Decades ago, my father-in-law, of blessed memory, decided to spend the night with me and my wife in our small Manhattan apartment after he finished some business meetings. Looking to impress dear old dad with our maturity and independence, we cleaned and shined our two-bedroom obsessively for a week. The big night, which happened to be Halloween, arrived, and we were nervous. Who doesn’t want to prove to their parents that your adult life is up to their expectations? The knock came on our door and in he walked, enraged and dripping from head to toe with egg yolks and flecks of eggshell, his expensive suit and raincoat a mess. As he told it, just as he walked up to the door of our building, a group of neighborhood kids appeared from nowhere and pelted him relentlessly in the traditional Halloween egging ritual. As he tried to chase them, one boy yelled out, “Hey, man, welcome to New York!”
I thought about this story the other day as I was driving on a bridge between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. As my car sped over the Delaware River, a flock of geese deposited their proverbial calling card on my windshield. As I turned on the windshield wipers, Siri called out from my iPhone in her chipper AI voice: “Welcome to New Jersey.”
The trope of sarcastically welcoming someone to a place is a subtly gut-punching way of demonstrating to a person how very unwelcome they are. Yet, consider the opposite use of the sarcastic welcome to empathize with a person entangled in the nonsense or the heartlessness of a new place or institution. Such sarcasm appropriately follows a new resident’s or visitor’s expression of distress and frustration; it’s a snarky way of telling them that you share their frustration because you’re on their side.
Expressing genuine sympathy with a stranger who is new to your neck of the woods is a great first step toward genuine welcome; but where does a person go from there? How about a family? A community, a city, a county, a state, our entire nation? Given limited resources, what obligations do or do we not have to immigrants, and under what legal, political, and economic circumstances? Which people crossing our borders get to be the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free immortalized in Emma Lazarus’s sonnet? Which get deported?
I am the grandchild of Jewish immigrants to this country; I am a member of the Jewish people who more than once had doors slammed in our faces as we ran from the Nazis in Eastern Europe; who were ruthlessly chased out of numerous middle eastern countries by the hundreds of thousands after Israel’s founding in 1948; who were lucky that both America and the State of Israel put out genuine, if not always perfect, welcome mats for us. The synagogue community in Albany where I am the rabbi, has for years, welcomed Afghan refugee families, helping them to settle into their new homes until they can fend for themselves. Having been strangers in strange lands, we take very seriously and personally the biblical command to welcome and love the stranger.
As the federal government continues to throw and kick the stranger around in its multifaceted game of political football, the Bible’s mandate to us has never been more relevant. This command is not a policy guide: it cannot resolve the excruciating intricacies of how to manage the millions of people attempting right now to cross our borders; it cannot determine how and to whom we grant asylum; it is not a metric for establishing legal paths to citizenship. The Bible’s imperative is that empathic aspiration which should undergird all discussions that we Americans conduct about immigration policy. Our immigration history is obviously pock marked. African slaves on the middle passage were brutally forced to come here, in a most unwelcoming welcome to the continent. Early colonists and their descendants who sought religious freedom and economic opportunity developed twisted ideologies to justify persecuting indigenous first nations who preceded them by millennia. Still, the old saw that America is a nation of immigrants is true. Like the millions currently trying to cross our borders, millions of us came here seeking welcome respite from oppressive economic and political realities in our nations of origin. Given genuine opportunities, immigrants and refugees of the past, present and future proved and will continue to prove that they can thrive here and help America to thrive as well. How strange is the paradox that no matter how unwelcoming and disastrous our immigration politics are at times, people don’t stop trying to make it to our shores. They personify the biblical command by showing up and reminding us to live up to our aspirations to welcome new people, since our ancestors were once also new. Whatever the state of American immigration policies and politics, we Americans must never stop aspiring to saying the words, “Welcome to America,” without sarcasm, and truly mean them.
Dan Ornstein is the rabbi of Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY. He is the author of Cain v Abel: A Jewish Courtroom Drama (2020, The Jewish Publication Society.) Check out his writings at danornstein.com
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