March 2006 Archives

In our hearts, Jews are immigrants. The very name "Hebrews," Ivri’im, comes from the word ‘to cross over’; Hebrews are boundary crossers.

Our founding story portrays us as refugees arriving to our land, and Judaism itself is a religion forged in exile and the experience of powerlessness, where stock was placed in prayer, study, and building just societies rather than in wealth, arms, or might. And so the Torah tells us: “You shall not oppress the stranger; you know the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Ex. 23:9) Especially at this time of the year, when we prepare for Passover, we remember what it means to be powerless and unloved in a land not our own.

All of this should lead us to support and promote legal immigration to this country. But what can it teach us about those who enter the country illegally in search of a living wage or a better life?

I think the key word in our verse is “oppress.” We are not called on to welcome those who cross into this country illegally with open arms, but neither are we allowed to place crushing burdens on them in order to criminalize their presence and make their lives more difficult as the bill the House of Representatives passed in December does.

Unfortunately, many of the measures currently being proposed in Washington and statehouses across the country are mere posturing that address neither the underlying causes of the flow of illegal migrants across the border nor the unspeakable conditions immigrants find once here.

Illegal immigrants do not have an easy life; and helping to move them slowly on the path toward citizenship as the Senate bill proposes will not change this is in the short term. That bill is not an amnesty that rewards those who broke the rules; it is a way to bring common sense and even a measure of decency to this large underclass of workers on whom our economy relies.

Should we open our borders indiscriminately? Absolutely not–it’s important to give priority to those who play by the rules and also to keep control over our border for security.

Should we reward those who cross illegally? No–but the Senate bill, with its penalties for illegal immigrants and requirement that they pay back taxes before heading down the path toward citizenship is hardly that. Instead, we can deal humanely with a class of workers whose plight is created in part by globalization, our existing immigration policies, and our insatiable demand for cheap goods and services. In other words, we can heed the Jewish experience of exile and the injunction not to oppress. Then we will live up to the words of our tradition: “Speak out, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.” (Prov. 31:9)

Where should we stand on immigration reform?

If not for the closed-door policies and quotas held by America and other countries barring Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, the Holocaust would not have claimed its millions of victims. As Jews, we understand that part of our job is to protect the weak and persecuted, which sometimes means providing save haven and refuge. That is why Israel has a history of welcoming innocent refugees, whether the Cambodian boat people, the Christian Lebanese, or such breakaway sects from Islam as the Bahai and Ahmayeds, all of whom have found safety from persecution within Israel’s borders.

Being a safe haven does not preclude being concerned about security. Indeed, successful reform should not only include ways to tighten the process for vetting immigrants to make sure that potential terrorists do not enter the country but should also create the conditions that would close down our porous borders through fair and reasonable visiting worker and political refugee options.

However, America’s history of xenophobia ill serves us here. It is more than the fact that we are a nation of immigrants, because one person’s immigrant is another person’s stranger.

As Jews, we know what it is like to be strangers. Our whole religion is built upon this essential ethical leitmotif: Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt. We are to make sure the stranger is treated fairly, because we know what it is like not to be. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, which is why more synagogues should be joining other faith-based organizations to offer food and other aid to the illegal immigrants we see suffering within our midst.

But there is another issue of justice here as well: the fact that agriculture, travel, and other significant businesses build their profits on substandard salaries that could not reasonably support America’s working poor and therefore attract illegal immigrants who seek to escape the squalor of even worse poverty across the border. Reforms to allow visiting workers may be reasonable, but they will not be just unless they also address minimum standards for pay and fair treatment of the strangers coming to us with dreams for a better life for themselves and their children--dreams similar in some ways to those shared by our own parents, grandparents, and great grandparents who came to these same shores.

Recently, The New York Times published an op-ed by Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, who expressed his indignation at HR 4437, an immigration bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in December that includes provisions for a 700-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and making it a felony to be in the U.S. without proper immigration documents. The cardinal argued:

"What the church supports is an overhaul of the immigration system so that legal status and legal channels for migration replace illegal status and illegal immigration. Creating legal structures for migration protects not only those who migrate but also our nation, by giving the government the ability to better identify who is in the country as well as to control who enters it...

Enforcement-only proposals like the Border Protection act take the country in the opposite direction. Increasing penalties, building more detention centers and erecting walls along our border with Mexico, as the act provides, will not solve the problem."

Instinctively, I agree with Cardinal Mahony's condemnation of the pending House legislation. While the legislation is not without merit--people are scared and perhaps a good old-fashioned fence might just work--nonetheless, the bill echoes the kind of shameless vote-pandering we saw in the Schiavo fiasco. The House bill is ultimately more hysterical than realistic or sober. It plays on the public's fear and distrust of the "other."

To be sure as it now stands there are a number of other other options being debated in the senate that are far more sober and nuanced, (see Esther Pan's analysis on the CFR website.)

As to the Jewish perspective on this immigration debate: as with so many subjects that are a matter of Jewish concern, it's not so simple and straightforward. First things first, however: There is no Jewish position on immigration. Nonetheless, there is a vast bodyl of Jewish wisdom regarding the issues of security and vulnerability that I think shed a great deal of light on the immigration issue.

At its heart, the immigration issue is a contest between two forces inherent in the human psyche--a desire for freedom and openness and the need to be secure and safe.

Jewish wisdom echoes the cardinal's claim that it is a divine imperative "to help people in need. It is our Gospel mandate, in which Christ instructs us to clothe the naked, feed the poor and welcome the stranger." The only difference between Jewish wisdom and the cardinal's is the manner through which that goal is achieved.

The cardinal's position highlights the beautiful universality of the Church, with its confident open posture. Sometimes such an approach is precisely the proper antidote to those spreading fear. Yet, at other times such an open posture can seem all too messianic and unreasonable in a irrational and sacrilegious world of suicide bombers and terrorists.

While there are Jewish sources that express the same openness voiced by the cardinal, for example, Lamentations 3:30, which says "offer his cheek to him that smites him," such ideas are balanced with the admonition "if one comes up to attack you get up before him and attack him."

While man's natural inclination is to defend himself and fence himself in, God and His otherness challenges us to move beyond our comfortable confines and reach out to other human beings, inviting them into our lives. As of now, the pending federal legislation to criminalize illegal aliens and those who help them highlights only the other side--that of fear and security. It fails to speak to the side of us that welcomes in the poor and sick and places abrahamic hospitality at the center of life.

Let's hope that the more magnanimous bipartisan proposal that emerged in the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday--the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act sponsored by senators Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and John McCain of Arizona--gains support. If not, it's time to go back to the drawing board.

To the chagrin of many of my friends, being ethical does not entail defenselessness. Power, like anything else, can be ethical; it must be ethical.

From a Jewish perspective, it's tempting to make powerlessness a pre-condition for ethics. Jewish liberals are fond of pointing to the biblical prophets' ability to speak ethical truth to power. As if truth and power are at opposite sides of the spectrum. They thrive on the prophets' persecution and their howling in the wind.

While I agree that there is a time for prophetic politics, what these Jews sometimes forget is that a) the prophets may have been right but usually ended up being ignored because their policies were simply way beyond peoples' present capacity, and b) if the kings (against whom the prophets railed) were themselves just and ethical, we would never have needed the prophets in the first place.

It's tempting to spend this post ranting and condemning Bush/Cheney, etc. (God knows how long we could do that.) But I would rather deal with the painful reality of the present, recognizing the ethical complexity of the situation. Arguing that we must jump ship from Iraq because this war is unethical is, simply put, far too simple to be the ethical solution to the problems we are facing.

The great 20th-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once remarked, "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." Niebuhr coined the term "Christian realism" to describe his sober views about the nature of man, sin, and politics. More than anything else, Niebuhr realized the dangers of absolute political ideologies. Most notably, he spoke out against absolute pacifism and those who stood on what they thought was the moral high ground looking down on power and coercion as unethical.

While for Christains, Niebuhr's position was somewhat of a hidush (a new idea), for Jews spiritual realism was no new idea. The Bible is packed with ethical complexity. Nonetheless, Niebuhr's ideas greatly influenced theologians across the the spiritual spectrum. In Judaism, those such as Rabbi Irving Greenberg developed their own brand of post-Holocaust Niebuhrian Jewish realism, arguing that power and ethics can be compatible. The challenge of the modern age--what Greenberg calls the third millennium-- is to harness power for ethical means.

Which brings us to the question of the ethics of the war in Iraq and the broader war on terror. Was the President wrong in going after Saddam Hussein? As I wrote three years ago in an op-ed in the New York Jewish Week, probably. (I will spare you the myriad reasons why).

The war on terror will never be won by just attacking nation-states, especially those nation-states that have nothing to do with radical Islam (Iraq was a secular state!!). We should have attacked Iran, Syria, or Saudi Arabia well before we went anywhere near Iraq. But that is not what happened. As it now stands, we are three years into this mess with no exit plan in sight, and each day, human lives are being sapped. Iraq has been nothing but trouble and disappointment.

Nonetheless, now that we have gone in and torn apart the social fabric of the country, we can’t just walk out leaving Iraq to eat itself up alive. To use a biblical analogy, you can't take the people of Israel out of Eygpt and leave them to wither in the desert! To do so would make us guilty of nothing less than a hit and run. Responsibility and ethics go hand in hand. Imagine if God had washed his hands of the Jewish people after the sin of the golden calf.

We as a country must take the responsibility for finishing what we started. Simply put, Iraq is still incapable of functioning day-to-day. Whether we like it or not, we have an obligation to its citizens to be there an ensure day-to-day social and political stability.

Yes, it would be nice if we could just walk out of Iraq, forget about this whole episode, and go on trying to hunt down the real terrorists. What we forget, however, is that the act of hunting down to capture, kill, and coerce puts us in a most precarious and ethically risky situation. Almost always, when one lifts up one's fist, ethics, in some sense, are suspended. But that is how politics and power work.

Politics is a messy business that has no neutral ground. Every decision is a lesser of two evils. Still, at every moment there is a more ethical and less ethical option to choose from. While it is hard to say that staying in Iraq is ethical, leaving Iraq is unethical.

In recent months, public opinion has increasingly been turning against the war in Iraq–and for good reason, as body counts for U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians continue to soar, as the situation on the ground becomes increasingly chaotic, and as each successive justification proffered for the war proves false.

Of course, we all know that hindsight is 20-20 and so it takes no particular wisdom to say that, in retrospect, invading Iraq was a mistake. The question is, does Jewish tradition offer any insights that could have helped us avoid the situation beforehand? The answer is a resounding yes.

The Talmud (Sotah 44b) places great constraints on milchemet reshut (elective wars, as opposed to mandatory wars of self-defense) and also enshrines the religious leadership as a check on power-hungry sovereigns wishing to rush to war (Sanhedrin 20b). In Deuteronomy 2, we see Moses commanded by God to make war on the Amorites and nevertheless offering them terms of peace. The rabbis take this passage to mean that one must always offer peace and that engaging in war is a last resort (Sifrei Bamidbar 42). The current administration appeared to have little interest in finding non-military solutions to the real problem of Saddam Hussein and his supposed cache of weapons of mass destruction. The uncertainty over their existence combined with a lack of immediate threat demanded that the U.S. continue to work through the United Nations to let the arms inspectors do their job–a job they were in fact doing remarkably well when they reported no evidence of WMD’s.

Once at war, our tradition also places strict limits on the conduct of soldiers and the treatment of prisoners of war. Our religious and ethical obligation of k’vod ha-briot (respect for the dignity of all creatures)–to say nothing of our legal obligations–make it incumbent on us to treat prisoners humanely. This is the right thing to do, and it is the smart thing to do; the backlash against the United States has grown in no small part from the torture at Abu Ghraib and similar facilities, and the ongoing degrading treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. When we violate the dignity of others, we diminish our own humanity as well and risk losing the moral core which can lend our actions clarity and rightness.

There is no question that we must support our troops–the vast majority of whom are serving their country with the utmost professionalism. So too we now have an obligation to Iraqis to help return their country to stability at a very minimum. But these obligations are best served not by blind compliance with a war-mongering administration whose values in justifying and executing this war run contrary at every turn to the dictates of both morality and common sense. Instead, we need to reassert the invaluable ethical lessons we learn from our tradition–the reluctance to go to war, and the demand for proper conduct when we do–so we can begin to repair the damage and move toward a stable future.

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