Rabbi Patricia Karlin-NeumannStanford University
Memorial Church18 May 2008
Counting Toward Home
(Exodus 13:3-10; Leviticus 19)
Hayom Shmonah v’esrim yom she hem arbbaa Shavuot la’omer
Today is twenty-eight days, which is four weeks of the Omer.
The omer is a Biblical measure of volume of grain. On the second day of Passover, an omer of barley was offered in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. Once the omer of barley was offered up to God, it was possible for people to enjoy the new barley harvest. For 7 weeks, the omer was given and on the 50th day after the beginning of the count, corresponding to the holiday of Shavuot, two loaves made of wheat were offered in the Temple to signal the start of the wheat harvest.After the destruction of the Temple the counting of the omer continued, and it continues still to this day.
So this, then, is the time when Jews are counting. From the second night of Passover, the holiday of freedom, to the arrival of Shavuot, the holiday of the giving of the Torah, Jewish tradition is to count every night. It is a time of counting the blessings of sustenance. It is a time of counting the blessings of freedom. It is a time of anticipation. If Passover is freedom from--from slavery, from powerlessness, from despair, Shavuot is freedom for--for commitment, for embracing purpose, for the opportunity of learning. The Torah, given in perpetuity on Shavuot, is the anchor, the foundation, the mooring. Shavuot enables Jews to come home. And so this is the season of counting toward home.
The blend of counting toward home and the Passover-Shavuot season could not have been more apparent to me than it is this year. I began Passover in Brooklyn. We had come for the wedding of a close family friend, and much to my delight, our hotel was a few short blocks from 530 2nd Street—the apartment my parents brought me home to after I was born. My husband, George, took pictures of our kids and me in front of that square brick building which was part of the legend of my childhood, and then we walked two blocks over to 379 3rd Street—the Brooklyn brownstone where I lived as a rabbinic student. When, as a young adult, I moved into that brownstone, thinking of my earlier stint in the neighborhood, I sent this limerick with my change of address cards, “While walking through Brooklyn one day, a woman’s bookstore on the way, Patricia found a new space two blocks from her birthplace and moved into Brooklyn to stay. Oy Vey.” Well, I didn’t stay there physically, but for me, returning to Brooklyn is always about coming home. My father, who grew up in Brooklyn, and whose business required him to dispatch delivery trucks all over the borough used to say, “I know Brooklyn like the back of my hand.” I found myself looking at my own hand,remembering my father, and I found myself hearing echoes my father’s off-key singing in my head, the pull of home calling forth the simultaneous images of my younger years and my present.
But the Brooklyn of my infancy, and even of my rabbinic school years, is not the Brooklyn of today. The woman’s bookstore of my limerick is long gone. Every restaurant in the neighborhood features a different cuisine and culture. The sights, sounds and scents evoke Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe. The cabbies are from every country in the world, speaking animatedly into their cell phones in foreign tongues and then conversing with their fares in accented English. Some of the people who create this rich diversity came to America seeking their fortune. Others came to America forced to leave behind their fortune. Some came as refugees-- former accountants working as home care givers, former doctors working as cashiers, starting over with hopes for freedom to rebuild.
We might expect this global presence and cultural diversity in Brooklyn. But as Mary Pipher’s reveals in her book, “The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community”, home has many dialects and complexions—and not just in New York orhere in Silicon Valley, but all across America. Indeed, Pipher begins with a visit to Ellis Island. Then, the rest of her book takes place in the heartland of America. She chronicles her engagement with refugees from Iraq, Sudan, Vietnam, Bosnia, and Sierra Leone--in Lincoln, Nebraska. Lincoln, Nebraska once was the “the middle of nowhere”. In the 1990s,with nearly full employment and a low cost of living, the US Office of Refugee Resettlementidentified the city as a preferred community. And it is now the dwelling place of a vast array of refugees whose memories of home are rendered in every language of the world. And so, Pipher says, Lincoln, the American heartland, has become “the middle of everywhere”.
These last few weeks, we have been all too conscious of how connected we are to places far away, how much we all live in “the middle of everywhere”. We have been all too aware of the trauma of natural disaster. As the cyclone in Burma/Myanmarand the earthquake in China remind us, we are citizens of a global community. And we have been frustrated in our outpouring of aid and expertise and stymied in our provision of emergency services not only by impassable roads but also by intransigent political forces. These are realities the world’s refugees know well. Many of the refugees trying to put down roots throughout our country came here because of the trauma of human disaster, the terrifying ordeal of power abused. War, violence, genocide and torture have all too often been their tutors.
Garrison Keillor, who has made his name epitomizing Middle America, wrote, “If we knew the stories of refugees, they would break our hearts.” Pipher listens as her refugee friends tell stories mythic in scope—of grandparents carrying children across raging rivers, of families barefoot in the snow, trudging across mountain passes, of a poet surviving torture in an Iraqi prison by remembering the beauty of a flower garden;…of Vietnamese men in reeducation camps forced to search for land mines on the their hands and knees in the fields, …of women abducted and raped by soldiers, of children who mistook fireworks for bombs until they saw the bodies explode.(13)
Yet, if refugees are living witnesses to the worst of humanity, they also embody one of humanity’s most enduringand inspiring attributes—the immeasurable quality of hope. Although refugees may have been victimized, few truly helpless victims can make the daunting trip to a new land and a new life. Rather, it takes work, intelligence, patience, charm and luck to be selected as a refugee. As Pipher says, “Arrival stories are survivor stories. However, after the victory of safe passage, years of hard work follow. And in their own way, the challenges of the United States can be as rough as the challenges of Sudan or Afghanistan.” (57) Think of all that refugees must grapple with when they arrive here: obtaining money, jobs, housing, legal status, and language; understanding ourculture, politics, laws, personal boundaries, and social mores. Any of these can be insurmountable. Add to this the memories of what refugees often endured to get hereand the size of the mountain they must climb becomes more visible.
Pipher suggests a thought experiment:.“Picture yourself dropped in the Sudanese grasslands with no tools or knowledge about how to survive andno ways to communicate with thelocals or ask for advice. Imagine yourselfwondering where the clean water is, where and what food is,and what you should do about the bites on your feet, and your sunburn and the lion stalking you. Unless a kind and generous Sudanese takes you in and helps you adjust, youwould be a goner.”
It is up to us, in the heartland of America, in the streets of Brooklyn, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to be kind and generous people willing to befriend refugees. It is up to us to be cultural brokers, to be the kind of neighbors who can ease a transition, share hospitality, offer helpful advice, translate our bewildering culture.
Those of us who treat the bible as a sacred text, recognize the refugee from our own sacred history. “You know the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Exodus describes the experience of becoming a refugee first to and then from Egypt, of traversing land and sea to freedom, of struggling with the unknown with only God’s promise and hope to forge each new step. And to remember that journey each year at Passover, all aroundthe tableare admonished, “B’chol dor vador, chayav adam lirot et atzmo c’ilu hu yatza m’mitzrayim”“In each and every generation, each person is obligated to see him/herself as if he/she went out from Egypt.” What this means is that there is a ritual mandate not only to identify with, but even to identify oneself as a refugee.
This year, the Marin Osher Jewish Community Centerhosted a Multicultural Freedom Seder,in which the hosts invited our refugee brothers and sisters to join their table. The traditional Four Questions and four cups of wine were augmentedwith readings from those who have served as our contemporary Moses’--Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Aung San Suu Kyi. Native American Joanne Campbellprayed in Coastal Miwok, a language no longer learned and rarely used. Former Rwandan ambassador and activist, Theogene Rudasingwa shared the words of his young daughter, “If you have love in your heart, if you have forgiveness in your heart, if youhave freedom in your heart, then you have life.” Then he added, “The cry for freedom and forgiveness is a cry for love. Please, please, please listen to the children. They are our future.”One young Vietnamese woman, herself a child when she escaped from communist rule remembered, “There was no freedom of speech, no human rights. We couldn’t make our own songs or create poems from our own hearts, as we are doing here at the seder.” A woman from Darfur, experiencing the tradition of the breaking of the afikoman, the piece of matzah that is hidden for the children to find at the end of the meal, reflected, “The larger half is broken and put away because we are hopeful people, hoping for an end to oppression.” (J. Weekly, April 18, 2008 pp. 5, 52)
Refugees are hopeful people. For so many, what makesit possible to endure the arduous path to freedom arethe dreams of and for their children. Rabbi David Zeller once taught, “Children return the afikomen to us because children return lost parts of ourselves to us.” And so refugees courageously endure the hardship of dislocation and acculturationso thattheir children can create songs and poems from their own hearts, so that their memories of pain and terror can give way to roots in new and fertile soil in the middle of everywhere.As an old refugee song tells, “We’re here. Our seeds are planted in the land. We’re here. Though they thought we’d die at their command…We came. Dry branches falling from the tree. We came. Wondering how this world would be. We turned away from death. We took another breath. We’re here.” (Rosalie Gerut “We Are Here” Blue Hill Records) Refugeescourageously endure the hardship of dislocation and acculturation in order to create new memories—and the reality—of a new home.
In Leviticus, in a section called the “Holiness Code”, we read the oft-repeated lines:“Vahavta l’reacha kamocha, ani Adonai”“You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Eternal Your God.”What does“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”have to do with “I am the Eternal Your God.”? How we treat our neighbors, particularly those who are newcomers, is a manifestation of how we honor and imitate God. How we identify with our neighbors, trying to make of this land of dreams a new home, revitalizes the sacred hopes of our own ancestors. To understand the stories behind the eyes of those who struggled to arrive here, to see the shared humanity amidst the different languages, clothing, aromas and recipes is to be reminded that we are all descendents of the first human beings; we are all son and daughters of Adam and Eve. As Carlos Fuentes oncewrote, “Reconozcamonos en el y ella que no son come tu y yo.”“Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.” (348)
As refugees count the days toward feeling settled in this new country, creating a new home out of hope and dreams, let us recognize ourselvesin those who are not like you and me. Let us reach out to our neighbors and welcome them to our tables. Let us listen as they bequeath us their stories of the triumph of humanity over inhumanity and offer our understanding of our own culture in response. Let us remember thatwe too were strangers in the land of Egypt, we too were refugees in a land far from the familiar. Let us count and recount the blessings we have and the blessings we can share, as wetogether count toward home.
Hayom Shmonah v’esrim yom she hem arbbaa Shavuot la’omer
Today is twenty-eight days, which is four weeks of the Omer. May we all celebrate this season in freedom, with open hands and open hearts.
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