You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer

Our Torah commands us:

לא־תעשק שכיר עני ואביון מאחיך או מגרך אשר בארצך בשעריך
You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer, whether a fellow countryman or a stranger in one of the communities of your land. (Deuteronomy 24:14)

 And Rashi explains that "abuse" refers to the substandard wage that the laborer's neediness or their foreignness might allow you to extract from them.

I am reading a history of farms and farm labor which is reminding me of all the ways we have historically done just that in this country. Chattel slavery built this country, its financial system, and some very great fortunes by treating African captives and their descendants as property. After the Civil War ended chattel slavery, Klan terror allowed the white people who took the land to continue exploiting the Black people who farmed it by means of debt peonage and sharecropping.

We have a minimum wage in this country (which has reached historic lows) but it explicitly says it is for "non-agricultural labor," meaning that gouging the pay of farmworkers is legal. And by keeping most of those farmworkers in a status that denies them the protections of law, we restrict their means of resistance: of bargaining for better. Sometimes we do that by laws and treaties, like the Bracero Program of the 40's, 50's, and 60's or the non-citizen status of Filipinos in the first half of the 20th century. Sometimes we do that simply by hiring people from other countries but declaring their presence here to be "illegal."

The most fundamental thing that makes me human is treating you as human.  Leviticus 19:18 expresses it this way:

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Treating others as something other than human is demonic. It is demonic when we rip infants from the arms of their mothers. It is demonic when we herd teens into concentration camps. It is demonic when we gas moms who are trying to bring their children here for safety from death squads and gangs and sexual abuse.

As I write these words I can hear an imaginary reader objecting, "But what about..."

And I fill in the words "But what about if it were you?"

What if it were your toddler being forced to testify alone in court in an language they don't know as to why they would be in danger if they were still at home?

What if it were your teen confined behind razor wire, under the supervision of predatory and violent adults, because they seek sanctuary here?

What if it were you being gassed because you are trying to keep your children safe from murderers and predators?

If you cannot identify with the exploited and the oppressed, then you are identifying yourself with the exploiter and the oppressor. You don't have to gas that mom yourself. You don't have to rape that teen yourself. You don't have to kidnap that infant yourself. If you fail to see them as human -- if you fail to see them as YOU -- then you share in the guilt of those who do those things.

I am uncertain what it would cost to reduce the super profits of agribusiness by paying a living wage to the people who actually farm our food, the people we choose not to call "farmers" but "farm workers." I do know that if they cannot feed their own children while those children live indoors and attend school, then we do not deserve to eat. I do know that if they cannot live free of pesticide poisoning, then we do not deserve to eat. I do know that if we cannot treat the people who feed us as human, then we ourselves are not human.

Cherem

So far as I can tell, my dad's dad, Harry Levine, was born in London, England on August 4, 1889 and came here in 1901, before the US Congress decided that he was a member of an undesirable race. That race, listed on a number of official documents, was "Hebrew."
My mom's mom, variously know on official documents as Molka, Molly, Margaret, and Marjorie, was born here. Her mom, Betsy Stenzler, came here from what is now Ukraine, but was listed in official documents in 1907. She is also listed as a member of that undesirable race, Hebrew.
None of my grandparents or great-grandparents had to undergo "extreme vetting." None of them had to get permission to come here before they arrived. All they had to do was show up, look reasonably healthy, and give some sort of indication that they would not immediately become public charges.
When white people brag that their families came "the right way" that is generally what they are talking about, showing up.
I find evidence that Harry, my paternal grandfather became a citizen in 1918. I find no evidence that my paternal grandmother, Cecilia became a citizen. That did not stop my father or his brothers from serving in the US Army and Navy.
I find no evidence that my great grandparents, Betsy or Sam, ever became citizens. That didn't stop their son, my grandmother Margie's brother Arthur, or their grandson, Margie's son Roger, from serving in the US Army.
Coming from England in 1901 I would have to guess that my grandfather Harry was not fleeing a horror that he had to prove in court at the age of twelve, nor that he was separated from his family and put in a cage. When I knew him he had a little shoe store on Burnside Avenue in the Bronx at a location which is now a Payless.
Coming from Galicia in 1907 it is possible that my great grandparents were frightened by the pogroms in Russia, just across the river. They did not have to submit to a hearing to demonstrate that this was a justifiable fear, nor that they fell into a recognized class, approved for asylum.
After 1924 the Congress decided that "Hebrews" were an undesirable "race." I suppose one proof is that all these people I mentioned remained Jewish. I, their grandson and great grandson have remained Jewish. Betsy and Sam continue to be listed in census reports as Yiddish speakers, even thirty plus years after their arrival. Even Harry, born in England, is listed in some census reports as Yiddish speaking, although my father remembers him refusing to speak to his customers in Yiddish, yelling "Speak English!" at them.
After the Nazis took over central Europe, huge numbers of Jewish people wanted to flee. But by then the United States had implemented strict quotas on this undesirable race and was unprepared to waive them. Their were no gas chambers yet in 1938. Lindsey Graham and Jeff Sessions and their ilk could have argued that they had no justifiable fear. Hell, they could have looked at the possibility of coming conflict with Germany and argued that all those desperate Jews were "bad hombres" and possible enemy combatants. Six million of them died.
I am unsurprised by Graham and Sessions. I don't expect any better. But now I hear some Jewish Americans feign outrage at comparisons between the US Coast Guard forcing the MS St. Louis to return to Europe in 1939 and Customs and Border Protection gassing asylum seekers at the San Ysidro border crossing.
You don't see the connection? You pretend it is disrespectful to the dead?
It is you who disrespect our dead. You disrespect them by allying yourself with the Cordell Hulls of today. You disrespect them by allying yourself with the Hamans of today. Your disrespect them by allying yourself with the Labans of today.
You risk cherem. You risk cherem. You risk cherem.

מודה אני

Was I five years old when they first taught us to sing "Modeh Ani"? It is the first prayer an observant Jew recites in the morning, even before one washes ones hands. It is a simple prayer that can be taught to young children and I see posters and plaques of it for sale, to be hung in a child's bedroom before they can speak.

I translate the words as: "I am thankful before You, living and eternal King! You reanimate my soul within me in the great mercy of Your faith!"

These words - in the melody I first learned for them - come to me often while my dog Prophet and I walk together in the woods along the Hudson, looking at the Palisades across the way. Everything about those walks is a gift. Once or twice a winter we hear a piercing screech and see a bald eagle winging up the river or sitting and watching us from a tree. Occasionally the air and the water are still enough that we can see the cliffs on the Jersey side reflected on the river's' surface. Frequently the rising sun moves down those cliffs, so that their upper reaches are illuminated bright red, while the lower part is still black and gray in the shadow of the Bronx side. The light in the woods we walk in is different each day. So is the color of the leaves. And - not to be forgotten - there is the everyday blessing of a companion who enjoys the walk as much as I do, although his sensory universe is totally different and his list of the blessings would have much more to do with sounds and scents: his friends, their human companions, coyotes, opossums, rabbits, and feral cats.

So those are all extraordinary gifts for which I have to remind myself to be thankful. But the words of the prayer which take my breath are "b'chemla rabbah emunatecha": in the great mercy of Your faith. Your faith. Your mercy. Because I failed to live up to my promise yesterday. I may fail again today. But I am still here, still breathing. There is mercy for my failures. There is faith that I will eventually do right.

After the Shoah the rabbis devoted a great deal of attention to theodicy, the question of how a good God can permit the presence of evil or of unmerited suffering. What interests me every morning is the problem of unmerited grace. What have I done to deserve all my blessings? What have I done to deserve a good friend like Prophet? A wife like Judith? All my human friends and family? Living indoors? My health? What have I done even to deserve a breath: the reanimation of my soul within me?

Every single one of these things is an unearned blessing. I receive them due to great mercy for my failings and faith that I may eventually merit some of them.

A note. While writing the above yesterday I was thinking about the world-class view that is the Hudson and the Palisades from the Bronx. We once took an excursion boat on the Danube from Kelheim to Weltenburg Abbey. It was spectacular, with 80 meter cliffs rising above the river. I am really glad to have seen it. But the Palisades are twice that height, and I get to look at them every single day. You see what I mean about making time to appreciate a gift?

So I was thinking about the Danube and all the literary and musical works it has inspired. I looked it up on Wikipedia and there was a mention of Chabad niggunim from the 18th century that Lubavitcher Hassidim used to sing. To clarify, a niggun is a repetitive melody, often sung with nonsense syllables, to aid in meditative prayer. And the claim - unsubstantiated in the Wikipedia article - was that these Hassidim used these melodies to heighten their appreciation at seeing the Danube! In other words, they were doing the exact same thing that I do with letting Modeh Ani run through my mind as a walk along the Hudson.

I texted my college friend Pinchas in California to ask if this were so. In addition to being a professor of Talmud and a scholar of Zohar, he is familiar with Yiddish literature and has done translation for YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research. He responded almost immediately that yes, it is so, and that the best known of these niggunim is the refrain to the song "Dona Dona."

I know this song from the Folkways records of Mark Olf, who was a friend of my grandfather. But it achieved great popularity in the Sixties in English versions. It was the B-side of a Joan Baez single in 1960 and was also recorded by Chad & Jeremy, Donovan, and the Chad Mitchell Trio. I always wondered about the refrain to that song, which is just "dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, do; dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, dona, do." If it is a reference to the Danube, ("Donau" in German, "Duna" in Yiddish) it suddenly all makes sense.

Today as Prophet and I walked by the Hudson in the steady rain, I sang "Dona Dona."

Why I use the term "Neo-Confederate"

The other day I responded to a friend's Facebook post about the election with a comment using the term "neo-Confederate." One of his friends, a stranger to me, objected to the tone. Not knowing him at all I could only guess why he would find this characterization of today's Republican Party objectionable: Not "nice"? Calculated to shut down discussion? I chose not to engage with a stranger on a friend's page. But I do think it is worth my time to explain why I think it is an accurate characterization. 

1) Since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder 570 US 2 (2013) Republican leadership has instituted voter suppression rules of various types in many states. Georgia, for example, insists that the voter's name on the rolls be consistent with every other place it is listed. This rule is designed to exclude people with names the average Anglo Saxon finds "unusual.  My stepchildren, for example, have a Portuguese surname. It is two words and doesn't begin with a capital letter. I can't tell you how many incorrect variations I have seen on official forms because the computer (or the clerk) insists on inserting a capital letter or deleting a space, or even deleting the second part of their name! By far the silliest of these misunderstandings transforms the surname to Da.

North Dakota now insists on street addresses, which excludes rural residents who use PO boxes, the majority of whom are Native. Alabama first introduced an ID requirement for voting, then closed DMV offices in majority-Black counties in order to increase the difficulty of obtaining that ID. All these subterfuges to reduce the presence of people of color on Election Day mirror the 8-box laws, and spurious "literacy" tests, and poll taxes that the original Confederates used to retake political power after the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution. Should their advocates be insulted to be called neo-Confederate? They want to disfranchise African Americans, just like the ex-Confederates of the late 19th century.

2) Apropos those Reconstruction Amendments, the President has now announced a campaign against the 14th Amendment's explicit statement that people born here are citizens. That Amendment was originally put in place to nullify a Supreme Court decision almost universally regarded as its worst: Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 US 393 (1857). In Dred Scott the Court specified a class of people -- those of African descent -- with "no rights that a white man was bound to respect." That is exactly how immigrants and their children would be treated if we were to abolish birthright citizenship. CBP and ICE are already acting as if due process doesn't apply to non-citizens who live in this country, arresting them and holding them without court orders or indictments. Now the Republican Party wants to treat people who are born here the same way. South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham described the Constitutional right to citizenship as a "policy." Actually, he called it an "absurd policy." The 14th Amendment is a Constitutional protection that the original Confederates tried to prevent when it was first introduced. What better description of its current opponents could there be than neo-Confederate? They, too, believe in a group -- immigrants from countries outside Europe -- with no rights that a white man is bound to respect.

3) And then there is their worship of the regalia and "heritage" of the Confederacy. Why would people who fly the white supremacist banner of the Confederacy object to being called neo-Confederate? Why would people who insist on public monuments to Confederate leaders (originally erected not to commemorate that past, but to emblematize disfranchisement and Jim Crow) be uncomfortable with that characterization.

I chose not to have this argument on Facebook. But I definitely wanted to articulate and clarify my thinking on this. I don't like to throw around inflammatory phrases in lieu of making a case. I also like to be clear and accurate. "Neo-Confederate" is both when it comes to describing the Republican Party of 2018.

"A Well-Ordered Militia"

This old photo (2014) of armed occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is circulating again today on social media (and even some legitimate news sites) as a kind of placeholding illustration to represent the private "militias" that claim they are deploying to the southern border in terror of a few thousand desperate and impoverished refugees from Central America. My first reaction was to wonder about an inverse relationship between gun size and anatomy, or perhaps a direct relationship between caliber and IQ. Then I remembered the Second Amendment defense of a "well-ordered militia" and wondered whether this assortment of crackpots would have qualified.

But I am a student of US history. So I quickly realized that, yes, had they had iPhones in the early 19th century, one of the main activities of the militias of the time would, indeed, have been the taking and posting of heroic selfies, probably with explicitly racist hashtags.

I started thinking about the Red Stick War of 1813-1814. The Mississippi militia burned Native farms without engaging them in battle before installing themselves at a fortification they called Fort Mims. When two African American teens told the Mississippi militia's colonel that Red Sticks were in the vicinity, he had them beaten for lying. Then he served several barrels of whiskey to his men, so that they were actually both drunk and outnumbered when the Red Sticks attacked and defeated them. All the African Americans present at Fort Mims then departed with the victorious Red Sticks.

The Tennessee militia, led by Andrew Jackson was plagued by infighting, indiscipline and desertion. It was only the arrival of several hundred Cherokee and Creek allies along with a regiment of US Regulars that allowed Jackson to mount an offensive. And (of course, this is Andrew Jackson we are talking about) he subsequently treated his Creek allies as a defeated force, making them sign a humiliating treaty as if they had been opponents!

Then there is Black Hawk's War of 1832. Black Hawk led a group of Sauk and Fox Natives across the Mississippi River from Iowa to settle on lands in Illinois. When his scouts discovered a large body of Illinois militia, he sent three men to parley with them. Major Isaiah Stillman shot them, then sent his men after the Sauk scouts who were observing from nearby hills. When the militia encountered Black Hawk's main body of fighters, they turned and fled. His defeat sparked a general call-up of militia, but they were plagued by insubordination and desertion and they were finally disbanded. Black Hawk was eventually captured by Regular troops of the US Army, but the militiamen who accompanied them engaged in a wholesale massacre of non-combatant Natives.

Abraham Lincoln was 23 when he enlisted in a company of Illinois militia to fight the Sauk. He was elected Captain, apparently because he was a very good wrestler. He remembered his service in an 1848 speech to Congress saying, "I had a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes, and although I never fainted from the loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry."

I think sending large bodies of US troops to the border now is a political stunt by a racist President. But they are being sent, nevertheless, and they have to prepare for the conditions there. Among the concerns of planners is the presence of heavily-armed (and poorly-regulated) civilians. In fact, the planning PowerPoint for "Operation Faithful Patriot" refers to "Reported incidents of unregulated militias stealing National Guard equipment during deployments. They operated under the guise of citizen patrols supporting CBP." Here is a copy of that slide.

All of which is another way of saying that racist militias are not a new phenomenon in US history. Neither is their disorganization. It seems not just to be part of the imagined heritage of the American white man, but an essential piece of our actual history, too.

Finding Common Ground

My wife Judith and I used to attend an annual retreat for school leaders at which some classic text was the focus of each year's discussion. One year the assignment was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Not long into the seminar, Judith revealed that she had only read as far as page 9 and then put the book down when she encountered the sentences: “You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It’s quite astonishing, when you’re used to working with European material.” The other participants - like me mostly white, mostly male - could probably be excused for not having had the same visceral reaction to those words that she did. They could certainly be excused for having written them: they hadn't; Huxley’s book, not theirs. But they could not be excused for refusing to hear her horror and revulsion. Yet this is precisely what they did. And they insisted that Brave New World was something that should be treated as ironic literature and that must be “discussed.”

When Sylvia was a senior in high school, her humanities teacher had the class read a couple of coming-of-age memoirs by immigrants and then discuss US immigration policy. One day one of her classmates announced that she believed no new immigrants should be allowed in the country, then added that current residents who had been born elsewhere and their children should also be deported. Then she gave Sylvia a long smile. The teacher insisted that this was an opinion (instead of an intentional and very personal provocation) and that it should be “discussed.” 

Jessy was a college freshman in a writing seminar when the professor prompted the class to describe a scene that was scary. She wrote a few paragraphs about a cloudy night in the woods with unidentifiable rustling noises in the brush and mysterious animal calls. One of her classmates complained that it was utterly unfrightening and would have been better if it described an urban nighttime scene with street lights and lots of “diverse” people. Nobody objected. Jessy was the only person of color in that class. She heard this to mean that her family was more frightening than wild animals. The professor saw that Jessy’s feelings were hurt, but felt that Jessy should have “discussed” it.

I choose these examples because they are about feelings and identity. In the case of Jessy and Sylvia, good instructors, with the trust of the class, may have been able to get people to look at why these comments were direct insults, intentional in both cases, instead of “differences of opinion” but their own points of view prevented them even from seeing this. In the case of Judith, nobody set out to insult her intentionally. Instead, the erasure came when educated, mostly-liberal people insisted on treating her reaction as a failure to engage intellectually, as if her reaction proved that she, too, was nothing more than a “negro ovary.” Again, an attentive facilitator might have directed participants to examine their own responses to Judith. Instead, and again, that facilitator was only interested in what he already understood about the book. 

What about a person who tells me, “It’s too bad Hitler didn’t kill your parents”? Or a teacher, assigned to my faculty, telling me, “I didn’t go to Harvard to become a zookeeper caring for your animals”? Those aren’t differences of opinion. I have no interest in discussing them. 

I believe in good and I believe in evil. I don’t think Sylvia or Jessy’s classmates, or the people in Judith’s seminar (or even the Nazi or the teacher I fired) are themselves evil. But they choose to serve evil. 

I am well aware of the danger of confusing my own views with “the good” and of demonizing people who disagree with me. But I see a danger as well in valuing civility above empathy and in failing to see that words harm.

Last week we saw a white extremist send bombs to multiple prominent Democrats, including the former President of the United States and the former Secretary of State, and to a mainstream news outlet. He was apparently motivated by our current President's "opinions" about them. We saw a gunman enter a synagogue and slaughter 11 worshippers, apparently motivated by his "opinions" about Jews and immigration. We saw another gunman attempt to enter a Black church, and -- failing that -- murder two African American shoppers in a supermarket, apparently motivated by his "opinions" about Black people. Much of the commercial press (cough-New York Times-cough) seems to think that the problem is "incivility."

All of this is just to say that I don't believe in finding "common ground" with those who would annihilate me... or anybody else.