A D’var Torah for Parshat Behar/Bechukotai by Rabbi Rachel Greengrass
The feel of my son’s hand in my palm never felt so bittersweet. It was Mother’s Day, and I could not ignore the over 800 children only 30 miles south who were separated from their mothers and anyone who knew them. We drove, as a family, to protest the separation of families and the deplorable conditions of children who had been deemed “unaccompanied minors.” (The vast majority had family/sponsors in the States.) That’s how I found myself chanting and marching, yelling to children that they were not forgotten, that they were loved – while holding the hand of my youngest son, whom I love so much it hurts. Having a child is like letting your heart walk around outside of your body. And yet, if we really love them, there comes a time when we let them go and make their own lives.
For so many, it is their incredibly deep love for their children, their desire for them to have “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” that gives them the strength to send their child to the United States to be with family or friends who have immigrated before them. (Kinder transport did this for some of our relatives in the time leading up to the Holocaust.)
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At the time, 2019, our country was separating families at the border. Parents did not know where their children were. Some were sent to the Homestead Children’s Detention Center, where we were marching. Built on waste. Meant to hold 400, but at over double capacity. Only meant as a temporary stop, but children were there for months on end, receiving no education (not even allowed pencils), not allowed to touch one another, hug a sibling, braid a roommate’s hair. Eating food that was strange and not nutritious. Treated like hard criminals yet with no trial and no lawyers allowed into the facility. Not allowed to call their parents or sponsors. And if they turned 18 in the center? They were deported without seeing a judge.
We met with Florida legislators, many of whom did not want this happening in our state, but the land was “federal land” and did not belong to Florida. The Superintendent of Schools, Alberto Carvalho, wanted to enroll the children in school. He offered to send, and pay for, teachers, but again, he was told he had no jurisdiction, because it was not his district; the land belonged to the government.
In our Torah portion, Behar, God warns, “The land is Mine; you are but gerim, migrants, with Me” (Leviticus 25:23). We do not own the land, God does. The Torah goes into great detail about what responsibilities that puts onto us as temporary visitors and arbiters of God’s land.
This is on the heels of reading about the shmita (Sabbatical) and Jubilee years, times when the land is allowed to rest, when those who had been reduced to poverty have their position, holdings, and dignity restored. Where any land sold from its ancestral inheritance is recovered, anyone who needed to indenture themselves to pay off debts is released. It’s a vision of the ideal: the land producing without being worked, everyone having abundance, the poor and rich alike suddenly on an even economic tier. The citizen and the immigrant enjoying the same rights and the same bounty. It’s a shift from a mindset of scarcity — that there’s not enough to go around, so we have to grasp firmly what is “ours” — to an abundance mindset, that there actually is plenty.
Find more commentaries on Behar/Bechukotai.
After all, isn’t that a large part of why we are told to fear immigrants, because “they” will take what is rightfully “ours”?
No less than 36 times we are told to love and protect the ger, the stranger, the immigrant. Often we hear, “because you were gerim in the land of Egypt.” Yes, as Jews we know the heart of the immigrant, because we were immigrants, not just in Egypt, but again and again throughout history.
But Behar reminds us that, even in the Promised Land, we continue to be gerim. The land is not ours to do with as we wish.
Perhaps that is why the Jewish community is not just sympathetic, but empathetic, to the immigrant. Perhaps that is why I clung so hard to my child’s hand and wondered if I would have the strength to let go if it meant his chance at a better life, his chance at safety. 
And perhaps this is why we had the audacity to shut down the largest detention center for unaccompanied minors, even though the land was “not ours.” Because we know that it’s really God’s, and we are accountable for what happens on God’s land – for how we treat God’s creatures. And we believe that if we follow God’s commands to love the stranger as ourselves, that we will find that we have abundance and security, enough for everyone.
Rabbi Rachel Greengrass serves Temple Beth Am in Miami where she is President of the Rabbinical Association of Greater Miami and serves as the Chair of the Resolutions Committee for the CCAR. She is a leader of RAC-Florida, working in coalition with other social justice organizations to create a more just world by following our Jewish values.