This is my Shabbat sermon from Parashat Vayishlach delivered Dec. 6, 2025 (16 Kislev 5786).
On November 9 and 10, 1938, the Nazi regime in Germany carried out its infamous November Pogrom, Kristallnacht, the Night of Shattered Glass. 400 Jews were murdered or driven to suicide. More than 1400 synagogues and 7500 Jewish businesses and homes were destroyed. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. In the days that followed, 30,000 Jewish men were transported to concentration camps.
Did this pogrom materialize out of thin air? Of course not. Antisemitism was nothing new to Germany nor to Europe. And most of the 1930’s saw marginalizing of Jews, stripping them of rights, and subjecting them to violence. According to the Jewish Museum of Berlin, “For years already, the Nazi regime had been pursuing a plan of forcibly expropriating Jews and, in particular, “Aryanizing” Jewish businesses to finance Germany’s re-armament process.”
And then, of course, there was a spark that lit the fuse, a pretext to justify attacks on Jews in the minds of those itching to punish them for their crime of simply existing in Germany. The scapegoating came in the form of seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan who, on 7 November 1938, shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, who died of his injuries two days later. The Jewish Museum’s website writes the following: “The assassination provided a welcome pretext to strike out against the Jewish population with unprecedented brutality. Nazi propaganda portrayed the violence as an outbreak of ‘spontaneous national rage.’” Of course, as we know, it was exactly the opposite, an orchestrated attack by Hitler and Goebbels, by the SA and SS, with popular support from a willing public.
I share the story of Kristallnacht, because for me it was the beginning of my own paternal family’s immigration story, the day my grandfather’s home was ransacked and he escaped, eventually joining his sister in Chicago. He was accepted to this country as a refugee, fleeing oppression and seeking to build a better life in America. The US did not make it easy. There was rampant antisemitism in the State Department that blocked so many Jews from escaping in the years when that was still possible. But he did come and I’m here because of it.
I want to touch on the theme of immigration today, and truth be told, I hesitated to share this story at all. First, because drawing Holocaust analogies is really almost never a good idea. In considering our American response to the recent and inexcusable DC shooting of Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe and murder of Spec. Sarah Beckstrom, there will be some who want to claim some sort of parity between these acts or types of acts, that these two young men and their actions, nearly 90 years apart, were equally culpable of taking lives or equally innocent because of the geo-political context in which they came to their violent acts. I want to caution us against drawing these types of comparisons between Hershel Grynszpan or Rahmanullah Lakanwal. They are different people. The national and historical contexts are far from identical. The sociological question of what societal conditions help to breed violence or when or against whom violence might be justified is in interesting one, but not one I feel prepared to address at this time.
No, I share the story of Kristallnacht because I’m interested in how societies relate to outsiders, how they can weaponize racist tropes against foreigners, including when those so-called foreigners are legal residents, citizens even. I’m not going to restate today my specific concerns about Ernst Fraenkel’s “normative” and “prerogative” states and I how I fear his framework is increasingly relevant to life in America today. That sermon from Yom Kippur is online if you wish to review it.
What I want to consider today is what we might do when faced with the erosion of basic democratic norms and civil legal protections, when minority populations are subject to leaders or citizens from the majority making blanket claims about their own insecurity while asserting blanket condemnations of entire populations that they consider to be, well, “garbage.” Beyond important and necessary legal challenges, beyond OpEds and protests, what are some non-violent tools available to us to push back against the scapegoating of migrants, of racist and xenophobic rhetoric condemning the cultures of entire countries and their millions upon millions of inhabitants and expatriates?
Years ago, at the height of the #MeToo Era, I gave a sermon on Parashat Vayishlach, this week’s parsha, about the rape of Dinah. I spoke of a Tarbut Ra’ah, the Talmud’s term to describe a culture of pervasive tolerance, even permissiveness surrounding bad behavior. I suggested then that Jacob’s silence on the rape of his daughter may have been reflective of that culture, the tendency to blame women for sexual violence or undervalue considerations of consent.
Here we are, now eight years later, and Stephen Miller is claiming the tarbut ra’ah, the irredeemably wicked culture, is that of Afghanistan, of Sudan and Somalia. “You are not just importing individuals,” Miller tweeted (on Thanksgiving, for God’s sake). “You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
To be clear, I don’t disagree that these are, in many ways, failed societies. The brutality in Sudan is horrific. The Taliban’s totalitarian oppression of women and dissidents is terrifying, which is why our Afghan neighbors selling their wares at our Boutique last Sunday are here, in the United States! But how Miller justifies his own family’s immigration story and American success after his great-grandparents fled Czarist pogroms, I have no idea. Does he honestly think the Nazi Germany from which my grandfather escaped was anything other than a “failed state?” By such logic, am I and my children somehow tainted by the tarbut ra’ah, the societal rot that forced Grandpa Montrose to flee, that caused the extermination of two-thirds of European Jewry? Orwell himself would be hard-pressed to imagine a more Orwellian inversion.
I am deeply concerned about global terror and how it affects Jewish communities around the world, but I would submit that if there is a tarbut ra’ah, a pervasively dangerous culture that threatens America urgently at this moment, it is in fact the increasing normalization of nativism, of white nationalism, of antisemitism and anti-Israeli-ism, of racism, sexism, islamophobia, and more. In Parashat Noah, there’s a famous debate about Noah. Was he truly “blameless?” Was he a hero for having been a good man against the backdrop of his failed society? Or was he only “blameless” in comparison to them? No matter the answer, the implication of such a debate though is that it is quite difficult to buck a trend, to be good when bad behavior surrounds us. That’s the danger of a tarbut ra’ah, and it’s one the characters of our parasha contend with as well.
Not long after the Rape of Dinah narrative, and just before Rachel tragically dies in childbirth while delivering her son Benjamin, the Torah offers an enigmatic passage:
וַתָּ֤מׇת דְּבֹרָה֙ מֵינֶ֣קֶת רִבְקָ֔ה
Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died,
וַתִּקָּבֵ֛ר מִתַּ֥חַת לְבֵֽית־אֵ֖ל תַּ֣חַת הָֽאַלּ֑וֹן
and was buried under the oak below Beth-El;
וַיִּקְרָ֥א שְׁמ֖וֹ אַלּ֥וֹן בָּכֽוּת׃
so it was named Allon-bacuth.
Who was this Deborah? In a text where we infrequently hear details of women’s lives, let alone the particulars of their deaths, why would the Torah take time to tell us about Rebekah’s nurse? The thirteenth century Catalonian sage Ramban suggests the verse is not really about Deborah at all. Drawing from Bereishit Rabbah (81:8) he writes, “for the weeping and anguish could not have been such for the passing of the old nurse that the place would have been named on account of it. Instead, Jacob wept and mourned for his righteous mother who had loved him and sent him to Paddan-aram and who was not privileged to see him when he returned.”
But Rashi in Troyes two centuries earlier thinks different. He reminds us that decades earlier, after Jacob bargained for Esau’s birthright and stole his brother’s blessing, Esau wanted to kill him. So, Jacob fled to Haran, to the house of her Rebekah’s brother Lavan. וְשָׁלַחְתִּ֖י וּלְקַחְתִּ֣יךָ מִשָּׁ֑ם, she says. “I will send and fetch you from there” once your brother’s anger dies down. Jacob, of course, stays a long time, twenty years, and the question is, does Rebekah actually send for him? According to Rashi in the name of his teacher Moshe HaDarshan, she does in the form of her maid Deborah.
But the real question is why does it take so long to leave? What is happening in Haran that keeps Jacob there? We know his uncle Lavan is manipulative, that he switches his daughters under the chuppah, that he compels Jacob to work for him for fourteen years, but the midrash suggests something even more sinister was going on. That the household of Lavan and his father Bethuel before him was a tarbut ra’ah, a depraved culture. One midrash argues that the reason they try to hold Rebekah (Gen. 24:55) for ten days before allowing her to depart with Abraham’s servant is related to the reason Lavan, a generation later, delays Jacob’s departure. This was a household that abused women.
In Rebekah’s case, the midrash in Yalkut Shimoni (Gen. 109), suggests that Bethuel, king of Haran, had introduced jus primae noctis, a custom granting lords the so-called “right of the first night” with a virgin bride before she is given to her husband. Bethuel and then his son Lavan after him were about to exercise that “right” before God intervenes and Rebekah is able to flee to Canaan with Abraham’s servant and her own nurse by her side.
This midrashic tradition is probably what Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, the twentieth century leader of Yeshiva University, has in mind when he posits an intriguing theory about Deborah, the maid who Rashi says goes back home to fetch Jacob, who spends decades with him, and who is honored with a burial in today’s Torah reading. “Apparently,” he writes, “Deborah played a major role in shaping the history and destiny of the Jewish people.” How? “Deborah was the leader of a moral underground movement.”
The Rav’s argument hinges on Rebekah’s quality of chesed. Much like the ancient debate about Noah in his time, he asks how someone who is raised in such an abusive household could be so kind? He writes, “Rebecca was brought up in the house of Bethuel and Lavan, in a pagan orgiastic society – how did she exhibit such great humility and chesed?... Why was she not influenced by her family and society? There must have been an ‘underground community’ in Haran, preaching Abraham’s morality. Rebecca was part of this underground movement. She studied and absorbed Abraham’s philosophy and adopted his weltanschauung (his worldview) – living by his principles of justice and righteousness.” Deborah, as Rebekah’s nurse, he argues must have been the conveyor of these values. That’s why she merits to be named in our parsha. That’s why she is buried at Alon Bachut, the so-called “weeping oak.” She was the jedi master, a subversive teacher of kindness against the backdrop of her tarbut ra’ah.
Hevre, I don’t know the extent to which our current circumstances call for an underground movement. As I said, we should be careful to honor distinctions between this political moment in this country and others that might serve as a cautionary tale. And yet, this era is, on its face, a dangerous one for many who dwell in this land, most of whom are responsible, hardworking, and fully deserving of the opportunities afforded my family, Stephen Miller’s and just about all of yours. I do believe there are things, both public and private we can be doing to support immigrants, including of course, the many who arrived here lawfully, many of whom have protected status, and some of whom are friends of this congregation.
For those who are getting up to speed or could use a reminder of the administration’s actions following the shooting of Wolfe and Beckstrom, the US Customs and Immigration Service issued a new policy memo this past Tuesday reiterating actions that the agency has been instructed to take. These are:
· Placing a hold on all affirmative asylum case decisions
· Placing a hold on all pending applications for immigration benefits including applications for work authorizations and green cards) from nationals of the 19 travel ban countries
· Conducting a re-review of all approved immigration benefits requests from nationals of the 19 travel ban countries
Given these circumstances, here are a few specific things we might do at the national level (with thanks to Evan Serpick for helping compile these resources).
· HIAS, the century-old Jewish organization which advocates on behalf of immigrants and refugees suggests going to Refuge Council USA (rcusa.org) and follow their action alerts. You can also go to congress.gov to contact your elected officials and insist they resist isolationist and/or racist policies.
· Contact the ACLU who are mobilizing legal and political advocacy responses.
In our Reservoir Hill neighborhood:
· Support and/or volunteer at Beth Am’s weekly produce distribution on Tuesdays or Byron McKenney-Powell Free Market on Thursdays, which support about 100 Afghan migrants living in the neighborhood as well as other neighbors in need.
· Support and/or volunteer at the Reservoir Hill House of Peace, 2401 Eutaw Pl., which provides stipends, housing, and community for asylum seekers, fill out the contact form here and/or contact Ruth Clemens, 410-935-1862, ruthkclemens@gmail.com
· Support and/or volunteer with ERICA, which is looking for volunteers to co-teach English classes for Afghan women in Reservoir Hill on Tuesdays from 9:30-11:00 (contact Daniel Jacoby, 443-756-7377, djacoby@erica-baltimore.org).
Baltimore Citywide:
· CASA is the largest and most organized local organization providing direct support to migrants under threat, including emergency legal support, family support, and legislative advocacy.
· Our partners at JUFJ work closely with CASA to advocate for local immigrants. They are currently asking people to urge Baltimore County officials not to require law enforcement to cooperate with ICE.
· The Esperanza Center offers English as a Second Language (ESL) education, healthcare, and low-cost immigration legal services.
Friends, let me end with this. I know many of us feel paralyzed by the volume and range of things coming our way these days. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. Start small. Pick something you can dedicate some time to. Think about what is the best use of your time as well as the most effective. And remember, a Jewish commitment to the stranger, the foreigner, is both a reflection of our own historical experience as a people who have been shut out (or worse) from so very many societies and nations.
It’s also at the core of our Torah text which reminds us again and again to notice and respond to the ger, the resident alien in our midst. It will take moral communities, above ground and perhaps underground, to continually remind our country and fellow countrymen who we ought to be. We Jews know what it is to be scapegoated, which I believe means we have an obligation to speak out when we see it happening to others. How we do that effectively is always a critical question. If only we could ask Deborah of our parsha, of Soloveitchik’s imagination, the underground warrior-nurse. I’m sure she would have some ideas for us as well. Meanwhile, we’ll do our utmost to do some good in her stead.
