So if I'm driving in Mt Kisco, as I'm sure you have experienced, I am often yielding to pedestrians.
As someone who walks a lot in town I've noticed that not everyone enters the crosswalk with such confidence. Many members of the latino new immigrant community will wait on the sidewalk until there is absolutely no traffic coming. If I'm driving I often have to make eye contact and wave them on. They will smile and wave in gratitude. Its possible that they come from a country like Israel where that is just being smart or it could be that they don't feel they have the right of way.
This may not seem significant but I think this is one of many small behaviors that communicate whether someone feels they belong.
When you feel like you belong somewhere you are not as concerned about being unassuming and deferential.
I will start walking in the crosswalk because I have the right and if I don't and I'm stopped by the police, I speak the language to talk things through and if I get a ticket I have a whole community filled with lawyers to help me. If I get hit and need medical care I have insurance. I walk with confidence because I can handle the consequences. For new immigrants the margin of error economically, legally, and medically is so much narrower.
That's why the Torah tells us not to take advantage of the stranger, of the immigrant because they don't walk with the same confidence in the world, they walk with deference and unfamiliarity and some may be tempted to leverage their vulnerability for personal gain.
What we learn from the Torah as Jews we also learn from our history as Jews. Having been a stranger we know that strangers are not only taken advantage of but easily labeled as "the other" and blamed for a whole host of problems that had little or nothing to do with us. As Jews we lived in societies that purchased their community cohesion on the backs of our derision. Societies were able to define themselves by who they mutually rejected and often we were on the other side of that line.
The Torah and our historical experience make us sensitive to and responsible for when we see it happening to others.
And indeed it is happening to others. I'll give you a couple of examples, one economic and one public safety.
The brick and mortar shopping experience is in the midst of going through a major disruption in the United States as e-commerce changes the way people shop. Owners of commercial real estate are in the process of figuring out how to find tenants whose businesses are internet proof. If you travel across the country you will find empty spots in strip malls and shuttered big box stores. Disruption in the long run is not always a bad thing but it will take time for commercial spaces to re-imagine and refill vacancies. In the meantime change is hard and I have heard people more than once say that some of the store vacancies in downtown Mt Kisco are because of our new immigrant population. I've met with Mt Kisco Mayor Michael Cindrich multiple times recently and he also heard these claims. He assured me that vacancies are related to e-commerce or landlord/tenant issues. But the economy and disruption can be disorienting for people and what we have seen happen historically in those kinds of circumstances is no different than now. When things begin to feel strange, it must be the stranger.
Another example is the issue of public safety. Since 9/11 we have been concerned about security and rightly so. We have every interest in protecting Americans from those who wish to do us harm. But fear is not an easy thing to contain and its an even easier thing to manipulate. When the threat is foreign it becomes easier to point to foreigners. Some have said that undocumented immigrants commit violent crimes when they enter our country. At least two different studies that measured incarceration and crime rates found that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate than U.S. citizens. If we were interested in addressing the more significant public safety issues first, we would not focus on immigrants but citizens and more specifically the ones who drive cars since auto accidents take many more lives than immigrants. But we are wired to be wary of the stranger.
Add to these social realities the possibility that more undocumented immigrants may face deportation and you have a new immigrant community that lives in a perpetual state of anxiety.
4 Million of this country's 11 million undocumented immigrants are connected to a child who has some form of citizenship status. Deporting one of these 4 million means taking a family apart. With this concern in mind, children of undocumented immigrant parents at Mt Kisco elementary school are sent to school with emergency packs. These packs have the phone number of an adult they can call if they come home and find that their parents are not there. Recently Mt Kisco elementary has reported a decrease in attendance among new immigrant children whose parents have been more reticent to let them out of the house.
For us it's a public policy conversation. For our neighbors it's a reason not to send their kids to school.
Shortly after I heard about this I flew to Israel. On the flight home
I crossed an ocean to enter this country but, thanks to Ambien, I don't remember much of it.
I don't remember much of Customs and Immigration either. I wasn't there long enough for it to have made an impression. I slid my passport into a scanner, pressed the pads of my fingers on some backlit glass and a machine spit out a piece of paper before I could lose my train of thought. Did my ride know I got in early?
I passed long lines of people speaking foreign languages on my way to get my bag. The officer standing between me and the arrivals hall said "welcome" in the same way I used to greet customers who entered the Gap at Woodfield mall where I worked while home from college.
On the car ride home I was listening to people on the radio talking about who belongs here and who doesn't. Who followed the rules and who didn't. Who is "legal" and who is "illegal". The tone felt so presumptuous and I couldn't put my finger on it until I remembered how the gates of entry swung wide for me that morning. How thoughtless that act of citizenship was.
The truth is I did absolutely nothing to earn or deserve my citizenship, it was gifted to me at birth because of a decision my great grandparents made. I didn't have to work for it, sacrifice for it or travel to get it. It was given to me before I even knew to dream of it, before I knew what dreams were.
It's self evident that there are millions of people in this country that did much more than I in order to be a part of it. In that car ride home I realized that my Ambien was their sleepless nights, my fingerprints were the labor of their hands and the welcome I received with the entitlement of a consumer was the very same thing that made them cry.
Do I really know who belongs here and who doesn't?
The conversation on this issue has to take on a different tone.
Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler taught that when the Torah uses the word stranger to describe a foreigner it is an attributed characteristic not an intrinsic one. It is not who that person is, it's a perception we project on to them. Its not something innate in that person but the point of view from which we see them. Dessler teaches that our job is to invest care and friendly concern into that person so that they become more familiar and less strange. How else are we to understand the Torah's preoccupation with the stranger?
How different would our experience in Egypt have been if pharaoh took Dessler's approach? How different would Jewish history be if our host societies chose not to persecute but to see and appreciate us? How different would the world be if people's insider status was not seen as license but a reason to be humble and appreciate what others did to end up at the very place where we started?
A group of Mt Kisco clergy, volunteers and community leaders decided that it was time to change the conversation so that it reflects that spirit.
We are organizing a march and rally during which we will hear immigration stories. Stories of why and how people came to this country. What its like. What are the joys and the challenges. Our goal is to help us all to see the human being within the immigrant.
It will take place on Sunday May 7
th
at 2:30pm. We will begin to march in the parking lot behind the Mt Kisco movie theater and end up in front of village hall.
I hope you will join us.
We want to dedicate a day during which those of us who have always felt at home hear from those who worked so hard to make this their home. We want to say clearly that the crosswalk is theirs too and when it comes to sacrifice, hard work and realizing a dream we are the ones who should defer to them.
Aaron
