Sermon – Rosh Hashanah 5787 – Rabbi Karen Martin
Back in January, members of five different Worthington faith communities came together for the first gathering of faith250, a project to honor the 250 years since the founding of our country and to help build bridges and relationships across faith communities through the study of four of America’s foundational texts.
As we began our conversation around The New Colossus, the poem found on the base of the Statue of Liberty, Rabbi Kellner invited those gathered to share the story of how we or our families came to this country. In hearing each other’s stories, we learned that around our table sat a Daughter of the Revolution, first and second generation immigrants, and several people in between.
The New Colossus was something of a strange choice to kick off our conversations about the foundational texts of this country. It wasn’t the earliest text – The Declaration of Independence, nor the most hard-hitting – What to a Slave is the 4th of July by Frederick Douglass, which truly does not pull its punches.
Nor was it the most surprising, because America the Beautiful has two verses that I – a show choir kid! – did not know existed. Rather, The New Colossus was an entreé into the American story that many of us shared – the story of coming to America in hopes of finding a better future for ourselves and our children.
The New Colossus was written by Emma Lazarus, a Sephardic Jew in 1883 that tells a story of America that is at once aspirational and rooted in the American story as a nation of immigrants:
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!”
These words, an explicit statement of welcome, were written in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act which passed the year prior, growing nativism, and widespread hostility toward immigrants in general and in particular against the tide of Jews immigrating to America fleeing the pogroms in eastern Europe and the Pale of the Settlement. Against this backdrop, Lazarus’ poem was a defiant and hopeful statement of welcome and succor. Lazarus challenged America to live up to her founding ideals, which, it turns out, is a very American Jewish thing to do.
That same spirit of challenge runs in her family and is, in turn, our legacy. Emma Lazarus was not the product of a new immigrant family. Had she so wished, she could have joined the Daughters of the Revolution as a direct descendant of the first Jews to arrive in America. Her people came from Portugal, emigrated to Holland, and travelled from there to Recife in Brazil.
They were forced to flee Recife when Portugal captured the colony and imposed the Inquisition in 1654. From there, a group of 23 Jewish refugees made their way to New Amsterdam, a colony of the Dutch West India Company, forming the first Jewish community in North America.
Many of these refugees had nothing, not even the money at the outset to pay for their passage.
Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of the colony, was not pleased and wanted to kick them out as soon as they settled their debts. He wrote a strongly worded letter to the directors of the Dutch West India Company asking permission to do just that given the well known “repugnance” and the “deceitful nature” of the Jews. Unfortunately for him, the Jewish refugees wrote to their family, friends, and coreligionists back in Holland for their support, and they came through. It turns out that Jews were significant investors in the Dutch West India Company, and new world capitalism won out against Old World discrimination. Stuyvesant was ordered to give liberty to the Jews, to allow them to live and trade both within the colony and beyond.
Appalled at the idea, Stuyvesant wrote back to the directors, “To give liberty to the Jews will be very detrimental… Giving them liberty, we cannot refuse the Lutherans and the Papists.”
Stuyvesant resisted at every step. While several of the Recife refugees pushed back, one, Asher Levy, was particularly tenacious. When Stuyvesant wanted Jews to pay hefty fees in lieu of serving in the protection of the colony, Levy demanded the right to stand guard and join the militia–at least in part because he couldn’t afford the fees at the time.
Few colonists were able to get licenses to become butchers, but Levy, a few years later, was able to secure such a license, only to be told he had to become a Burgher of the colony to practice, and Jews were not permitted to do so. He petitioned the directors to become a Burgher – and Stuyvesant, already in a precarious position, was forced to grant the status. Levy then petitioned for permission for his shop not to sell pork and to be closed on Saturday for the Sabbath. He was one of the first Jews to be permitted to sit on a jury – ironically, or perhaps deliciously at the trial against Peter Stuyvesant for his conduct in the loss of the colony to the British.
Levy and his comrades demanded that Jews be treated as all other colonists, forging a path through which all could hope to receive equal treatment under the law. They created homes, settling in this nascent nation, living out the command that God gave to the prophet Jeremiah for the Babylonian exiles 2000 years before:
Jeremiah 29:5-7
(5) Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit. (6) … Multiply there, do not decrease. (7) And seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to GOD in its behalf; for in its prosperity you shall prosper.
And as they did so, they continued to work both for the good of the nation, and to create a space for themselves within it.
There was a lot of work to do. While the Constitution of the United States forbade religious tests for federal offices, almost every state of the newly minted United States required test oaths for office and the majority required anyone holding a state office to be Protestant, or at least Christian.
Nevertheless, Jacob Henry ran for and won election to the State Assembly in North Carolina in 1808 and 1809. His opponent, perhaps a bit sour, argued that he should not be allowed to take his seat in the assembly since he was Jewish and could not take the test oath, though technically the test oath itself was in violation of the state’s Declaration of Rights which read: “that all men have a natural and unalienable right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience.”
In Jacob Henry’s address to the assembly, he demanded:
Are you prepared to plunge at once from the sublime heights of moral legislation, into the dark and gloomy caverns of superstitious ignorance? Will you drive from your shores and from the shelter of your constitutions, all who do not lay their oblations on the same altar, observe the same ritual, and subscribe to the same dogmas?…
For all know, that persecution in all its shapes and modifications, is contrary to the genius of our government, and the spirit of our law; and that it can never produce any other effect, than to render men hypocrites or martyrs.
He was allowed to take his seat in the assembly, and paved the way for other Jews and other non-Protestants to serve at all levels of government.
During the civil war American Jews experienced their first and only exile on American soil, this time in the form of General Order 11, issued by Ulysses S. Grant, expelling all Jews from the Military Department of Tennessee, which extended from Cairo, Illinois through parts of Kentucky and Tennessee on the charge of smuggling, despite the lack of evidence. Following the expulsion, Caesar Kaskel, a Jewish man from Peducah, KY hurried to Washington D.C. to speak with Abraham Lincoln:
President Lincoln famously asked, “And so the Children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Cannan?
Kaskel replied: “Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.”
“And this protection they shall have at once,” Lincoln replied.
When later asked why he countermanded Grant’s order, Lincoln answered, “To condemn a class is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad. I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.”
For the record, Grant did later regret his order and brought several Jews onto his cabinet when he became president.
A generation later, Emma Lazarus wrote the words of The New Colossus, again pushing back against the forces of nativism and bigotry that sought to paint all immigrants with the broad brush of condemnation. Her words became a beacon of hope for those seeking a better life, and for generations it shaped many of our understandings of America as a country that cares for all who come, that lifts people up, and helps them make a better future for themselves and their families. An America whose capacity for compassion is a source of colossal strength.
Last January, we debated whether her words were a lie, a challenge, or an aspiration. Ultimately, it is all three. Too often, when we fail to live up to that welcome, they’re a lie. Yet they were written as a challenge, a reminder of who we could be in the face of a country that, just over a century after its founding, was already forgetting its roots. To me, to many of us, they are aspirational: our hope that America will be a country that remembers the Biblical command to welcome the stranger, for we were strangers in the land of Egypt, and perhaps also on the Lower East Side.
In 1790, Moses Seixas, Warden of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, RI welcomed President Washington to Newport with the words, “Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events) behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People—a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine.”
In 1905, at a ceremony marking the 250th year since the arrival of the first Jews in this country – those refugees from Recife, these words from President Theodore Roosevelt were shared:
Even in our colonial period the Jews participated in the upbuilding of this country, acquired citizenship, and took an active part in the development of foreign and domestic commerce. During the Revolutionary period they aided the cause of liberty by serving in the Continental army and by substantial contributions to the empty treasury of the infant republic. During the Civil War thousands served in the armies and mingled their blood with the soil for which they fought.
I am glad to be able to say, in addressing you on this occasion, that while the Jews of the United States…have remained loyal to their faith and their race traditions, they have become indissolubly incorporated in the great army of American citizenship, prepared to make all sacrifices for the country, either in war or peace, and striving for the perpetuation of good government and for the maintenance of the principles embodied in our Constitution.
For 372 years now, we have been a part of the tapestry of this country. As American Jews and Jewish Americans, we have shaped this country as much as it has shaped us. We came in search of refuge, with hopes based on the promise of a land that would judge us not on our faith but on our character and our contributions to this nation.
Time and again, we have challenged America to live up to its highest ideals for our sake, and for the sake of all who dwell here. Torah teaches us v’ahavta l’reiacha camocha – love your fellow as yourself, and Talmud goes further, that:
“We should sustain the non-Jewish poor with the Jewish poor, visit the non-Jewish sick with the Jewish sick,” – that we must care for the most vulnerable not only in our own Jewish communities, but in the broader communities in which we live– “for” Talmud tells us, “these are the ways of peace” (Gittin 61a 5).
Lit by the light of Torah, radiant as Liberty’s torch, we also worked to extend the promises and protections of equal treatment under the law to others.
Rabbi Abraham Joshual Heschel marched with Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, and Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who fled Nazi persecution, spoke immediately before King at the March on Washington, warning against the pernicious perils of silence in the face of injustice. Jewish leaders supported political action to right the wrongs of racism and inequality in this country so actively that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Japanese American Redress Act, and the Fair Housing Act Amendments of of 1988, among others, were all drafted in whole or in part the conference room of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
At this time, we’re facing antisemitism unlike anything we’ve seen in decades. I’ve had a handful of conversations in which people have mentioned making sure their passport is updated should “worse come to worst.” But I’m not ready to run yet. We have faced this before, and we have fought against the tide of bigotry and nativism with our words and actions.
We know how to make meaningful change in this country, how to fight for our voices to be heard, and how to envision a better tomorrow. We are not alone in this fight for a brighter future. We have friends and allies united in hope.
Tonight, we have looked back through history, drawing on our past to see where we’ve come from, to draw strength from those who went before and forged the paths we now tread. We know this country is not perfect and never has been. Longing for the past cannot build a better tomorrow.
But we can. On Rosh Hashanah, we symbolically re-enthrone God as our Sovereign and affirm our service to our highest values, justice and mercy, compassion, caring for each other, and for the most vulnerable in our midst. With Torah as our light, with every voice and every vote, we can work to ensure our government continues to be by and for the people, a government that is in service to the people, so that all people can practice their faith “according to the dictates of their own conscience.” We can build “a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Moses tells Joshua as he prepares to cross into the Promised Land, hazak v’ematz – be strong and resolute. We too must be strong and resolute in our convictions.
Together as generations of Jews who have gone before us, we must continue to challenge America to live up to her ideals, to make America a light unto the nations in truth, her lamp lifted beside the golden door.
L’shana Tova
Rabbi Karen Martin