In this political moment when the Trump Administration has sought a way to undercut families who flee violence and look for a way to thrive, this family separation policy serves as a barometer for the rest of a program that has exploited state terror to sanction racism and the neglect of the least represented demographic groups in our society. In reality, it’s a continuation of the worst strands of American history – of the conquest of the Native Americans, the cruelty of slavery, the injustice of Korematsu.

It’s for this reason that I’ll join with a couple of dozen rabbis, members of T’ruah (The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights) on Monday and Tuesday (July 2 and 3) in San Diego, as part of a larger action by the organization Mijente. San Diego is a crossroads for a government run amok. It will be the gathering-point for a larger portion of our society that is awakening to the shenanigans of I.C.E., the bureaucratic juggernaut charged with intimidating and eliminating real people. None of us can afford to give I.C.E. a license to do this evil work. We can’t allow the purveyors of fake news and fear-mongering to get away with the wholesale destruction of people on the basis of their color, or the stigmatization of religion or gender or disability. Indeed, the abolishment of this agency, as Sean McElwee has written in The Nation, would go a long way toward healing the pain we are now feeling, and toward reestablishing the diversity and goodness of our commonwealth.

I'll be there with my passport, walking across a border with my colleagues in the faith community. I know that a deeper truth, a blessing, was once ultimately conveyed that transcended artificial boundaries – and that a sorcerer scrambled his rhetoric and spoke of tents whose flaps were open and hospitable. You see, nothing could get in the way of humanity ... he knew we have all been strangers at one time or another, and that it is a virtue to offer shelter and nourishment to little children and mothers and fathers. We’ll speak what we know in our hearts and minds and stand up for it.

Our Jewish tradition provides us with a framework to understand the difference between a powerful leader with a strategy for helping people and a powerful leader whose every move is not only opportunistic but fatal for those most vulnerable in society. This week’s Torah portion explores this opposition in dramatic fashion, just as people across the country are rallying around the immigrant families being tormented for one thing – for seeking refuge here.

Several millennia ago, a story was told about a sorcerer by the name of Balaam, who was asked to curse the Israelites – on their pathway out of Mitzrayim and into a land of promise. He was the surrogate prophet for hire, the type of individual who commanded great respect and the hoped-for ability to circumvent a deeper reality. According to the rabbis, he could move an audience in a manner not dissimilar from Moses. Each was a master of speech and a political lightning-rod. If anything, Moses was more of a deliberate speaker, deliberate and halting with his language; while Balaam stepped up to the highest podium, manipulated words, and basically transmitted fake news.

There was one thing Balaam couldn’t achieve, however, and that was to deny the basic decency and goodness of human beings. When he was asked by the kingmakers to curse a group of people that simply wanted to pass through a borderland on their way to safety, what came out of his mouth instead was a blessing: Mah Tovu Ohalecha Ya’akov. How Goodly Are Your Tents O Jacob.

-Rabbi Joey Wolf

Above photo is from AP.