I know I say this to all the B’nei Mitzvah students, Yul, but you really have a special parashah. So much so that your shabbat has a special name—Shabbat Shirah, the Shabbat of Song. Named, of course, after Shirat Hayam, the Song of the Sea—the most visibly noteworthy part of the entire Torah, composed as it is into three special columns—two exterior columns, one interior column laid out in such a way as to emulate the Israelites marching through through the sea, a wall of water to their left and to their right. It is, as Nahum Sarna has put it, “the paradigmatic moment of redemption.”
It’s the moment when we could literally taste freedom, the saltwater, salt air, droplets strewn around us embodying the sense that Egypt, mitzrayim, our oppressive, narrow space was being swallowed up behind us, and we were journeying into the beyond.
Of course, the journey didn’t end there. What followed up the journey through the sea but the midbar, the wilderness, journeying into the unknown, new senses of danger to our left and our right as we sought out the promised land.
It is fitting that we would immerse ourselves in the song of the sea on this particular Shabbat, because this particular shabbat is what is known as refugee shabbat, organized by HIAS, originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, with whom Society Hill Synagogue has partnered before. HIAS is the world’s oldest refugee agency, working back in the 1880s and 1890s to assist Jews fleeing pogroms, organized massacres of Jews, in Russia and Eastern Europe, by providing meals, transportation, and jobs to members to the fast-growing Russian Jewish population immigrating to the United States
Today hundreds of congregations around the world, including ours, have signed up to make space on Shabbat to recognize refugees and asylum seekers. As HIAS notes, “The fastest-growing European refugee crisis since World War II is still ongoing. People seeking asylum are being turned away at borders around the world. And this year, for the first time ever, the total number of displaced persons globally is over 100 million.” That’s over 1 percent of the world’s population. “This is a critical moment” HIAS says, “for all of us to reaffirm and redouble our support for refugees and asylum seekers.”
The story of the Israelite, the Jew, is in many ways the story of the refugee. A refugee is formally defined as someone who has fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and has crossed an international border to find safety in another country. They often have had to flee with little more than the clothes on their back, leaving behind homes, possessions, and loved ones.
Our own refugee story started with the journey through the sea, but didn’t end there. From exile under Babylonian and Roman rule in the ancient world, to medieval expulsions from Spain, France and England, to the aforementioned pogroms in eastern Europe, to the devastation of the Holocaust, the refugee story is a tragically familiar one for the Jewish people. Yul’s Torah portion evokes those first memories of escaping oppression, with not much more than the clothes on their back, searching for safety and freedom.
Those journeys did not always go well. We know of the S.S. St. Louis which departed Germany in 1937 with nearly one thousand jews aboard, making the arduous journey across the Atlantic, and which was turned away by Cuba and the United States, forced to return to Europe, many of its passengers, we think, perishing in concentration camps. Never again.
For years the United States has stepped up to follow through on this commitment of never again, hosting the world’s largest refugee resettlement program, living up to the creed emblazoned on the statue of liberty, composed by the Sephardic Jew Emma Lazarus:
The New Colossus
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 her beacon-hand
Glows 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-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
3 million out of the 4 million refugees resettled since 1980 were resettled in the United States. We understood how central this service was to our values and our prosperity.
While our approach has ebbed and flowed over the past three decades, it reached a new low under the last presidential administration. In 2017, for the first time since the adoption of the 1980 U.S. Refugee Act, the U.S. resettled fewer refugees than the rest of the world.
Under the current administration, we have seen improvement: President Joe Biden set what advocacy organizations are calling a robust refugee admissions goal of 125,000 people for the coming year, compared to only 23,000 refugee resettlements under the previous administration in 2018, even before the coronavirus pandemic.
With refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Ethiopia, and gang violence in Central America, the need of human beings for safe harbor is as high as ever.
These advocacy organizations encourage us as citizens to thank the Biden administration for setting an ambitious refugee goal and then to challenge them to meet it.
We know the spirit of the refugee; it is in our souls. Just as the tradition teaches us that all of us were at Sinai, the tradition in perhaps the central passage of the Passover Seder calls upon us “b’khol dor va’dor chayav adam lirot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatzah mi’mitzrayim.” In each and every generation we must regard ourselves as though we personally left Egypt.
What does this mean? We’re called upon to imagine that terrible, awesome journey through the sea, whose chanting Yul will lead us in tomorrow, recognizing that it’s not just a sacred myth—it’s a lived reality for people. Like our ancestors; people are needing to flee persecution, heading out into the wilderness. What will they find when they reach the promised land? Will they find a misgav, a refuge, or will they, like the St. Louis, be turned around.
Our souls know this journey. We know deep down—even if not physically or literally—we know deep down the spirit of the refugee. The feeling of the walls closing in, the experience of wondering if our souls can find a home in this world; the experience of being insecure, not knowing what the future will bring. And we know, therefore, how much it would mean for a person, a family, a nation to open their arms, to embrace the wandering spirit, the weary soul. To show what we’ve learned through our own journeys, pouring out our hearts to welcome those in need. It’s in many ways what the story that Shirat Hayam is all about.
Finally, I want to lift up the powerful Torah Yul offered while celebrating his becoming Bar Mitzvah. First it should be noted that Yul chanted the entire shirat hayam, Song of the Sea, leading a call and response rendition of parts of the song, facilitating, in a sense, a theatrical re-enactment of crossing through the split sea, reminding ourselves of that experience, nurturing that seed within us that knows how important the experience of freedom is for us and those around us.
In his teaching, Yul noted that shirat hayam is a celebratory song—yes celebrating the experience of freedom, but also, as Yul bemoaned, celebrating in great, even gizzly, detail, the defeat of the Israelites’ enemies. For Yul, a close reading of the text found that the balance was too far towards reveling in the defeat of Egyptians compared to celebrating the freedom of the Israelites. He compared this to past and present geopolitical conflicts: yes, we need to celebrate Ukrainian victories on the battlefield fending off Russian aggression, he cited, but does that mean we need to celebrate the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers, many of whom had no desire for war? Yes, the United States celebrated its victory over Imperial Japan at the end of World War II. But did it need to celebrate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese at the hands of the atomic bombs?
For Yul, the following now-famous teaching from the Talmud resonates: Yes, the Israelites—human beings—celebrated the drowning of the Egyptians, but did God? As the Talmud teaches, “The ministering angels wanted to chant songs of praise [after the drowning of the Egyptians] but the Holy One said, ‘The work of my hands is being drowned in the sea, and you sing songs of praise?'”
We are all created in the image of the Divine. Yul wants us to remember that.
