The father’s black T-shirt was
stretched out wide so that the little girl could climb inside and cling to him.
They were both face down in the green-grey water. The child’s arm was draped
around her father’s neck. She’d been clinging to him in her final moments.
Their final moments. Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23 month old
daughter Valeria drowned in the Rio Grande river, on the border between Mexico
and the United States, some time on Tuesday night this past week. 24 hours
later the photos of their lifeless bodies had criss-crossed the world,
prompting shock and outrage. You may have seen the photos; or you may have
blinked and missed this tiny fragment of the ongoing migration crisis on
America’s southern border.
“Give
me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The
wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed
to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” The words of the
Jewish-American poet Emma Lazarus (written in 1883) are, famously, inscribed on
the Statute of Liberty in New York harbour. They belong to an era long gone –
not only in American history, but also in world history; an era – almost
impossible to imaginatively inhabit now – when migration and immigration by
those fleeing persecution or war or starvation, or seeking to better their
lives, was welcomed (or sometimes merely
accepted, more or less) by host nations for a variety of reasons: economic, or
social, sometimes even moral reasons.
Although there were
periodic concerns about who might be entering one’s country, it was still a world
where it was understood that others, born in one part of the globe, might want
to, or need to, leave their homelands and re-build their lives, try to re-build
their lives, somewhere else.
And this was understood
because there was an awareness that human history is a story of continuous
waves of migration, dispersal and wandering. An awareness that populations have
always - for millennia - been on the move; that there has never been an age
without continuous movement across borders, across continents, across mountain
ranges and seas and rivers.
I like to think that Jews
in particular are alert to, sensitive to, this story, not only because we have
historically been a nomadic people, a diasporic people, moving across the face
of the earth because of persecution, certainly, but also through choice, often
economic choice and the wish for a better, more secure life. A life more secure
if not for ourselves, then for the next generation, all those countless
Valerias clinging to fathers and mother - our grandparents and
great-grandparents - making those perilous journeys to new lands, each one a
real or symbolic ‘goldene medina’,
where the hope was one could lay down one’s head (and one’s battered
suitcase of family heirlooms, or Torah scrolls) and shelter from the dramas of
history. For a while.
So yes, I like to think
that Jews in particular have this story grafted to their souls, this empathy
with the immigrant experience, because of our diasporic history of crossing
continents, a history that was shared by religious and secular alike, a history
that embraces the pious and the heretic, the believers and the non-believers,
and all those in-between. An understanding of, and a sympathy towards, those
who are forced to - or choose to - cross borders, seems to be psychologically
and sociologically part of our cultural inheritance. But it is also part of our
spiritual inheritance.
In our cycle of readings
from the Torah we are in the midst of the book of Numbers, the fourth book of
the Bible: B’midbar – ‘In the wilderness’. Those 40 years in the wilderness, those years
of desert wandering, is part of the foundational story, the foundational myth,
of Jewish consciousness. This quixotic narrative is encoded within our Jewish
psyches: that long journey away from the place of slavery towards the so-called
‘promised land’. Those in-between years, which stretch out for a lifetime. Some
rabbinic commentators saw this as a punishment, which is one way of describing
it - and is maybe the way we all feel when we are frustrated from getting what
we want when we want it: someone or something is punishing us.
But then we in our
comfortable lives – or at least more comfortable than were the lives of Valeria
Ramirez and her parents – we aren’t always very good at tolerating
disappointment, or waiting for our wishes to be fulfilled. Although I admit
that 40 years is a long time to wait -though that is sometimes how long it
takes to reach where we want to get to.
But the foundational
narrative of the Jewish people – the Torah, the five books of Moses – is mostly
set in the desert, in the wilderness. Almost three-quarters of the whole Torah,
is located within, or describes, this story of wandering from place to place.
It’s as if the storytellers are letting us know, in their own subtle way - as
they so often do, not spelling it all out - that this is what most of your
lives are going to look like: life as a journey, life as movement between
places, and between states of mind - between slavery and freedom, between
having your lives controlled by others and having the possibility of more
autonomy, more ability to forge your own path, your own destiny.
We each have a promised
land - though it may be that few of us ever reach it. We may picture a land
flowing with milk and honey, set in some distant place, or set in the future –
a little dream cottage in the country, or financial security, or a new
relationship, or a life free from mental stress or physical pain – but most of
our time is spent, like the children of Israel, schlepping from place to
place in what can feel like a random or haphazard way, having to bear with what
the next day brings. We do live in the wilderness. And we may experience it as
a punishment.
But those desert years
that the Torah describes are described as containing one special experience
that was beyond the expected rigours of a normal desert journey. The people
were fed every day with quail and what the story calls manna. When they woke up
every day the manna was just there, waiting – except Shabbat, because that’s
when the heavenly storekeeper had his day of rest and didn’t open up shop, so
the children of Israel were told to stock up the day before.
And the thing about
manna, so the rabbis of old said - those Jewish storytellers who spoke about
the Bible stories and created stories about the stories, (we call those stories
midrash) - what they said about the manna was that it tasted like whatever you wanted it
to taste of: chocolate cake, smoked salmon, salted caramel ice cream, lamb cutlets, (probably not bacon and eggs - but you get the idea).
Manna was storytellers’
fantasy food. The point of it was to help people feel grateful for what they
received. Life might have been, life now might feel like, one long journey
through a wilderness. But there are small miracles along the way, moments when
we receive just what we need. For us, these daily miracles may not be food,
though it could be, but we know it when we receive it: something we really need and that we can’t
give ourselves, that we are dependent on getting from the outside - a hug, a
text, a phone-call, a job offer, someone’s loving gesture, things which fall
into our laps like ‘manna from heaven’. These gifts which just arrive – though we
can’t control them - make our long desert journey feel a bit more bearable. A
bit more hopeful.
And we all need hope.
Particularly in these fraught and disturbing times. Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his wife
Tania had hope, they made their journey from Salvador towards their promised
land, a long and hard and fraught journey, along with thousands of others,
100,000 a month, and they reached Matamoros, the Mexican city on the banks of
the Rio Grande where they went straight to the American migration office to
apply for asylum. The office was closed because it was a weekend - and anyway
there are just 3 interview slots each week and there were hundreds of
applicants in the queue before them. So you ‘do the math’, as they say over
there.
And because you have to have hope, and
the wanderings can go on for a lifetime, Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez decided
to swim across the river, and he took his daughter on his back, leaving his
wife on the Mexican side of the river, and in spite of the river being at its
highest level for 20 years because of floods, he got his daughter safely across
to the other side, the American side, and he left her there and started to swim
back for his wife and, while he was swimming back to get her, his daughter left
the safety of the shore and went back into the water, so he turned back in
desperation and tried to rescue her and – well you know how the story ends,
because you have seen the photos, just as you saw the photo four years ago of
Alan Kurdi the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned off the Greek island of
Kos, which galvanised a world-wide response, a twitch of conscience, though the
drownings continue - as we know and don’t want to know - whether it’s in the
Mediterranean, or the English Channel, or the Rio Grande.
This is the greatest humanitarian and
ethical challenge of our era: the fact of, the inevitability of, migration,
immigration, across the planet - and with the resultant rise of xenophobia and
nationalism around the world, and various forms of retreat-behind-the-barricades
populism on the rise close to home here in the UK, and in the rest of Europe,
and beyond, we Jews should know, in our souls and in our hearts, which side of
history we are on, or should be on.
This will be the greatest religious
and spiritual challenge the Jewish community worldwide faces in the 21st
century – how we respond, individually and as communities, to the fact that
people always have and always will, want to, or need to, move: to leave ‘there’
– wherever ‘there’ is, and come ‘here’, wherever ‘here’ is.
We recall that in Genesis Abraham is
described (14:13) as a ‘Hebrew’ – ivri – and this becomes the name of
his tribe and his people. And although we don’t know the linguistic origins of
this name, Jewish tradition has connected the word to the Hebrew verb ‘to cross
over’. Jews are ‘boundary crossers’ in many senses – mostly metaphorical – but in
our times it is sometimes useful to remember this in its literal sense. We have
had to move physically across boundaries and borders for millennia – and so we
have this deep identification with all those who need to, or choose to, make
these perilous journeys today.
[based on a
sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, June 29th 2019]
