Paul Bass Photo
Rabbi Herb Brockman.
“Faith Matters” is a column that features pieces written by local religious figures.
(Opinion) It was on a cold morning in Sept 2015 that Alan Kurdi’s body washed ashore on a beach in Turkey. Along with his parents and older brother, they were fleeing the violence in their native Syria. Their rubber raft was bound for a “safe harbor” on a Greek island. The boat capsized. Alan and his brother and mother drowned.
The image of a 2‑year-old lying in the sand was captured by a Turkish photographer and was sent around the world. People opened their hearts when they saw the suffering in that image. All these years it never left me.
For Jews, our history is replete with moments when we had to pack up and leave our homes, and try to find refuge somewhere else. So common was the experience over the millenia that ironically a flower was named after that reality, “the wandering Jew.”
On Passover, the holiday we complete celebrating this weekend, we are to recall and remember that experience. But, we are taught, it is not enough to remember, we are also to act. Thirty-six times in the bible, we are commanded, “You are to welcome the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt!”
Upon seeing Alan’s lifeless body, much of the world seemed to open their hearts to refugees. There was an outpouring of sympathy. But soon the welcome mats were pulled in. The sympathy gave way to fear. Here in the U.S. and elsewhere, the sympathy turned to fear stoked by political advantage. Though John F Kennedy had written in 1958, “We are a nation of immigrants,” fear is a powerful force.
The United Nations, in an attempt to stir the hearts around the world, produced a video. They called it “Faith Over Fear.” They did so because they found that it was the faith communities all over the world that did not cede the ideals that they were called to provide safety to refugees. They focused on a German Protestant church that had sponsored a Syrian family, the Papal visit to Lesbos visiting refugees there and ending up “adopting” a family and bringing them back to the Vatican, and a synagogue, along with a mosque in Connecticut, working with refugees. Welcoming the stranger, it seems, was a unifying ideal.
Hospice/hospital was a term for Christian places of refuge for wandering people — its root was “hospitality.” In Islam, within the Albanian Muslim community is besa, a term meaning to take strangers into your home and protect them. I know this term for it is only in Albania, of all Eastern European countries, where there were more Jews after WWII than before. And in Jewish tradition is the image of Abraham “sitting by his tent in the heat of the day” and welcoming those who passed by.
So it was recently when 27 religious denominations and interfaith organizations decided that we must continue that tradition here. We must, out of our convictions, help to support the right to welcome those who seek this safe harbor. To the extent that the law allows, we will do all in our power to act on the religious imperative as is guaranteed our right under the First Amendment to the Constitution and the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. We went to court to defend that right. And we will support communities that choose to declare city/town/state ordinances that declare themselves to be welcoming places according to law.
Yes we are a diverse community yet grounded in that pledge all citizens take, “…one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Previous“Faith Matters” columns:
• Faith (Still) Matters
• Faith Matters: Gaza & Ramadan
• Faith Matters: On Passover & Redemption
• Faith Matters: Freedom Struggles & Holy Week