To my dear friends in Havurah:

Not out of joy or exhilaration, Rabbi Benjamin and I will stand in protest this Thursday at our local ICE headquarters at 4310 SW Macadam. We will join other faith leaders in our community in demanding that this branch of Homeland Security “let our people go.”

Now we know a bit about Pharaoh. We’re hardly newcomers to that confrontation. Magic did nothing: our success had more to do with moral clarity and being in the right. And yet, what’s striking in this week’s portion is that the Torah replays it, in reverse, a recurring nightmare, a curse. In Kee Tavo, we are given a dire warning, a prediction of what is bound to happen, should the people reject what the Torah teaches with regard to safeguarding a just society:

“You will become a consternation, a proverb, a pithy saying,” it says. (Deut. 28:37)

The commentator Mizrachi stipulates that we become a cause for the consternation of others. In other words, our example leaves the broader world in disrepair, in disgust, without the psychic wherewithal to move forward. Another later verse states the reason for this desperation: that the “ship” we steer will circle back to Egypt. (Deut. 28:68)

The nautical reference is obscure, but what comes to mind is a slave-ship, the degradation of human beings, the refusal to welcome neighbors as prospective citizens. There’s the hint of an enclosed world, an ark – life at risk. And I’m also thinking about my grandmother, who at the age of 11 left Vilna behind and was tricked onto a boat in Riga and crossed an ocean by herself – to join her father (my great grandfather) who had abandoned his wife to come here to America.

There are many stories like this one. For every immigrant, fleeing harsh and even dangerous conditions at home, there’s the breakage, the hardship of sustaining a connection with one’s loved ones, and with one’s past and future. There’s the emergency, the packing up and compressing of all that’s been owned, there’s the placing of one’s possibilities in the hands of others. There’s the smuggling of human lives, the stash houses, the sweltering hot trailers, the lack of oxygen.

But what makes the situation worse, devastatingly so, is when a society like ours makes it legal and acceptable to shun those who have escaped Pharaoh. Around the world, racists look up and say to themselves if it’s permissible here, it’s a plausible option to put up walls and close gates everywhere. It’s becomes okay for these unlucky ones to drown, to have their little ones taken away. And within our own culture of border control and customs enforcement, on the heels of 9/11, a significant segment of our voters have gradually given their thumbs-up to criminalizing those who seek asylum. All this, despite treaties to which we are signatories that honor the credible fears of these people, the most vulnerable ones.

ICE, on the one hand, is a recent iteration of enforcement – given its mission to keep people out after the events of September 2001. (Its antecedent INS was nowhere near as well-funded, nor as focused on the mechanisms of state terror.) What’s much worse is the detention and enforcement industry that has sprung up, with a multi-billion dollar momentum of its own. The stakeholders and fear-mongers have a good deal to gain from it all, as should have been expected. And they are ideologically committed to their program.

All of this is new, but it has actually happened many times before. There was an expurgation of history and culture during the conquest of Native Americans. There was slavery and the Black Codes which kept African Americans working for former slave-owners and restricted their mobility. There was the Ku Klux Klan, which was populated by some of the most venerable leaders throughout our country, including former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. There was the internment of Japanese Americans, shamefully perpetrated by FDR’s administration and household names like Earl Warren, who at the time was California’s attorney general and a leading supporter of rounding this ethnic group up. He and others looked the other way, while vultures looted property of the deportees and our armed services put people who loved this country and whose kids fought for what America represented behind layers of barbed wire in a desert. Within the last couple of years, of course, there have been Trump’s infamous attempts at travel bans targeting Muslims.

The point is that we should not be allowing this to go on – least of all, as Jews who can sniff the stench of Nazi Germany, where we too were deported and shut away and condemned to a terrible fate out of sight, out of mind. And yet we realize that, while we were on the margins, others knew what was happening to us. They abetted it, they enabled a regime to propagate its annihilatory hatred– so we today dare not stand by idly, when the undocumented are rounded up outside schools or on the sidewalks of the Washington County Courthouse. The ICE agents in unmarked cars brazenly swoop in and remove them. They terrorize people who aspire to be citizens of this country, taxpayers, and they incarcerate them at Sheridan – a place where hardened criminals dwell.

What does it say about us if we accept this demonization of people fleeing danger? What does it mean that respected elected officials can make statements reminiscent of Pharaoh’s callous refusals to pay attention to suffering – if we fail to speak out here in Portland?

What does it say for our polity that the US Attorney for Oregon conflates lack of documentation with a surge in crime – a “reasoned” argument that gets taken seriously by many in our community?

Acts of magic won’t defeat Measure 105 this November. It’s a cynical attempt to revoke our state’s sanctuary law, which prohibits the use of state and local law enforcement resources to apprehend people whose only crime is being undocumented. We’ll need to bring out the vote against it.

The recalcification of hearts may be systematic, but we can call it out.

Yes, Rabbi Benjamin and I will be protesting ICE, but in our appeal to “let our people go,” don’t think that we’ll limit our opposition to the detention of immigrants in Sheridan or NORCOR, a four-county jail in The Dalles; or that our resistance will narrowly focus on Jeff Sessions’ Zero Tolerance program and its despicable foregone separation of parents and children.

No, we’ll join other people of faith who worry about what’s happening, in terms of it being a benchmark, a green light – a signal of a broader societal regression, a failure to learn from the past.

The Torah forbids us from becoming “a consternation, a proverb, a pithy saying.” When the world looks at how America abuses people in flight, a message gets broadcasted. It’s communicable – this wholesale inhumanity. If the world succumbs to the idiom of racism, of hate, of xenophobia . . . we will all end up in the same boat back to Egypt.

We won’t have it. “Let my people go.” Our vision of an inclusive society is steadfast. Enough of this accursed business, this greedy enterprise of fear and intimidation and walls. It’s the hour to say “No” to Pharaoh, welcome to all who want to live a good life together.

- Rabbi Joey

Photos are of a recent IMIrJ protest and of a mural at Alabama's Talladega College painted by Harlem Renaissance artist Hale Woodruff. The painting is part of a series of murals depicting the 1839 mutiny by slaves on the Spanish ship La Amistad.