What we owe our fellow human beings
As parts of President Trump’s travel ban take effect, including a pause on the U.S. accepting most refugees from all over the world, what should concern us is not only the legal question of presidential authority, but the moral authority of presidential action.
It is not that our government is wrong to consider security. A President’s first mandate is to protect the people. But we faith leaders, too, have a mandate: To promote not what is popular, but what is right; to heed not the words of pollsters, but the words of God.
The most oft-repeated warning in the entire Bible is the admonition not to wrong a stranger: “You know the soul of a foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.”
It is one thing to speak of the risks of admitting mostly Third World refugees into our country. It is another thing to speak only of security; to create an image of a bedraggled refugee shattered by Bashar Assad’s brutality or broken by ISIS’ savagery as a mortal threat to the United States, and nothing else.
Are they not, above all, human beings, and is not the value of human life the preeminent concern of all faiths?
Twenty-five members of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue traveled to Greece and Germany in May. We traced the route of refugees from the moment they washed upon the shores of Greece, through their temporary resettlement in camps, ultimately ending in Berlin, where more than a million refugees are being absorbed.
In Athens, we met two Iranian teenagers, aspiring songwriters, persecuted by Iranian authorities. They sang to us the most touching anthem of their aspirations. They could have been any teenagers in the West, strumming on their guitar and singing songs of love.
In Thessaloniki, we met a Yazidi young man who was so traumatized by his captivity by ISIS that he couldn’t even be in the same room with us as he told his story. He wrote it beforehand, and a staff member of the camp read it to us aloud.
In Germany, we met several Yazidi refugees, now resettled. One was a young woman who was a sex slave of ISIS. She wanted to meet us; she wanted to tell her story, but she couldn’t really. She told it in three-word sentences, her eyes cast downward, traumatized.
To turn inward — America first and last — is an affront to the very definition of America.
Our country is supposed to also be about humanity, compassion and dignity: The last best hope on Earth. We are a country of immigrants. That is how President Trump’s family arrived here from Germany in the late 19th century. That is how most of us ended up here. Someone in our family immigrated, usually fleeing persecution or poverty. They turned to a country whose beacon beckoned.
It is confusing nowadays to be an American abroad. I stood at the Brandenburg Gate, in view of the German Reichstag, and it was devastating to think that the German chancellor, not the American President, is the world’s foremost champion of liberty and human dignity.
In my entire life, I have never had such feelings, no matter who was the President or what party he represented. We are abandoning political and moral leadership, so indispensable to the security of the world and the self-image of the United States.
We stood on the shores of Lesbos, the Greek island 14 miles from Turkey. Tens of thousands of refugees were saved here, plucked out of the water by aid workers and volunteers. Others drowned trying to reach these shores.
From Lesbos, you can see Turkey, and from Turkey, you can see Europe. Lesbos is freedom. Lesbos is never having to worry about chemical attacks again; never having to face religious persecution. Never having to hear explosions in the morning or a knock on the door at night.
Jewish tradition asks: Why did God choose to put the Divine Presence in the burning thornbush, that ugly, stout shrub? Why not some majestic oak or pine that would symbolize the majesty of God? The sages teach: God put the Divine Presence in the lowest of trees to remind us that God is present in the lowest of people.
We can never forget our calling: To remember, and to remind others, that God is present in the mightiest and the lowest of human beings. Human life is sacred. We are of equal worth in the sight of God and are equally entitled to dignity and love.