Community Blog

Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Vayikra, the beginning of Leviticus, in which we get the rules and regulations regarding five categories of sacrifices. There were burnt offerings, meal offerings, peace offerings, sin offerings, and guilt offerings. I haven’t found these labels super informative, but they get the broad strokes across. 

In The Five Books of Miriam, “Leah the Namer” teaches, “The Hebrew word for sacrifice is korban, from the root meaning to draw near. In contrast, the English word sacrifice comes from a Latin root meaning to make sacred. At the heart of these differing interpretations lie two fundamentally different understandings of what it means to offer something to God.” In response the book of modern commentary offers a response from the nameless “our daughters,” with the question “How do you transform something profane into something sacred?” 

That line really hit me, and while I feel like I could offer several potential answers, this week I am particularly thinking about the deportations without due process we are seeing all over our country in the last few weeks. On Tuesday, I attended a gathering of rabbis along with the executive director of Congregation Action Network (CAN), who told us many stories about the immigrants impacted by recent events. Stories of people whose documentations timed out while waiting for their next appointment or set of paperwork, or people whose documentations were in order but were detained anyway for being too recognizably non-American or non-White, or people whose documentations were in order but were detained anyway because they dared to speak out on controversial political topics. The separation of families, the inhuman treatment at many of these for-profit prisons and detention centers, the idea of sending asylum seekers back to their countries of origin to starve to death or be killed by drug cartels, is horrific in any circumstance. No human being is illegal, and I do not draw these distinctions to indicate that wanton and cruel deportations of undocumented residents is somehow acceptable either. However, when the legal authorities aren’t even following any legal protocol, when it seems anyone can get snatched away by plain-clothed men in masks just for speaking out against certain policies or politicians, when due process isn’t followed, immigration enforcement simply becomes state-sponsored terrorism. Our country starts to look like 1970’s and ‘80’s Central and South America, like Argentina’s Dirty War, and our legal residents become the new Desaparecidos. These actions are beyond profane. 

And yet, though many democrats and leftists protested President Trump’s immigration enforcement in his first term, a certain proportion of those same voices were noticeably silent as the many of the same policies continued through President Biden’s term. Families continued to be separated, immigrants were denied asylum, and deported to countries they weren’t even from. In Biden’s final year in office, deportations were at a 10-year high, thanks in part to extensions to Title 42, a supposed public health order. We allowed the profane to become mundane, and are now seeing the escalation of such inhumanity as a result. 

In the second verse of the parasha, the Torah says, “A person who shall bring near of you an offering to God.” Ibn Ezra points out that the grammar there is wonky. It should say, “A person of you [i.e. from the Israelite people] who shall bring near an offering to God.” He offers a couple non-committal potential explanations for this phrasing, but mostly seems concerned with just correcting the grammar. The Chassidic Masters, on the other hand, read into this wording for purpose: “The verse does not say ‘a man of you who shall bring near an offering,’ but ‘a man who shall bring near of you an offering’—the offering must come from within the person. It is the animal within man that must be ‘brought near’ and elevated by the Divine fire upon the altar.”

And here is where I think we find the answer to Our Daughters’ question: How do we transform the profane into the sacred? By being willing to bring the animal within nearer to God, and allow it to be sacrificed. By giving up fear of scarcity or retribution, by letting go of xenophobia and the concern that outsiders are here to take something from us. We are not sheep and they are not wolves. We are all humans, made in the Divine Image. We all have something to give, and we all have needs to elevate our spirits. We can act out in this moment of profanity, to show our holiness, to shine light on the sacred spark within us all. We can speak out against the cruelty in order to transform our communities into stronger hubs of diversity and abundance. 

In the coming weeks, I will have more information from and about Congregation Action Network to share. As you know, we have looked into ways Ner Shalom can actively support immigrants and refugees in the past, and a lot of the asks from big organizations like HIAS and the Sanctuary Movement are beyond our capacity as a small congregation. However, because CAN is a hub of many congregations already acting in small and local ways, I am hopeful there will be something those of us looking to be proactive can plug into. In the meantime, please note our April Tzedakah of the Month recipient is now CAN, as their executive director shared with us on Tuesday that the organization currently only has enough funds to stay afloat through June. 

May we sacrifice fear and hatred, may we draw closer to the Divine with sacred purpose, and may we elevate the holy order that all people should live with dignity and freedom. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.