“I Lift Up My Lamp Beside the Golden Door”

"I Lift Up My Lamp Beside the Golden Door" 
The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus 
Rabbi Gary S. Creditor 
May 19, 2006

My maternal grandmother was a diminutive lady. I inherit my hair color from her. In her early teen years she left her hometown of Bielsk, Poland, northeast of Warsaw, and proceeded to America on her own. I know that she traveled in steerage and came to Lower East Side where she lived with a cousin. There she met my grandfather who was a border in another apartment. I regret not knowing more, nor thinking to ask her of her stories in her lifetime. But there are a few things that I do know:

            She came here without papers – no visa.

            She revered this country.

            She never spoke Polish after she got here.

            She idolized President Roosevelt who pulled the country out of the Depression.

            She saved my family's life because the rest died in the Holocaust.

            She was a resident alien, required to file a green card, until 1969,

when, late in her life, she became an American citizen.

She wanted to visit me in Israel and could not get a passport without being an American citizen. So learned how to sign her name in English and recite the pledge of allegiance. She got her passport and visited me.

I think of her, I think of my other grandparents, I think of Ruby's maternal grandmother who allowed into this country in the inundation of Eastern European Jews who came at the turn of the century, and I think of her sister who was turned away because of some eye malady. She died in the Holocaust. And I think of Eastern Jewry trapped in Europe after the Evian Conference that ratified the fact that the Jews of Europe had no place to go to escape the Nazis and their diabolical plans. I think of all of them these days as we witness a great debate over the soul of America. PBS has a series entitled "The American Experience." What is this experience? What is the nature of our soul? How should we view and react to this sea of human beings besieging our shores upon rickety boats and through arid scrub lands? What does our Judaism add to this difficult conversation and the posture that America will take to the world?

We as Jews have had a unique response to the American Experience which began as an overwhelmingly Protestant Christian European experiment. We merged into the mainstream in a very short period of time. Again to cite my family's experience: all four of my grandparents were quintessential Eastern European Jews. Their accent was unmistakable and so was the dinner menu. I saw fish in the bathtub waiting to become gefillete and my grandmother made chrain – horseradish – fresh they way her mother did in Poland. My mother learned Yiddish first and went to Yiddish school before public school. My father served in the US Army in the Pacific theater of World War II and was prepared to invade Japan. I went to public school for all but one year k- 12, English is my native language, I follow the major American sports, and was not drafted because I received a high number in the first lottery in the winter of 1969-1970. If not for my kippah, I could not be singled out as a Jew walking down Cary Street. Neither could most of you. I am a graduate of Columbia University and Ruby is a graduate of CCNY in New York. We are representative of the American experience. There has been a lot of melting and merging because our grandparents ran away from Europe because of real and perceived persecution and the belief that America was the Golden Medinah whose streets were paved with gold. They had a dream which was not just, not only Jewish. It was a dream to make a good living, provide more for their children, and live and die in peace. It was a dream embraced by many other immigrant groups who gave up their native language and ethnic particularities to become "an American." There is a profit and loss sheet on this reality, but that is another sermon for another time. Let is suffice to be said, we are a representative part of the American Experience.

In the Torah we read the story of our slavery and our salvation. We began as strangers in Egypt, migrant workers who tended Pharaoh's herds. It turned into the slavery that we remember at Seder night and thus the empathy and sensitivity for anyone who is a stranger. We begin the Seder with an invitation: "all who are hungry come and eat, all who are in need, come join us to celebrate." These were not intended to be mere platitudes, but a true, honest invitation with the expectation that it could be accepted. Later in the Seder we will really open the door and invite the quintessential stranger, the wanderer from bris to bris and from Seder to Seder, Elijah the prophet to enter. And what do all the children look for? Did he sip from his goblet!? We expect him to partake of our food and our drink. It is neither act nor child's play. It is either for real or we make a mockery of our story and our ritual. Interestingly, when Ruby and I were in Israel, after services they would announce that anyone who needs a Shabbat meal should come to the lectern after services and a family would be waiting there to welcome them to their table. Does the table need just to be the piece of furniture in our dining room – my grandmother didn't have either dining room or dining room table – or can it metaphorically be America, "from sea to shining sea"?

Based on and reflecting on our national experience, the Torah commands proper behavior towards the resident alien, probably the most parallel condition to the illegal alien, just then the movement of people was more fluid and less restrained. They were entitled to work and obligated to certain taxes. Their humanity was to be respected, but they did not define the Israelite experience. They lived in dignity and were entitled to protection, but they were not citizens and thus excluded from certain privileges. It is a model that causes us to think about these people who a trying to find their Golden Medinah.

In reflecting upon my family's experience, Judaism's insights, the American Experience  and the threats that we all feel, I come to the posture that we need to be empathetic to those who have come, fix that process which is clearly broken, and realize that this country, whether fact or fiction, is still the greatest country on earth. Despite how many might hate us, there are many more who want to join us. This government needs to find the means to regulate and control the flow so that those who come do so in dignity and safely and not like wild animals or being sold and bartered so cruelly. The laws must be respected but they need to be crafted humanely. The United States must engage Mexico as a partner in controlling our southern border, for it is their people and those passing through Mexico from elsewhere in Central America that are those in question. In that sense we have a vested interest to help Mexico and its neighboring countries to raise their standards of living so as to induce their citizens to remain in their homelands. The question is ultimately larger than whether the National Guard will be stretched too thin. Our vision must be upon the human experience and not only theAmerican Experience. My grandparents did not see the Holocaust coming. They ran here because life was terrible and here was the promise that it would be better. While these people are not facing such a terrible demise of their people, they are running here for the same reason that my grandparents did. Where would I be, would I be, if the door at Ellis Island was slammed shut? Those on the St. Louis, not allowed to land in America, died in Europe.

When I reflected upon this subject extemporaneously a few weeks ago, I closed my remarks by citing the words inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. It must not be lost on us that the author was a good Jewish woman – Emma Lazarus. Its text makes reference to Jewish metaphors. Growing up in New York, I had many an opportunity to look at the lady in the harbor. I went there for the first time when I was in third or fourth grade, and my grandmother who had come from Bielsk, Poland, who had been welcomed by her hand held high, came as a class chaperone. I now really understand the deep symbolism of that day. So here are those words.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land:

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of exiles. From the beacon-hand

Blows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

'Keep ancient lands your storied pomp!' cries she

With silent lips. '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 up my lamp beside the golden door!'

May America never lose its soul.

May the lamp in her hand, like ours above the bemah illumine our path and our country forever.                                    

Shabbat Shalom.