Sermon: A Refugee’s Lot

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 19 November 2016

I don’t imagine it figures in his memory – it will have seemed so small at the time.   But I remember this as the single kindest act my father has ever done for me.  It was 1976, forty years ago.  Britain was not having a good time.  We had recently come out of the three-day week, when power shortages meant that factories had to be closed for a large part of the week, strikes had meant that lessons at school sometimes had to be conducted by the light of Calor gas lamps.   We had a generator in our garage for the power cuts. There was a popular though glum poster saying “Would the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.”  My family was about to be part of the exodus of those years.

My father had found a great job through his company in Los Angeles, California.  We were hardly to be deprived refugees.  But leaving London felt very tough to thirteen-year-old me.  Leaving friends and family, school, shul and the scouts.   Leaving the familiar.   But we were going to do it, with the day of departure the first of January 1977.  I remember being especially upset about one silly thing – I really loved my collection of Matchbox model cars, built up over the years since I had been very small.   In America these cars were going to be all wrong – the cars would all be different.  That was when my father said the kindest thing – that he would help me replace them when I got there so that I would have a proper collection of cars again.

In the end when we did settle in Los Angeles I never really took him up on his offer – at 13 toy cars didn’t really matter that much.  Our experience as economic migrants was good – we were welcomed to Los Angeles, settled in to school, an active and exciting American shul, but the scouts wasn’t so good – in London we baked jacket potatoes in our camp fires, the first scout troop meeting I went to in Los Angeles they were learning how to barbecue steak.   Our experience was not that of the refugee.

The refugee narrative is one of the most obvious points of contact between different world religions, wherever their origin.  A wandering Aramean was our father – Abraham and Sarah, their families, including Lot and his family, and descendants are all wanderers, nomadic people having to leave place after place in search of a better future.  The family of the infant Jesus has to leave their home in Judah to flee to Egypt in Matthew Chapter 2 in order to escape King Herod’s decree condemning first born infant children.   The first year of the Muslim calendar is dated to the Justinian year 622, the year of Mohammed’s Hijra – his flight from Mecca, where his life was endangered by tribesmen angry at his preaching to the Jewish-Arab town of Yathrib, later renamed Medinat Al Nabi – the city of the prophet, now shortened to Medinah.   Of course this is not only an Abrahamic tradition – Siddhartha Gautama – the Buddha found his enlightenment only by following an uncertain trail out from his hometown in Nepal, becoming a wandering monk.  How were the world’s religious refugees received?

Leaving and beginning a new life in another place by choice or by force is central to the continuing Jewish story down the centuries.  Sometimes we have left by expulsion, such as the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 or from Spain in 1492.  Sometimes we left by circumstances in the lands of our birth which make staying a near intolerable option, such as from the Pogroms in Russia and the Ukraine in the late nineteenth century or the rise of Nazism in 1930’s Germany.  Much of the time we have got up and moved on because this way led a better life for ourselves and our families, such as the Jews leaving Poland to make the bulk of the Jewish communities of America and the UK and back in the past where at the turn of the Common Era as many Jews lived in the Diaspora from Alexandria in Egypt round the Mediterranean to Rome as lived in Israel. Today the Jewish population of Shanghai is now at least 3000, though just before World War Two may have reached 20,000 and of Hong Kong near to 5000, go East young man. (Sources in www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/chinajews.html#6)

Sometimes by choice and sometimes by force.  The story of Lot reminds us of how difficult it is to move on even when it seems that it is the only sensible thing to do.   Lot had already been a refugee more than once in his life.  He had accompanied his uncle and aunt Abraham and Sarah leaving Haran for the land of Canaan and begun a life of wandering.   But now he was settled in Sodom with his family.  He had a place in the community.   How difficult to see the society disintegrating around him, its immorality and cruelty symbolised by the way in which people of the town come to attack his visitors, and Lot’s descent into putting up with it symbolised by his ridiculous offer to give his assailants his daughters.

Yet still Lot finds it difficult to make the decision to leave, to become a refugee yet again.  That trilling note which Lola sang was a Shalshelet, one of only four appearances that it makes in the whole Torah.  It was on the word Vayitmahmah – and Lot could not decide to go.   Seems so ridiculous in the circumstances that with Sodom in the state it was in Lot would have any second thoughts about leaving the awful place but it is not easy to decide to make your family refugees.

Our Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 50:11) suggests that it was because Lot was making a good living in Sodom, he had prospered there, why leave all that behind?   It also names the angel who got him out of there Raphael (Gensis Rabbah 50:2) – the healing angel, as if to become a refugee you have to be healed from the natural propensity of all us to stay in the place we are used to, even when the circumstances become awful.  Even then Lot’s unnamed wife couldn’t take leaving and looked back on the journey, famously becoming a pillar of salt.

When we witness the refugees and the migrants of our time we have to remember that behind every person on the dinghy arriving on European soil, every person looking out of place in a Scottish town, every person struggling with a new language, was a tough decision to leave.  A mixture of bravery, hope, trust that the strangers they would encounter would be kind, that the future could be better than the so often intolerable situation they have left behind.

It’s such a familiar saying that it has perhaps become hackneyed that the Torah says only once that you should love your neighbour as yourself – because it’s easy to love the person who lives like you do, but it says 36 times (Leviticus 19:18 and eg 19:34) that you shall love the stranger as yourself.  That is much more difficult and it is because we have the capacity to do so – because as a Jew “you know the heart of a stranger” – that we must do so.

How so?  How do we fulfil this mitzvah?  Of course its on a personal level – our individual willingness to welcome the new child to our school, the new family to our street, being open in our attitudes to people coming to our country as we needed people to be to us.  It’s on a communal level – the Alyth Drop in for Recent Refugees has now been running for four years welcoming 50-60 guests a month to this Synagogue for an afternoon or friendship, support and enjoyment.  There are some beautiful pictures of what happens there up on our Act with Us noticeboard.

The Alyth and Golders Green Parish Church Homeless Shelter gives fifteen people a warm place to eat and sleep once a week in rota with other churches and Synagogues through the winter. Up to half of our guests each time are recent migrants or refugees including, the last time I joined them a mechanical engineer from Somalia and an ex-teacher from Monserrat, working as cleaners through the day but with no home to sleep in at night.  Both projects always welcome new volunteers.  They don’t solve the causes behind the displacement of peoples nor behind homelessness but they offer some healing – Refuah for the individuals who are displaced when they end up in London, in the tradition of Rafael.

This week I was part of the launch of a Joseph Interfaith Foundation initiative to help recent refugees aged 16-23 to be introduced to the Social Culture of Britain.  The idea is that the Jewish and Muslim communities of the UK, both migrant and refugee communities in their origin, can work together to help young refugees, here without family, to learn how to be a positive part of this country, how to live in a multicultural society when they may have been used to monoculture at home, how to use our health and education services, how to feel that the UK is a welcome home.   It will take place in mosques and be led by Jews and Muslims together.  No one initiative makes the move easy or solves the problems but love of the stranger is best made up of a rich mosaic of levels of care.

Leaving home is tough.  Recognise this in the faces and experiences of refugees and migrants and know that small acts of kindness make a difference.  I finish with a poem written by Lotte Kramer – Lotte was born in Mainz, Germany and came to England as a child refugee, having to leave her parents behind as a fifteen year old.  They were murdered by the Nazis. She is a member of the Peterborough Liberal Jewish Community.  She wrote this poem “On Shutting the Door”

Often, when I leave home,

I think of you,

How you’d have shut the door

That last time

They fetched you out at dawn.

 

What fears would prophesy,

What intimations

Could foretell the terrors

Of those plains,

The herding in to ash?

 

Or maybe, you looked round

As if before

A holiday, leaving

No trace of dust,

No crumbs for pests, no moths

 

In cupboards, carpets;

Covered the chairs,

The setee from the glare

Of light and sun,

Turned off the water, gas…..

 

We know the heart of the stranger.