and extremely unlikely to see her children endure a final farewell in a prison visiting room. Understanding this allows me to understand more about those who are not me.

In Lamentations, as we read of the prisoner whose face was ground into the gravel, and the streets defiled with blood, we learn that Jerusalem was complicit in her downfall: our sins brought the destruction upon us. The notion that God would destroy a nation for lack of righteousness seems so biblical and remote. But far too often we watch, on video, blood spill in our streets. Last year we saw a human being’s head, Alton Sterling’s head, ground into the gravel as shots rang out, and we watched him bleed. You don’t have to smell a child’s fear on the day of her father’s execution to know that we are now, as in ancient times, living in deep transgression of our values. Last spring, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, dissenting in a case about police stops, “No one can breathe in this atmosphere.”1 She was right. And our hearts are sick.

The trauma around us may be overwhelming. But every day when we wake up, we are given the opportunity to see ourselves, and our contributions, anew. We all must learn to live anew. Often we believe that what we bring to our work is the ability to help our clients or students or patients, to help our colleagues, to use our special skills to do something. We forget, or we do not have our eyes and ears open to see and hear, that our work can transform us. And when we hope to heal our fractured world that might be the place we have to start.  

What can we bring about by hearing? There is a well-known rabbinic dialogue questioning which is greater, action or study. The rabbis concluded that study is greater, because it leads to action.2 This is probably not a surprising answer. And yet, it’s not the only answer. When Moses read us the Torah, we responded: “we shall do and we shall hear” [na’aseh v’nishma] (Exod. 24:7). The rabbis also teach that our entry into the covenant with those words reflects a promise first to act, observing the laws of Torah, and only afterward to study and understand the law.3 This is seen as an extraordinary declaration of faith. It is also practical; imagine if we could not act, perform a mitzvah, until we understood the entire Torah? But even so this “act first” teaching seems inconsistent with the initial lesson that study leads to action. I can only conclude that we are not to see “doing and hearing,” or “action and study,” as binary; they are intertwined. At its core we can understand our obligation to do, and to hear, as a promise to sanctify ourselves by emulating God—by letting our actions be affected when we hear the cries of strangers, of those who suffer.

May 15, 2016, marked the 100th anniversary of a notorious lynching in Waco, Texas, the lynching of Jesse Washington. If you ever studied twentieth-century American history, you probably saw a photograph of it; you would not forget. Ten thousand spectators gathered to watch 17-year-old Jesse Washington being brutally killed, burned, and dismembered by the lynch mob. To mark the anniversary, an African-American journalist named Jesse Washington, knowing he shared a name with the victim of this tragedy, traveled to Waco. He wrote a searing essay about this visit.4 Among white residents, including judges now presiding at the courthouse where the lynching began, he encountered few people who knew the history of the lynching, or who cared to talk about it. Among African-American residents, he found that people immediately recognized the significance of his name, and knew about the lynching in great detail.

Some of us can choose whether to hear and listen to the story of Jesse Washington’s lynching; others cannot. Some of the black residents interviewed for the article were old enough to have been told the story of the lynching in hushed tones: a cautionary tale about the threat of violence in their town, violence by their neighbors. But some of us have to put ourselves in positions where we will hear such stories. Only when we can hear and understand the significance of Jesse Washington’s lynching can we hope to grapple with the weight of our history.

To that end, I invited into this essay some voices other than my own. After all, who am I to tell you what it is like to be in prison? I asked a few of my clients what they would want to share about being incarcerated. In the letters I received, my clients told me things they had not told me before. One wrote that he was “elated” I had asked for his story. Clearly, I am not asking enough to hear these stories.

The elated client wrote a lot about his family. In particular he wanted to praise his mother:

I grew up in North Philadelphia. My mother raised three children, two daughters and one son, not to mention the fact that she also cared for her siblings as well. My mother did good with us and I make certain that I tell her that all of the time. […] I want to make her proud of me despite all the obstacles that I have come up against due to choices I have made.

This struck me, because I could always use a reminder to praise my own mother, who is wonderful. And it struck me because, of all the ways I have attempted to understand imprisonment, I had never thought about how a prisoner might want to make his mother proud.  

Another client wrote about something I have observed, too, but I would not have been able to describe from his perspective. He wrote:

I will say this, it’s interesting how much men read in jail. It might not all be high literature but it’s reading. Most of these men didn’t read in school or even like school. That shows me that in the right conditions the will to learn is there.

Just days after my client wrote that letter, President Obama described how we have failed communities where “it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.”5 Together, President Obama and my client teach us that there is an entire community of African-American and Latino men for whom the first environment we provide that is conducive to reading is a prison. 

Another client’s letter reflected on how he maintains his humanity after childhood trauma and three decades of solitary confinement:

My childhood tragedy has not affected my ability to love others generously and that possibly is the real miracle. That ability can only be a blessing from God… . Loving others is my way of crying. Most of all, I want you to know I am human.

Maybe the stranger you encounter is not a prisoner. Many others also want us to know that they are human. Maybe your stranger is mentally ill, disabled, an immigrant, a person within the Jewish community who is not Jewish, or a person who is differently Jewish. We do not lack for strangers, or for life stories that remain unheard due to differences between us. You will hear things that I do not hear; those stories too will enrich our humanity.

It is somewhat intangible, maybe, to pursue hearing and listening. At home, at work, in community, we want to do. I believe in doing. I represent people with pressing needs. But it is precisely this call to hear, the imperative we recite twice each day, that we hope can awaken us to engagement. It was when God heard cries—the cries of Ishmael, the cries of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt—that hearing brought about redemption. Our challenge is to put ourselves in positions where we will be able to hear. Sometimes, like me, we will need to ask to hear these stories.

When I propose that we must listen and make ourselves able to hear the cries of those suffering among us, that is not the end of our responsibility. We cannot begin to heal these wounds by listening alone. Our individual intentions, no matter how righteous, cannot correct structural inequalities. Instead, may we hear the obligation to realize those rights.6 May we be engaged to pursue political and social change. May we build a society where no one has to cry out, “I want you to know I am human.”

This essay is adapted from a talk, “Listening to the Lament, Finding our Dissent,” given at Philadelphia’s Germantown Jewish Centre in August 2016, on erev Tisha B’Av. 

• 1. Utah v. Strieff, 136 S. Ct. 2056, 2071 (2016) (Sotomayor., J., dissenting).
• 2. BT Kiddushin 40b
• 3. See, e.g., BT Shabbat 88a.
• 4. Jesse Washington, The Waco Horror, published by ESPN, available at https://theundefeated.com/features/the-waco-horror/
• 5. Remarks by the President at Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers, July 12, 2016, available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/07/12/remarks-president-memorial-service-fallen-dallas-police-officers
• 6. Robert M. Cover wrote about the Jewish obligation “to realize those rights” in Obligation: A Jewish Jurisprudence of the Social Order, 5 J. L. & Religion 65, 74 (1987).

(from God Loves the Stranger)

Today is a day of repentance, renewal, and solidarity.

Repentance in Hebrew is T’shuvah, which means turning and returning—making an about-face.

It is a most treasured human gift.

One who turns around and heads in the right direction Is respected and appreciated.

Indeed, when we say that we are lost, it is often the beginning of the journey home.

The Source of Life, the Divine Beloved, calls us to return, calls us to T’shuvah, again and again.

V’Shavta Ad Adonai Elohecha: “And you shall return to Godliness, to Goodness” it says in the Book of Deuteronomy.

“Return,” the tradition says, “the moment before you die.”

“But when will I die?” we ask.

“No one knows. So return today!”

Return from where?

Return from arrogance, fear and delusion,

Return from a false view that to say we are wrong means we are weak and foolish instead of strong and wise and loving,

From a false hope that our children and their children will not harvest the consequences of our greed.

Turn toward what?

Turn us toward remembering

Turn us toward remembering what we learn in the Book of Leviticus—when God tells us, Ki Lee Haaretz, ki Gerim V’Toshavim Atem Emadi—The land is mine—you are sojourners and resident settlers with me. Our ownership and our residency are conditional and impermanent.

Turn us toward remembering that all beings on this planet, all beings, breathe the same air, are burned by the same sun, eat from the same soil and drink from the same cup.

Turn us toward remembering that all beings on this planet, all beings, are loved by the same endless, everlasting and infinite Love.

Turn us toward remembering that there is only one body to wound, and it is ours.

Hasheveinu Adonai Elecha V’Nashuva

Chadesh Yamaynu Kekedem

Turn us to you, Adonai, and we will return.

Renew every single one of our days.

May the ancient wisdom guide us into a new world of caring and hope.

This alternative Amidah was used during mincha prayers by members of the Reconstructionist Rabbinic Association outside of an Immigration Processing Center in order to call attention to the plight of immigrants and underscore the importance of the Jewish obligation to welcome the stranger. It is meant to be done as a call and response.

Avot

God of our ancestors. God of immigrants. God of refugees. We are border crossers.
We tie our fate with You who cannot be contained by customs offices. You who requires no passport

Gevurot

You are the power that nurtures, You support the fallen, You free the captive, You give faith to those who sleep in the dust.

Kedusha

We call out to each other, We turn in every direction, Your holy image is the face of every human

Binah

Help us to act with understanding

Teshuva

Return us again and again to your service

Selicha

Forgive us for retreating to our own comfort, Forgive us for not taking responsibility, Forgive us for letting little fears Stop us from helping with compassion.

Ge’ulah

Release us from captivity, Release us from persecution, Release us from misfortune, Help us to heal when rational arguments are insufficient.

Refuah

Heal the suffering that causes people to flee their homes.

Birkat Hashanim

All Bountiful one let every person live with abundance.

Kibutz Galuyot

Blast the great shofar for freedom
Gather in all those in exile!

Din

Restore justice with love and compassion.

Birkat Haminim

Let all wickedness be lost.

Tzadikim

Protect all the righteous people
fleeing war and
fleeing poverty.
Be with those seeking safety
and seeking security.

Binyan Yerushalayim

Build everlasting peace in Jerusalem.

Yeshu’ah

Plant your help in every land.

Kabbalat Tefillah

Hear our voice!
Hear the voice of refugees
Hear the voice of immigrants
Help us hear your voice

Avodah

Take pleasure YHVH in our work.
Lovingly accept our prayer.

Hoda’ah

Modim anachnu lach
We give thanks to you

Birkat Shalom

Sing Oseh Shalom