Rabbi Josh Whinston serves the Beth Emeth (House of Truth)
synagogue in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A
couple of weeks ago he led a team from his congregation some 2700 kilometres to
Tornillo, Texas. This is beside the
Mexican border, and it is where the US government has one of its camps altogether
housing now some 14,000 children of refugees, separated from their
parents. The Jews from Michigan were
bearing witness to something timeless.
They bore a word from God. All the Hebrew scriptures, the Law, the
Prophets the Writings, stress repeatedly that they themselves, the Hebrews, were
more than once strangers and sojourners, and may be again, that they must never
forget this, that their constant obligation and privilege, in their security
and prosperity, is to welcome the stranger and the sojourner, never to oppress
them but to share land and opportunity.
In Hebrew “stranger” is a little two-consonant word, ger.
Moses in Egypt named his son Gershon, “a stranger here”, to be a sign to the Hebrew exiles in Egypt. Rabbi Whinston would have read from any of
numerous passages – Solomon’s prayer, for instance, at the joyous dedication of
the temple: We are aliens and transients
before you, as were all our ancestors.[1] Israel’s judges are warned to judge fairly
whether it is for Hebrew citizens or for strangers, aliens.[2] Job’s righteousness, he insists, is partly
that he has never left the stranger out in the street or refused hospitality to
the alien.[3] The Torah repeatedly forbids any oppression
of the stranger, the foreigner, the needy, the widow, the orphan… and the
reason: …for you were aliens in the land
of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.[4]
Here in New Zealand we are bordered entirely by ocean, too
wide and dangerous to be crossed by desperate people in inflatables. Maybe Iceland is in a similar situation… remote,
and safe. But nevertheless we too were
once strangers and sojourners – Maori emigrated here; White Settlers from
England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, the Balkans, China; war
refugees, children from Poland; more recently, South Africans, and immigrants
from all over the South Pacific. That is
one reality – that human habitation of New Zealand has been from the outset by strangers
and sojourners… as were all our ancestors, said King
Solomon. It is as well for us to be
humble and grateful. The second reality
is for mindful and contemplative believers.
It is that, in our prayer, which is where we are most real, boundaries cannot
thrive, neither defensive walls nor fences nor searchlights nor guard
patrols. So the land of our prayer is
not particularly safe or cosy, or likely to be.
The land of prayer is a land of change, a land of welcome, a land of
risk, a land of making room and of expense, a land of understanding. We enter that land when, in the company of
Jesus, we wait in stillness and silence, and in his Spirit, and at war with no
one.
No comments:
Post a Comment