I wonder if Abraham would get our sympathy if he were alive today.
Or perhaps, more technically, I wonder if, were Abraham to arrive in this country in the way in which he arrives in Egypt
at the beginning of this week’s reading, he would be processed in such a way
as to allow him leave to remain on these shores.
Actually, I don’t wonder. It’s abundantly
clear that Abraham is an economic migrant. He wouldn’t have a chance. The Biblical
verse reads
There was a famine in the land and Avram when
down towards Egypt to dwell there, for the famine in the land was severe.
That’s not a well-founded fear of
persecution. He’s just hungry. Desperately hungry. By the standards of today’s
world, that’s not good enough. But it deserves, surely, our empathy.
The great Biblical commentator, Rashi brings
a teaching that dates to the first two centuries of the common era; “ra’av
bair, pazer raglecha – a famine in the city, makes your feet go wandering.”
Famines do that to a person.
No food, no possibility of sustenance.
Pazer raglecha – off we
go in search of pastures greener.
It’s hard-wired into the human condition
since I suspect, before there was such a creature as homo sapiens.
Several chapters later, in the Book of
Genesis, Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, also flees in fear.
His mother tells him,
Esav achicha mitchatein lecha,
lehargecha
Esau, your brother is plotting to kill you.
And off goes Jacob. He flees to Padan Aram.
Who wouldn’t?
I wonder if Jacob would be categorised as an
asylum seeker in this country if he turned up today pleading a real and
immediate threat of his life being ended.
Actually, I don’t wonder – I know he wouldn’t
have a chance.
For the UN Refugee Convention of 1951, even a
well-founded fear of persecution only counts if it’s for reasons of, “race,
religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social
group.”
And Jacob’s just in a filial spat.
I could keep going, from Jacob’s children who
fled famine in Canaan to seek food in Egypt to … and yes somewhere in all of
this are those images that so haunt me as a Jew, of desperate refugees from
Nazi Germany.
I don’t know how many of us know the story of
the Struma, a 78-year-old yacht that was commandeered by the Betar youth
movement in Nazi-occupied Romania to take Jews from the grasp of the Nazis to
Palestine,
Here's part of the tale of the Struma drawn
from the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust
Apart from the crew and 60 Betar youth, there
were over 700 passengers who had paid large fees to board the ship. Passengers
were told they would be sailing on a renovated boat with a short stop in
Istanbul to collect their Palestinian immigration visas. Each refugee was
allowed to take 20 kilograms (44 lb) of luggage. Romanian customs officers
took many of the refugees' valuables and other possessions, along with food
that they had brought with them. The
passengers were not permitted to see the vessel before the day of the voyage.
They found that she was a wreck with only two
lifeboats. She sailed on 12th December 1941, and on the day of her sailing, her engine failed so a tug towed her
out of the port of Constanţa. The waters off Constanţa were mined, so a Romanian vessel escorted her clear of the minefield. She
then drifted overnight while her crew tried vainly to start
her engine. She transmitted distress signals and
on 13 December the Romanian tug returned. The tug's crew said they would not
repair Struma's engine unless they were paid.[17] The
refugees had no money after buying their tickets and leaving Romania, so they
gave all their wedding rings to the tugboat men, who then repaired the engine.[17] Struma then
got underway but by 15 December her engine had failed again so she was towed
into the port of Istanbul in
Turkey.
All sounds desperately contemporary, doesn’t
it?
For two and a half months the Sturma drifted
around the Eastern Mediterranean while many turned to the British, holders, of
course, of the League of Nation Mandate over Palestine to step up and step in.
And no one did anything. And then on the 23rd of February 1942 the Struma was
torpedoed by a Russian submarine and sunk. Of the 792 people aboard, all but
one died. The only survivor, David Stoliar, was left clinging to a piece of
bobbing wreckage.
Why didn’t the British step in to help? Maybe
it had something to do with how the tale of refugees back then was being
reported in this country.
The Daily Mail, back in 1938 wrote
“’The way stateless Jews from Germany are
pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage . . ."
Thanks.
The point is this. Wandering is the normal
condition. Fleeing persecution is the normal human condition. It’s not “normal”
that everyone stays put, come what may. It’s not realistic. Suggesting that
human beings should stay put come what may is not how we, as human beings,
merit being called humane.
I’m so proud of the diverse national collection
of members in this extraordinary community. There are so many of us drawn to
this extraordinary city in this extraordinary country from so many countries of
the world – and Ezra, we celebrate particularly, with you – the son of a native-born Canadian and a native-born American. I don’t know how many generations
back it takes until we are all wanderers and refugees – from one thing or
another. For me, it takes three generations until my ancestors are from
somewhere else. How about for you or any of us.
And look what we have been capable of, as
Jews in the country, and not even just as Jews. Our Prime Minister is but two
generations removed from wandering, even, God help her, our Home Secretary.
Even putting aside, the question of the
contributions of outsiders, Jewish and otherwise, in the societies in which
they find themselves, it’s simply untrue to suggest that there is somehow a
natural state of affairs in which there are only us – the people who deserve to
be here, and them – the people who don’t.
Mary Douglas, the anthropologist and Biblical
scholar, is best known as the author of the book Purity and Danger. It’s about
the Biblical system of sacrifices and ritual purity. “Dirt,” says Douglas, “is
matter out of place.” “Dirt is not an independent, objective attribute of
something, but a “residual category [of things] rejected from our normal scheme
of classifications”
She illustrates these points with mundane
examples: shoes, for instance, are not dirty in themselves, “but it is dirty to
place them on the dining table”. Similarly, food is not necessarily dirty, “but
it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom”
I think that’s what we’ve done to human
beings. Not just in this country, but all across the developed world.
We’ve defined human beings as dirt when they
are more properly defended as human beings out of place. And that is a terrible
failure of our ability to recognise humanity in all humans.
I know it is possible, and even for some
attractive to respond at this point – but what about the criminals, the
failures to behave in some way we might consider suitably British in all this.
But again, the Bible should strip from us the
ability to hide, cosily, behind such a point.
After all Abraham – the first monotheist, arrives
at the border and offers his wife, Sarai to the border guards knowing she’s
going to be offered as a sexual companion for Pharoah. That’s not a radical
re-interpretation of the Bible – that’s exactly what it says. And what would we
call that behaviour in today’s terminology – human trafficker / pimp? It’s
clearly morally inappropriate behaviour, but, again, my questions are where do
we place sympathy? How do we related to humans caught up and moving even in
ways that are criminal where the impulses and the underlying causes are so much
more complex than simply ‘them’ being bad and ‘us’ being good?
Professor Lea Ypi, writing in the Guardian
about the nation of her birth – Albania.
There are about 140,000 Albanians currently
living in the UK, ranging from construction workers to doctors, from lawyers to
cleaners, from entrepreneurs to academics. The vast majority are well
integrated: they pay taxes, they queue, they apologise to inanimate objects,
they swear loyalty to the monarchy. When all are labelled criminals, their
differences, their personal histories, their contributions to society, become
invisible. The ideal of democracy is taken hostage by the ugly reality of
martial metaphors. When an entire minority group is singled out as “invaders”,
the project of integration breaks down. All that remains is violence,[1]
We’ve decided that some human beings are ‘out
of place’ and therefore can be recategorized as ‘dirt.’ Practices and treatment
that we would never accept of those ‘in place’ somehow can be justified.
And it’s abhorrent and it’s unacceptable.
And the fact that as British Jews, or
American Jews, or Israeli Jews have been in-situ for just long enough to shut
the door behind us justifies nothing.
It just makes things worse.
We’ve a destitute asylum seeker Drop-In, run
through this community. It meets once a month and provides those the Refugee
Council acknowledge as legally in the process of applying for refugee status
with food, company, a little money and human-to-human company.
We celebrate the 6th anniversary of the Drop-In this Sunday. They are looking for volunteers. Let me know if you are interested in hearing more.
And the next time there is something that
wells up inside, and we all do, and I certainly do it, that threatens to
consider a human being who has left their home in search of safety or
possibility, even if their reasonable threat of danger falls short of some UN
standard, check that you aren’t defining a fellow human being as dirt, simply
because they are out of the place where we feel comfortable with them
remaining.
And speak up, to be proud to be a refugee, or
a descendant
of a refugee and don’t let the other voices have all the good
headlines.
Because it’s simply repugnant that once we’ve
decided that there are people who don’t deserve to be here it’s OK to lock them
up as criminals, leave them – leave us – bobbing around the Mediterranean until
someone torpedoes the boat.
Shabbat Shalom
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