Memory and Responsibility: Our American Jewish Legacy

In 1883 a 24-year-old Jewish writer named Emma Lazarus submitted a poem to an art auction. The auction sought to raise money to construct a pedestal for France’s centennial gift to the United States, the soon-to-arrive Statue of Liberty. Twenty years later, following her death, Lazarus’ poem was chiseled onto that statue. Its immortal closing words are familiar to us:

 

“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!”

 

When Emma Lazarus wrote these words, America was beginning a new era in its history.  The population was growing rapidly. The Western frontier beckoned. Immigrants flooded into our cities. Optimism pervaded the air. We were on the brink of what Henry Luce later called “the American century.”

 

The late 1800s was also a watershed time for American Jews. In 1881, following a series of pogroms, Jews began migrating from Eastern Europe. The vast majority came to America. By 1920, more than two million Jews passed under the torch held aloft by Lady Liberty.     

 

Within this historical context, we can read Lazarus’s poem on several levels. First, it reflects and directs the optimism of America. It told America and its new immigrants what this rapidly growing country aspired to be.

 

Lazarus’s words also spoke to her Jewish community. Although she came from a fairly assimilated family, around the time when she wrote this poem, she had begun teaching English to immigrants living in the lower East side of New York. Their Judaism interested her immensely, and she began to study and learn about her religion. Lazarus’s words expressed her people’s age-old dreams and hopes for an end to wandering and persecution. They brim with optimism for a new life in America.

 

More than 100 years have passed since Emma Lazarus wrote these words, and we live in a very different America. Rather than optimism, many feel fear, unhappiness, and foreboding. September 11th exposed our vulnerability. Continuing conflict in the Middle East makes peace seem more of a dream than a possibility. Some fear that the huge numbers of immigrants are taking jobs and undermining American identity, and calls abound for an electric fence on our border with Mexico. In an article published about two months ago, New York Times writer Adam Cohen concluded that Americans are more pessimistic than ever. The “next generation of leaders,” he writes, “will have to resell discouraged Americans on the very idea of optimism.”

 

At the turn of last century, Emma Lazarus gave America, and the world, a message of optimism. Could she do so today? What would she say? How would she guide and inspire us?

 

First, I think she would tell us that our cores, we remain optimistic and hopeful. Even if we don’t always hold the golden door wide open, the persecuted and the ambitious of the world still make their way to our shores.  The American dream is an enduring possibility.

 

I think, for example, of Sergey Brin. When he was six, Sergey and his parents, both Russian-Jewish mathematicians, emigrated to the U.S. They came because of antisemitism in the Soviet Union. In Maryland, where they settled, Sergey received a public education and attended the University of Maryland. A grant from the National Science Foundation funded graduate school at Stanford University. It was there that he met fellow student Larry Page. Together they wrote a highly acclaimed paper on internet search engines. Several months later, in 1996, they left Stanford to start a company called Google.

 

The rest, as we probably know, is history. Google is a phenomenal American success story, and it has changed the way we get information. Brin’s story is the American dream. He fled the Soviet Union for America. In America, he received a public education and used it to help inform and connect hundreds of millions of people. Perhaps, like Bill Gates, he will go beyond financial and business success to become a champion of tzedakah, using his intellect and wealth to benefit the world. Perhaps he will follow in the footsteps of the many Jewish immigrants to American who not only lived the American dream, but helped make it possible for others to do so as well.  

 

Sergey Brin and his family found the golden door of America open. Were she alive today, I think Emma Lazarus would also tell us not to shut it. She might remind us, especially American Jews, of one of the most oft-repeated commandment in the Torah: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” I would go even further; welcome the stranger because you know what it is like to be unwelcome. Throughout our history, we Jews have known rejection and expulsion. From Palestine in 70 C.E., from England in 1290, from Spain in 1492. In 1654 Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Amsterdam tried to expel the first 23 Jewish immigrants to America.  Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s found the doors of most countries, including America, largely closed. Even if our Bible did not command us to know the heart of the stranger, our history would have taught us how to do so.  

 

Yet, we are at a unique moment in our history. Many American Jews today are of the fourth or fifth generation. We are moving out of the shadow of the immigrant experience.  We might, for example, know a Yiddish phrase or two, but we may have learned it from Seinfeld. Our grandparents probably knew acutely what it was like to be different. We might not. It is our responsibility, then, to act on the legacy of our immigrant ancestors; to remember and embody the words of Torah; “the stranger in your midst shall be to you as the native, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”  

 

When I hear these words, I think of a funeral at which I was called to officiate this year. It was for a man named Earl Bush, and he was the long-time press secretary to Mayor Richard J. Daley. I sat with about 15 of his surviving family members at his apartment. We spoke about his life and his achievements. Then we spoke about his Jewish identity. He had not been especially active in the Jewish community. Yet, when I inquired further, asking what being Jewish meant to him and what they would like to me to say about it at his funeral, they told me that it was he who urged and convinced a reluctant Mayor Daley to meet with Martin Luther King when he came to Chicago. They also told me about what happened when the first African American family moved onto their street in Skokie. Several neighborhood children shunned the new family. When Earl Bush’s children asked their father what they should do, he told them to do what they would with any other neighbors. Go over, say hi and invite them to play with you.

 

Earl Bush looked at the arrival of this new family not as a political issue. It was a human issue. To use the thinking of the great Jewish theologian Martin Buber. it was an I-Thou, rather than an I-It question. According to Buber, human relationships fall into either of these two categories.  I-It relationships are utilitarian, economic, mathematical. I-Thou relationships are human, emotional, informed by our values. This way of thinking applies well to immigrants and immigration debate.

 

A purely I-It approach to immigration would ask, “What is best for our economy? What is best for our jobs? What is the most politically expedient and acceptable?” These are important considerations. Yet, Jewish tradition also demands an I-Thou response. When we talk about immigrants, we are talking about human beings created in God’s image. We are talking about real people seeking safety and freedom. We are talking about real people who are often ostracized from the larger society.

 

This human dimension makes immigration a religious issue, not just an economic or political one. Indeed, Judaism, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has written, instructs us “to see the face of God in someone whose face is a different color than mine; to hear the voice of God in someone whose accent is different than mine." As we continue to grow up and live in a country where Jews are an integrated and integral part of larger society, let us strive to have heightened sensitivity to that accent and to the person who bears it. plight This sensitivity, this I-Thou approach, does not mean we condone illegal immigration. It does not mean we ignore economic and security concerns. It simply means that we respond as human beings, and as Jews who know what is to be ostracized, rejected and expelled. It means that we use every means we have to uphold the dignity of every person, citizen, resident or immigrant.

 

There are millions of immigrants in the U.S. The political and legal questions we face are enormously complex. It may seem too big an issue to address. Yet, it goes to our core as Jews and as Americans, and every act of kindness can make a difference for others and for ourselves. Allow me to illustrate. I have a very close relationship with my maternal grandfather, who is 94 years-old. He has achieved much in his life. He has delivered hundreds of babies, done thousands of surgeries. He fought in the Second World War and traveled around the world. He has lots of good stories to tell. But there is one he is most proud of. After World War Two, he saw several patients who were Jewish refugees. They lived in a settlement house in Milwaukee, and he would make weekly visits. They did not speak much English. They had little money. Inevitably, they would ask about the bill. He told them not to worry. It was in the mail. Of course, they never got one. Many of them are still alive, and some have succeeded tremendously. And they remember. Some live in his assisted living home; others he sees at restaurants. They all remind him of his act of gemilut chasadim, of lovingkindness, and every one brings him satisfaction and joy.  

 

In the 100 plus years since Emma Lazarus wrote the words on the statue of liberty, we American Jews have done great things. Here at Sinai, in the 1930s, our congregation made a special effort to welcome German Jewish refuges. Our leadership created programs to acclimate them to American life and made space in the synagogue in which they would worship and gather. Yet, we are not a people of sentimental nostalgia; we are a people of mitzvah, of sacred deed. We remember the past for the sake of the future. On this Rosh Hashanah, as we enter this New Year, let us, as a congregation and as individuals, resolve to write a new chapter in the story of American Jewry. Let us call this chapter “Memory and Responsibility.”

 

As we have built the largest and strongest Jewish community in the world, let us work to assure that the Jewish message of welcoming the stranger is heard. We can help shape the debate over immigration in America by drawing from our history and by telling our community that it is more than I-It issue. It is an I-thou issue. The immigrant is not a problem to be solved but a person to be cared for. Our hope is not naïve. We do not pretend that the issues are simple. We do not pretend that things will get better quickly or easily. But we believe that our history and our values matter today.

 

Jewish legend has it that when God finished creating the world, God turned to Adam and said: “Behold, see my works, how fine and excellent they are. Now all of this I created for you, and have placed it your hands. Do not corrupt or destroy it. Do not let it slip away. For if you do, there will be no one to preserve it after you.” Our American ideals as laid out by Emma Lazarus and our Jewish responsibility are in our hands. They demand our attention now more than ever. Let us preserve and uphold them so that 100 years from now, the words of Emma Lazarus still inspire, instruct and continue to ring true.