Migration and Immigration: Tragedy and Necessity

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 21^st 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 29^th 2019]