Rabbi's Week in Review Blog

Sometimes, without seeking a particular issue to address, one seems to come at me as something that is on many people’s minds. 

Lately, it has been the issue of immigration and what is to come of immigrant populations in the near future — in a conversation with the policy director at the most recent meeting of the Rabbinical Association of Greater Kansas City; a congregant who wanted to talk with me about what I see as the landscape for immigrants; a conversation regarding the fear of families — parents and children being split up; and, on the day I write this, an article in The New Yorker, “History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism.”

Particularly with the article in The New Yorker, we are reminded that the issue of how we do or don’t welcome immigrants — those coming to our country seeking a better life — is hardly new. The article chronicles the polarization in our country over the influx of Chinese immigrants dating back to the mid to late 19th century. Without going into detail, research on the impact of demonizing and putting strict limitations on bringing in Chinese immigrants had a negative economic impact that lasted for almost a century.

Our own immigrant story in America is one of both being welcomed in (my paternal grandparents came in the last wave of Jewish immigrants in the 1920s) and, during the presidential term of FDR, being denied entry at a time leading up to the Holocaust, when we most needed safe haven. As we are commanded to not oppress and to love the stranger, let our own experience as the stranger, the outsider, lead us to a place of empathy and action as to the next strangers seeking safe haven and a better life.