After 10/7 and the onslaught of antisemitism and the deepening hatred of Jews, it’s become difficult to know if all our friends of the past are still our friends in the present. But it hasn’t kept many Jews from continuing to advocate for others who have been hunted in the streets of our country’s cities and who are literally afraid to come out of their homes for food, healthcare, and school. In cities like Minneapolis, currently, Jews are collecting food and funds to feed hungry and scared people. While the family and friends of Renee Good mourn her death, we can’t look away at what’s happening around us. We do it because even these small steps help us remember who we still are and who we must never fail to be. It shouldn’t matter to us if they’re undocumented immigrants or somewhere on track to citizenship. To us, they are human beings, parents, children, siblings, and neighbors, even across town.

In the book of Exodus and the Haggadah on Passover, we learn, “Do not scold your neighbor with a fault which is also your own” (Mekhilta 18). It can apply to efforts we fail to achieve and which we shouldn’t blame our neighbors for failing to achieve, too. But what fault is it that the rabbis want our people to own, collectively? They explained that “we know the heart of the stranger for we were once strangers in Egypt.” We can’t fault our neighbor for being a stranger among us, because we were once strangers in Egypt.

As long as we say, “My father was a fugitive Aramean” at Passover, we are forever bound to the heart and soul of the immigrant who longs for nothing more than to be home. We know what parents feel when they’re buying food for their family and they’re grabbed and detained before they can return to their car. We know what the children cry for when their parents are taken away from them and they are left alone. And we know that none of what we’re witnessing is right or good. Comprehensive immigration reform is the only humane way to address a problem all of us share, including those who want to be home in America.

Whatever our opinion of or position on the subject of immigrants, deportations, warehousing children, etc., it must meet the standard established by our rabbis who interpreted the Torah. Whether we are halakhic Jews or not, the rabbinic standard makes us all the same and puts us on a moral high ground that we cannot fail to hold.

Our role in a world of humanity hasn’t changed. We are bound to live by a moral code that originates in Torah and binds us to God’s way for us. No one bears a fault that warrants the cruel and inhuman response to their status that we’ve witnessed. As witnesses we are duty-bound to say, “Stop! Enough!” and to insist on change that restores our status as a great people and a great nation.

L’Shalom,