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Temple Beth El Blog

Supporting Our Immigrant Neighbors in Madison

02/14/2018 09:29:34 AM

Feb14

Urgency of Now Immigrant Action Team

Jewish teaching is clear and unequivocal regarding our obligations to care for the stranger in our midst. In Leviticus 19:33–34 we are told: “When strangers sojourn with you in your land, you shall not do them wrong. The strangers who sojourn with you shall be to you as the natives among you, and you shall love them as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” This concept is repeated 35 times in the Torah. In this country, to which most of our grandparents and great-grandparents arrived as immigrants or refugees, many of our immigrant neighbors, due to their immigration status, are at great risk. This is true in Wisconsin, and right here in Madison. These neighbors, who are part of the fabric of our community, are living in constant fear of being stigmatized, deported, or separated from their loved ones. This terror affects individuals’ abilities to apply for and hold down jobs, enroll children in school, seek health care, contact the police when they are victims of crime, and access many other critical services the rest of us take for granted. Madison is not exempt from the tragedy of families being ripped apart by our federal government’s immigration policies. This message was recently posted to the Dane Sanctuary Coalition’s Facebook page, with a plea for help:

I have just learned of a young mother who works for us whose husband was detained by the police in Madison last week, who then called ICE who picked him up this morning. If you know anything about how this works, you know

that this means that he is gone. She is alone. They have three children under five years of age. She does not have family in Madison. As Jews, we believe in a world where every person is treated with dignity and respect, where all contributions to our society are valued, and where all can live together in freedom and safety. This vision compels us to stand in unity with our immigrant friends and neighbors, to offer our support and help, and to provide protection and support to those in need.

Now is the time to turn our Jewish values into action. You are invited to join our Urgency of Now Immigrant Action Team, one of the three action teams of the Urgency of Now Initiative at TBE. This group will help decide how we at TBE will advocate for and act to support and protect our vulnerable neighbors. Learn more, share your voice, and work with us to welcome those in need of our support.

For more information about the immigrant action team, contact Erica Serlin (ericar.serl@gmail.com, 608-833-8586) or Sherie Sondel (sherie.sondel@gmail.com, 608-444-3051).

For more information about the crisis facing Immigrants:

  • Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism: https://rac.org/immigration
  • Voces de la Frontera: http://vdlf.org/
  • Sanctuary Not Deportation: http://www.sanctuarynotdeportation.org/
  • United We Dream: https://unitedwedream.org/
  • Church World Service: https://cwsglobal.org/support-the-sanctuary-movement/

For information on the Dane Sanctuary Coalition:

  • https://wisconsinfaithvoicesforjustice.weebly.com/dane-sanctuary-coalition.html
  • https://www.facebook.com/DaneSanctuary/

A Weekday Taste of Torah

12/19/2017 04:04:14 PM

Dec19

Rabbi Jonathan Biatch

For the Torah Portion of Beshalach, Exodus 13:17 – 17:16

Rabbi Jonathan Biatch

Does Prayer Work?

I recently had a conversation with a member of my synagogue who discounted the effects of prayer in the healing process. “Why say a healing prayer for my relative? God’s not going to be swayed on her behalf by my worship.”

And I had to agree. From what we believe today, God does not intervene in the affairs of the world, whether requested or not.

But this does not mean that our prayers are ineffective. And the Israelites, in this week’s Torah portion of Beshalach, demonstrate this point.

We read in the Torah this week that the Israelites have departed from Egypt, and God has led them to the sea that will eventually part for them.

According to the text, God carefully manipulates this situation:

  • God hardens Pharaoh’s heart and causes him to regret his decision to let the Israelites leave.
  • God brings the Israelites to the sea, so that they appear to be hemmed in against the raging waters.
  • The Pharaoh makes the decision to bring the Israelites back to Egypt.
  • After the deaths of all the animals of Egypt during the Ten Plagues, God allows Pharaoh to wondrously find six hundred horses to enable Pharaoh, along with six hundred charioteers, to pursue the Israelites to the final confrontation at the sea.

 

There by the sea, the Israelites are oblivious to God’s machinations, and imagine only the worst possible outcome, which is their recapture and return to Egypt. The last resort is for them to cry out to God:

“Pharaoh drew near [to the Israelites by the sea], and the people of Israel looked up and – behold – the Egyptians were advancing after them. They were very frightened, and the people of Israel cried out to the Eternal” (Exodus 14:10).

A Third-century midrash interprets this cry of panic and fear not as distress, but rather as prayer, and reminds us that each of our three Patriarchs offered prayed at crucial moments in their lives:

“Concerning Abraham, scripture says of Abraham, ‘to the place where he had stood [in prayer] before the Eternal’ (in concern for Sodom and Gomorrah, Genesis 19:27); concerning Isaac, it is stated, ‘he went to pray in the field’ (to find a wife, Genesis 24:63); and concerning Jacob, it is related, ‘He prayed to the Omnipresent’ (in wonderment of the ladder extending to heaven and his finding the doorway to God’s abode, Genesis 28:11)” (Midrash Tanhuma).[1]

For the Israelites, their “cries” might not have directly affected God; the Divine One’s plans were in motion long before they arrived at the seashore. But their entreaties inspired one another to maintain courage and to await ‘the redemption of God’ (Exodus 14:13). It also strengthened those who took the first tentative steps into the sea, between the walls of water – on the right and on the left – that had never been seen before.

In a similar way, our prayers might not persuade God to change the Divine Mind on matters already destined to occur. But they can help us maintain courage at moments of doubt, and they can encourge us find our own solutions to our problems.

 

[1] Midrash Tanhuma Genesis, Mikeitz 10:11

Volunteer with Porchlight!

12/13/2017 09:40:03 AM

Dec13

Thank you to all of our Porchlight volunteers for November! We are pleased that Midrasha students participated. We served a full dinner to participants at Porchlight’s men’s homeless shelter located at Grace Episcopal Church. Our shopper was Staci Rieder. Our cooks were Lori Edelstein, Pat and Mel Weinswig, Laurie Schmidt, Linda Reivitz, John Mertz, and Julie Swedarsky. Our transporters were Lynn Silverman, Sheri Sondel, and Julie Swedarsky. Our servers were Isaac Bookstaff, Ilana Greenspan, Garrett Kennedy, Shoshaha Prager, Ryan Weinbach, Lynn Silverman, Sheri Sondel, and Julie Swedarsky.

Our next Porchlight dinner is Wednesday, January 31, 2018. 

Here is a link to our signup:

1) Click this link to see our SignUp on SignUp.com: http://signup.com/go/izGJvMG

2) Review the options listed and choose the spot(s) you like.

3) Sign up! It's Easy - you will NOT need to register an account or keep a password on SignUp.com.

Note: SignUp.com does not share your email address with anyone. If you prefer not to use your email address, please contact me and I can sign you up manually.

Again, here is the link:

http://signup.com/go/izGJvMG

A Weekday Taste of Torah for December 8, 2017

12/13/2017 09:25:57 AM

Dec13

Rabbi Biatch

A Weekday Taste of Torah

For the parashah of Vayeishev

Genesis 37:1 – 40:23

Dreaming

The Joseph story cycle begins! This is the stuff that dreams are made of!

Joseph’s brothers kidnap and sell him into Egyptian slavery! His master Potifar’s wife’s unsuccessfully attempts to seduce him! He gets thrown into an Egyptian prison, and he meets the Pharaoh’s butler and baker whose dreams he correctly interprets! And then, they forget about him, even though the butler promised to remember him and have him be offered a reprieve!

Great drama, great theatre!

One of the primary focuses of this portion is dreams, and their influence in the lives of our biblical ancestors. For them, dreams represented not only a vision into the divine mind, but also a foreshadowing of their destinies. They learned how God would influence their lives and their fortunes.

Contrast, now, what dreams mean to us: We have yet to learn whether they are the detritus of our reactions to our days’ events, or unfulfilled unconscious wishes, or the result of our inner mind’s problem-solving tasks. Some of us rise refreshed, other of us may be plagued by the strange events we perceive while sleeping.

 

There are others whose dreams may not be in the unconscious mind, but represent hopes to be fulfilled, or major aspirations in their lives. Each dream they have reflects an optimism that, one day, they will realize their dreams and participate freely in the life that God has granted them. These dreamers have the most difficult future ahead of them. This is because of others who wish to control the dreamers’ destiny, who do not want to help them fulfill their dreams.

 

The dreamers I refer to are those 800,000 migrants who live in our country as part of the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. These young people arrived in our nation as children, some as young as a few months, who have lived here continuously, who know no other home, and who now face punishment, such as deportation, for no real infraction of the law, but only because their parents brought them here because of their desperate need to flee persecution and economic deprivation.

The Hebrew bible states on 37 occasions that we need to be mindful of the plight of the ‘stranger’, because ‘we knew the heart of the stranger having been strangers ourselves in the land of Egypt.’ Our experience as servants to Pharaoh, re-enacted each year during the Passover seder, stimulates our empathy for the needs of others, and we must act on that empathy in order to save lives that are desperate and difficult.

These dreamers deserve a chance to live a life of promise, here in their adopted nation to which they have paid taxes, and in which they have taken various jobs that few if any Americans would enjoy, and in which they have lived virtually all their lives. Their lease on secure living here ends next March, and it is incumbent upon us American citizens to advocate on their behalf and help them remain secure in their lives.

I encourage you to contact your national legislators and ask them to support the new, clean DACA legislation when it is introduced into the Congress. We can bring dream fulfillment to these dreamers if we, ourselves, help them live up to their dreams.

November 5, 2025 14 Cheshvan 5786