Monday 12 December 2022

Wandering; Abraham and the Human Condition

  


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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