Last June 6, when ICE began taking our neighbors and congregants in the streets of Los Angeles, interfaith clergy immediately headed to the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC). We knew that the president would target Los Angeles, proudly known as Immigrant City, and yet no one expected the intensity, cruelty, and lawlessness of ICE that would unfold in the first city targeted and then continue as ICE raids spread across the country. At the MDC, we felt the understandable rage of people looking for their family, friends, and neighbors, and we created a physical line of protection and prayer. We stayed there in moral witness and faithful claim of the streets of our city as ICE was joined in the next days by the National Guard and then the Marines.
The city alighted with care for the families who were taken, and for those who were scared they would be next. It was an incredible blooming of mutual aid and creative action. Parents walked with or drove other kids to school, lawyers responded at all hours, people came out for late-night noise-making at the hotels where ICE officers were staying, food and grocery distribution began, citizen journalists emerged, warning and tracking, and neighborhood by neighborhood rapid response networks emerged like fast-growing vines, street by street.
Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) organized an interfaith clergy rapid response network, and all day long, every day, clergy were in courtrooms, showing up at hospitals where those injured by ICE officers were taken and handcuffed to bedrails, and responding to community requests for presence at churches, schools, and city government and union gatherings. We also began urgently reaching out to our colleagues across the country, knowing that this cruelty and scapegoating would be coming to their cities soon. And then it did again and again. We witnessed with deep rachamim (compassion) and kavod (honor) as faith leaders responded with clarity and courage in city after city.
Soon, we will come upon the one-year mark of the beginning of the raids. And we are still navigating this wilderness. Though the intensity and numbers have lessened, still, every day, people are taken and held in detention centers with deplorable conditions, where the death rate is rising. And the administration continues to find new ways to target immigrant communities. And again, clergy across the country are drawing upon the values of their tradition and their ometz lev (courage) to continue to care, protect, and bring awareness to this continued cruelty.
Find more resources on Bamidbar.
This week in Torah, we enter the book of Bamidbar, the Wilderness. And yet this is not the beginning of the wilderness; it is the continuing. It is the second year. We are deep in it now. There is power in naming where you are, even after you have been there for some time. Often, in the midst of being thrown into the wilderness, you do not yet have the words to name, gather, or plan what you need to navigate.
In the opening of the book (and the parshah):
On the first day of the second month, in the second year after the exodus from the land of Egypt, GOD spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting, saying: Take a census of the people … (Numbers 1:1-1:2)
We are reminded that we are in the wilderness, and then there is a roll call. All the ancestral families are counted, but not the Levites, whose particular role in society leaves them out of this census.
In his commentary on this verse, Rashi shares that we are counted because we are dear to God. Each of us is beloved, and each of us has a role to play in this wilderness.
Recently, through T’ruah, I traveled to Arizona with two of my interfaith LA colleagues to join a training of the trainers by the Freedom Trainers. Those of you who came to the T’ruah convening in DC had an opportunity to experience some of their comprehensive, creative, and participatory curriculum that draws from lessons learned around the world in the fight for democracy and against authoritarianism. One of the strongest aspects of the training is the clarity that everyone in society has an important and unique role to play. Like the Levites, faith leaders have a specific role. Here is what the Freedom Trainers share are the roles of faith leaders, or as they name them, faith leader superpowers:
- Moral protest & persuasion
- Organizing & training
- Providing resources, mutual aid, or sanctuary to mitigate repression
- Leveraging symbolic and spiritual power, including rituals
- Bridge-building
- Noncooperation
Bamidbar Rabbah opens by sharing a midrashic reading of what God said to Moses before telling him to conduct the census. It says that God opened the book of Bamidbar by proclaiming the words of Psalm 36:7: “Your justice is like the great depths.”
Find more resources on immigration.
Now is the time we need to reach into the abundant depths of justice. Perhaps you have been wanting to step forward in this wilderness to summon the unique role you have as a rabbi, cantor, Jewish professional, community leader, or person guided by Jewish values, but you have been unsure how or felt overwhelmed by all that is unfolding at once. We cannot tend to everything at once, but we can each do something.
I co-led a workshop at the T’ruah National Convening with Reverend Scott Bostic of DC. After sharing what we were doing in our own landscapes, we broke into groups by region so each person could write down the names of three people they were going to reach out to, either to make a new connection or to deepen a connection, in service of building the world we know is possible. A week later, one of the rabbis in the room reached out to me because she had written down my name to connect about the possibility of starting an interfaith clergy rapid response network in her city, as we have done in Los Angeles. And we put that in motion.
Knowing there is such beautiful, compassionate care and advocacy unfolding across the country, there is likely someone in your community you would like to support or help; someone you can weave the tapestry of your unique role more intentionally with, or with their community. This week, as we name the wilderness we are in and will continue to navigate, who are the three people you can reach out to in the coming days?
May we continue to draw forward justice from the depths and uplift each other as we navigate our unique roles in the wilderness.
Rabbi Susan Goldberg is a transformational spiritual leader deeply engaged in multifaith dialogue and social justice. She is the founder of Nefesh in LA and she is a Stanton Fellow of the Durfee Foundation, serves on the national board of Bend the Arc and on LA Unified School District’s Faith Advisory Council, and is an active faith leader in CLUE and LA Voice.