Don’t Say “This Is not Who We Are”

(A version of this previously ran in the March/April 2020 newsletter for Machar, The Washington Congregation for Secular Humanistic Judaism)

As many Macharniks know, before I became a rabbi I was a lawyer — and I probably count as one of those folks who call themselves “recovering lawyers” now. Before any of that, I was a Jewish educator in a lot of different contexts. I taught adult education classes more often than anything else, but taught supplemental school programs, too. (Machar’s JCS program is considered a “supplemental school.”)

I’ve returned to those roots a bit this past school year, after having been asked to teach the seventh grade class at Temple Isaiah in Fulton, Maryland. As at Machar, the seventh grade class at Temple Isaiah is the B Mitzvah class. Much of this class focuses on the Holocaust, from the beginnings of European antisemitism through to the after effects of the Holocaust itself. Though Temple Isaiah is a Reform synagogue, being a Humanistic rabbi is a positive point: I don’t try to explain the Holocaust as theologically justifiable, or frame Israel as some form of karmic compensation for the suffering of the Holocaust.

This meant that I was able to build a Holocaust curriculum from the ground up. One area that the latent lawyer in me wishes I had been able to delve into with the students — time was lacking, unfortunately — is the way Nazi Germany’s discriminatory policies were modeled on America’s legalized forms of racial discrimination.

The idea that American laws served as a model for Nazi Germany’s own discriminatory regime isn’t a new one, but it is one that hasn’t been taken particularly seriously among many scholars. This isn’t because no one has considered the possibility, but because scholars have been too insistent upon the need for direct connections — nearly identical legal language or direct emulation of American political structures — between American and Nazi policies. But reading the minutes of the meetings of the lawyers and judges who drafted the Nuremberg laws that rendered antisemitic discrimination into German law makes it clear that German lawyers were looking directly at Jim Crow laws, laws related to Native American tribal rights, laws related to the treatment of immigrants, and the historical treatment of Black and Native Americans as models when they developed the Nuremberg laws’ provisions banning marriage between Jews and non-Jews.

Perhaps ironically, it was in late 2016 — in fact, on Election Day — that James Q. Whitman was reviewing the galleys for his book, Hitler’s American Model (Princeton University Press 2017, paperback edition 2018), the first major work of legal scholarship that took German lawyers and judges at their word when they modeled Nazi laws on American ones.

Other than to give Prof. Whitman some well-deserved credit, why mention all this? Because the paperback edition of Whitman’s book opens with the observation that American democracy is in some respects nearly inseparable from its history of white supremacism, and that even early generations of Americans viewed democracy as functioning only because of white supremacism. No less important a figure in the history of American racism than John C. Calhoun claimed that racism and slavery ensured democracy for white Americans. Slavery, Calhoun wrote, is “the best guarantee to equality among whites.” Enslavement of non-white minorities, Calhoun argued, does “not even admit of inequalities, by which one white man could domineer over another.” (Calhoun, of course, became a leading advocate of nullification, the idea that states could simply ignore federal laws that state governments believed violated their political rights.)

Our democracy is tied tightly to its history of racism. It is not who we are or want to be as people, but it is who we have been as the American people. We cannot, no matter how deeply we wish it were so, claim that “this is not who we are” when our government acts consistently with the history of American racism. To disown that history is to deny reality — and our humanistic philosophy demands that we acknowledge reality and face its consequences.

This is, in other words, unavoidably who we are. We have diminished the hold of this piece of us in the past, and we can do that again. But even diminished, this part of us will likely never fully leave us. Dealing with this legacy — one that in the most terrible of twists wrought horror for the Jewish people in Europe while granting freedom to the Jewish people in America — will be our obligation no matter what comes of this year’s elections. And the terrible irony of Jim Crow’s grant of freedom in America and disaster in Europe means that this is a special responsibility for those of us connected to Jewish community.

As we fast approach the Passover season, which has traditionally been called z’man cheiruteinu, the season of our freedom, we must remember that our special responsibility to remedy the harms of American racism is part of what “never again” means — and, having recognized this, commit to action.

Remarks Against Executive Order 13888

(The following was delivered as an address on January 8, 2020, at an Interfaith Immigration Coalition vigil for refugees in front of the U.S. District Courthouse in Greenbelt, MD, on behalf of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.)

Good morning. I’m here today representing T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.

We know, all of us here, that Executive Order 13888 is unconstitutional, just another example of the Trump Administration’s cruelty and xenophobia.

As a rabbi, I know this not only because I know wrong and right. I feel this in my bones, in pain from a past in which my people’s lives were scarred over and again by the trauma of dislocation and rejection.

There I am, yakking in the cold. Y’all, it was windy, and dress shoes are not shoes for demonstrating in.

For more twenty-five-hundred years, the Jewish people have known what it means to be adrift. We have long known what it is to be ejected from one home and forced to find a new one — only to have our new home reject us simply for who we are. That experience as refugees inspired the creation nearly 140 years ago of HIAS, one of the parties to today’s lawsuit. It continues to inspire HIAS’s work today on five continents on behalf of refugees from around the world.

As Jews, we know it is our duty to welcome refugees, and to ensure their well being once they make our country their home. It is with us from ancient times. The book of Leviticus says it plainly: “when a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong them. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your own citizens” (Lev. 18:33 – 34). Yet this administration, hiding behind a mask of piety, shows its true face when it encourages state and local governments to discriminate against refugees.

The Biblical book of Lamentations reminds us — all of us — that we know what it is for our eyes to be spent with tears, to feel our hearts in tumult (Lam. 2:11). We know what happens when refugees are left to languish, and we know what we must do: welcome the stranger and ensure their security. We know what we must do: dry the tears and soothe the grief-worn hearts of those who become our neighbors.

Executive Order 13888 makes a mockery of these values. And so, on behalf of my rabbinic and cantorial colleagues at T’ruah, I call on the court to stop the Trump administration’s latest act of bigotry toward those who seek security — for no reason other than that welcoming the stranger is, simply, right.

May this administration come to understand all this, speedily and in our days.

Thank you.

(For more on the lawsuit that this demonstration supported, see the complaint filed in the case.)

The Unforgivable Government

(This was delivered at a HIAS event in DC on September 24, 2019. The event was co-sponsored by several congregations, including the one I serve, Machar.)

I’d like to ask you this question: What can we do when our government does something unforgivable?

We are here to support refugees in 5780 — and in all years. Many of us are here because our families were once refugees. Without the protections this country used to give to those fleeing persecution, without the chance to prosper the United States once gave the oppressed and downtrodden, many of us would not be here. I know I would likely not be here: my great-grandfather would probably have been dragged into the Czar’s army, consumed like so many other young men by war, revolution, or starvation.

Rousing the rabble at the DuPont Circle fountain

But today, our government rejects the very best of the American character, enacting upon others the very worst of its treatment of the oppressed, rejecting them and consigning them to lives of despair because of who they are.

And so I ask you to think about the question: What are we to do when our government, with little more than the stroke of a pen, commits acts of callousness, cruelty, and discrimination? When it does so in our names? What forgiveness can there be for the suffering of millions imposed in our names?

Jewish tradition tells us that when our people transgress, even if we ourselves have not committed the same offense, we are responsible. The Al Cheit that many will recite during the High Holidays says, over and over, al cheit she-chatanu — for the sin we have sinned — even if no one in the room has committed the listed sins. The Vidui — the confessional recited by many on Yom Kippur — has each member of the community take upon themselves the misdeeds of others. The Vidui reminds us v’hirshanu — we have caused others to do evil.

Turning red errors to white hopes

We may not be guilty, but we are all responsible.

We do not have the luxury of saying “not in my name” or even “not my president.” The High Holidays remind us: say what you must. Disapprove of what you will. It matters not, for our country’s cruelty is upon all our heads. Fixing what we can is upon all our shoulders.

What can we do when our government commits unforgivable acts of cruelty?

What can we do?

Millennia-old Jewish wisdom’s answer is simple: we own this. We may not be guilty, but we are responsible. We must treat our government’s transgressions as our own and do what we can to atone — even if there can be no forgiveness.

We must take action to bring love where there has been cruelty. We must shout, pitchu li shaarei tzedek — open up the gates of righteousness for me — to make it clear to all our representatives that we, as a country, must. Do. Better. For refugees, this means fighting to keep our country’s doors open. Win or lose that fight, opening the gates of righteousness means supporting refugees in our communities. It means showing true love of the stranger in our land so that they are strangers no longer, but are truly our own.

Whether we have transgressed, these transgressions are ours. And so, I ask that you resolve this with me, in the spirit of tochekha, of loving rebuke:

In 5780, may we act to correct our society and our government. May we speak out against the cruelty of 5779. May we act to open the doors to refugees. May we act to make refugees truly our own people. May we act to straighten our path and our nation’s path. And may we thus atone — even if we might not be forgiven — so that justice and kindness light our path forward and guide our future.

And let us say together, Amen.

Stop the Raids Protest Talk

(This was delivered at the rally prior to a July 5, 2019, march in Washington, D.C., organized by CASA, an organization advocating for immigrant rights . The march began at Benjamin Banneker Park and continued to the headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where we sat down and blocked the street in front of the building for about a half-hour before disbanding, promising to return in later weeks. I was there with Jews United for Justice, a D.C. organization that works in coalition with CASA and other organizations representing marginalized groups.)

I’m Rabbi Jeremy Kridel; I serve the Machar congregation here in D.C., and I’m a leader with Jews United for Justice.

Yesterday was the Fourth of July. Today, we remind our government — our government, all of ours — that its actions make yesterday a farce.

At the rally. It was hot. I’m on the left, CASA executive director Gustavo Torres is on the right. Photo by Marc Mauer.

George Washington, quoting the prophet Micah, wrote to American Jews, expressing his hope that all Americans would be able to sit under their vine and fig tree, and that no one would make them afraid (Mic. 4:4). Yet today, a day after the Fourth of July, we see our government doing just that — making our neighbors, our family members, and our friends afraid in their homes, at school, and at work.

And so we are here to demand that our government stop making people afraid. If the Declaration of Independence meant to ensure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, if our country is to be the beacon of freedom it claims to be, its first step is clear.

It must stop rounding up our friends, families, and neighbors from their homes, jobs, and schools.

ICE must stop.

As a Jew, and as a rabbi, I know that nothing could be more clear. My people’s history shows what comes when a government — any government — starts mass round-ups of those living in its borders. What starts with mass arrests leads to camps; and from there, darker things still. We’ve seen this before, and it’s a slippery slope.

There is still time to stop this slide. There is still time to be who we believe ourselves to be, to follow the words of the prophet Isaiah: to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty, and to loose the prisoner (Is. 61:1).

And it must begin here. We call upon our entire government to proclaim true liberty: to free the captive, to raise up the fallen, and to leave our friends, family, and neighbors unafraid, no matter where they are from.

May our leaders, in the words of Rabbi Louis Ginsberg, work faithfully for the public good, so that peace, tranquility, happiness and freedom will never depart from our land.

And may it start here: we call upon our government to live up to the principles it claims it is protecting.

Stop the roundups. Stop ICE.

Remarks at Immigration Solidarity Rally, June 23 2019

(The following was delivered at an Immigration solidarity rally hosted at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, MD, on June 23, 2019, and was organized in part by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D – MD 8th), a member of Maryland’s delegation to the U.S. Congress. Full video of the event is available here. It’s worth a watch just to hear the DC Labor Choir’s performance!)

As a Jew, I recognize that if today’s immigration system had been in place, I would not be standing here today: my great-grandparents would likely never have left the Russian Empire or Poland.

Speaking at the rally. Left to right: Rep. Jamie Raskin, Rev. Abhi Janimanchi, me. Behind me is Rev. Katie Romano Griffin. Photo from Cedar Lane UU’s Facebook page.

As a rabbi, I remember the statement of my predecessors nearly 1500 years ago in the Talmud: “All Israel is bound up with one another” (b. Shevuot 39a). Even more true is that we all are bound up with one another.

As a Humanist, I ask that we look to the power we all have, and all in our country share: the power of conscience.

We have come together as people who believe that the dark in our country can and must change. We believe in our responsibility to care for all of our neighbors. We believe in the possibility of a just society: one built upon equity, not pure legalism; a society built on love.

As people of conscience: may we be mindful that our fates are bound up with those of our neighbors, whatever their place of origin. May we find inspiration and common cause. May we build power to work together for justice — true justice, based on equity and the fundamental worth of each person — for our immigrant neighbors, for our refugee neighbors, for our asylum-seeking neighbors, and for all those to whom we are bound in common humanity, wherever they may be — and especially for those tramped upon by the power of our federal government’s executive branch. May we go forth and take action to protect our neighbors from cruelty, and ensure that this episode in American life is never repeated.

We come together in dark times. But in the words of Leonard Cohen, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” In this dark time, let us be the crack, so that we can let the light in.

May it be so.

Thank you.

Say It: They Are Concentration Camps

The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York has published an open letter to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, taking her to task for referring to the detention facilities the Trump administration is using to hold undocumented persons as concentration camps. The JCRC’s letter claims that “concentration camps” and “never again” are terms connected with and that should only be used with reference to Nazi crimes, and using it with reference to asylum seekers and others “diminishes the evil intent of the Nazis” to eradicate all Jews.

Here’s their tweet, with a scan of the letter attached to it.

We urge @AOC to refrain from using terminology evocative of the Holocaust tonvoice concerns about contemporary political issues, as per our letter below. pic.twitter.com/276hH8jRWn

— JCRC of New York (@JCRCNY) June 18, 2019

The JCRC of New York is, simply put, wrong.

Concentration camps predated the Nazis. The British used them in South Africa during what is sometimes called the Anglo-Boer War or simply the Boer War. Concentration camps are simply that: camps in which persons are segregated from the general population of an area and kept concentrated in a single place, usually for ethnic, racial, or political reasons.

DHS and (soon) Defense Department detention facilities satisfy that definition.

As a Jew, I refuse to limit the application of “never again” to only genocide. Mass displacement and mass political detention of a specific ethnic group, or of a number of people, carried out for political reasons are enough reason to apply the label.

A crime against humanity is enough.

Nothing else is credible in the presence of burning children, to follow Yitz Greenberg’s dictum.

The NY JCRC is wrong. You can tell your friends that this rabbi said so.

Step Forward

Rev. David Breeden, a Unitarian Universalist minister and Humanist, recently wrote an article on Medium that included the following explanation of Humanism:

As a set of ethical principles, Humanism’s core value is that people matter more than ideas. Humanists see people as of central concern not because of our specialness as a species but because of our capacity to both heal and destroy ourselves, the planet, and all living things. Devotion to nature and life is a core value.

Since Humanists do not speculate concerning an afterlife, we focus on growing beyond systems of oppression here and now. These systems include race, gender, nation, location, class, patriarchy, and hierarchy. In other words, any boundaries that damage the human heart and mind or prevent the full expression of each individual to be fully human.

Humanist commitments are always both individual and communal because human beings can’t be fully human in isolation.

I’ve been dwelling on these three paragraphs as my congregation enters b’nei mitzvah season (we do group ceremonies that tend to be concentrated toward the end of the school year). Some of what has made it stick is that it’s just well expressed, and catches some of what I want to make sure my congregation conveys to our students.

But the greater part of its stickiness for me is connected to the daily reminders that our current political and social climate is simply an affront to human dignity, which is the bedrock of Humanism. The revelation of the U.S. government’s policies of separating, upon apprehension, undocumented immigrant parents from their children is the latest example, and is perhaps the most individually grotesque and dehumanizing of the Trump administration’s policies.

It is unquestionably cruel to knowingly adopt legislative measures that have the obvious consequence of destroying individuals’ ability to obtain health care. But in some ways, it’s exactly the sort of thing governments do all the time: it’s anonymized, almost automatic distribution or redistribution of money. It’s heartless, and it’s cruel, and it’s bad policy and bad governance from both a financial and a human perspective.

But destroying the private insurance market is orders of magnitude different from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents stripping parents of their children and planning to place those children in detention areas on military bases. This isn’t detached enactment of changes to federal taxation and expenditure provisions; this is requiring that humans tear other humans from one another.

There’s no excuse for this. Even if you (erroneously) believe that the U.S. economy cannot sustain additional immigrants, and even if you (erroneously) believe that immigrants take jobs from other Americans, we can perhaps discuss legitimate policy questions about how much immigration is appropriate. But if you believe that tearing children from their mothers and potentially warehousing them on military bases is in any way appropriate policy simply because of undocumented immigration status, or is in any way not needless trauma upon those victimized and even upon the rank-and-file ICE and CBP agents who are tasked with engaging in this behavior, we have nothing to talk about.

Tearing children from their parents because their parents are undocumented immigrants is oppression. It damages the heart and mind of each person wrapped up in the system – victim and perpetrator alike. It damages the social structure as well as individuals.

If you claim to be a Humanist, you have an obligation to speak up and to try to find ways to help.

If you are Jewish, you likewise have an obligation to speak up and to help. Our obligation as Jews is even greater, because our history is one of wandering and of children being torn from their parents. Ours is a tradition that had this pain forced upon it time and again for the better part of two millennia. If you are willing to claim that your father was a wandering Aramean – if you are going to declare that your forebears were slaves in Egypt or anywhere else – you are doubly obliged to step forward and to say “No.”

So, what can you do?

• At the very least, you can sign this ACLU online petition
• You can contact your Congressperson, your Senator, and executive branch agencies and demand this practice end
• You can donate to organizations like the ACLU and its allies, who are pursuing litigation to stop the practice
• You can donate to organizations like the American Immigration Council and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which are stepping into the breach and providing attorneys to represent detained immigrants – because there’s no right to appointed counsel in most immigration proceedings

Step up and take action. Human lives and human dignity hang in the balance.