Thinking about Immigrant Rights

Another difficult vote in the Civil Law Committee in the MN House of Representatives. While House members claim it will make Minnesota safer if the police can ask people about their immigration status, the police, immigrants and most others strongly believe this will make us less safe. We ask the police to be responsible for our safety, and then members of the legislature with no law enforcement experience choose to ignore concerns cited about more racial profiling and fear of immigrants to report crimes.

What's worse, there is no vision or plan being presented by either political party to create real reform in ourstate or nation. We continue to treat immigrants as people to use for low paying jobs and then discard them as soon as possible. There is a need for a stronger voice of opposition in the House and the Senate to opposelegislation that will undermine local city ordinances trying to create a better environment for immigrants, that doesn't distinguish between who has documents and who doesn't. Jewish Community Action is part of a growing coalition of groups that recognizes the important contributions of immigrants and believes we must create a national lawthat includes a path to citizenship, family reunification and protections for workers.
-Vic

Dave's Slightly Cheeseball Shabbat Reflection

Last Friday night I walked into Mt. Zion for Shabbat services, and felt the weight of my kippah like the lightest touch of G-d's hand on my head. It was a gentle touch that could not possibly guide me, and it was faint enough that in my usual frantic pace and consciousness, I might lose awareness of it entirely. Still, it was present enough to me then that it reassured me as I walked into the synagogue. A thought flashed through my head as I walked in: what does it mean to speak with a prophetic voice?

I thought about the young French Jewish man who was kidnapped and tortured and killed, and the way that the news of his death pierced me, hit me like a physical blow. I could see and feel the scene viscerally. How much more of a powder keg of hatred must the world become? Yet another reminder of the seemingly unalterable distance between the work we do and the world as it remains.

It's not enough, is it, to rail at the steady downpour of injustices upon the world, if one really wants to speak with a prophetic voice. But what does it require of us? What if we had to first imagine a future in which G-d becomes fully present in the world, and the world truly becomes a world of complete peace, and truth, and justice? And yet, how fruitless it would be, to perceive such a world in some distant, foggy, nearly unattainable future, a future so obscure that the pathways of our actions and judgments, our hopes and our great loves, would dissipate before reaching it, like footsteps lost in dense fog or snow!

Maybe prophetic vision requires of us a more difficult faith; not just the dissolute faith in a far-off future, but a kind of severe faith in the present, which brooks no excuse or explanation why true justice has not or cannot be achieved now, in a single instant in which the shackles of history and brutality fall away from us like paper. Maybe it is only in the context of this severe faith, against the backdrop of this deeply felt image of justice manifest in the world, this song of songs one can almost hear erupting from every throat in the unfolding of the next moment, that a frail human being can begin to speak with a prophetic voice.

Wouldn’t such a voice inflame us, and charge us with G-d’s imminent presence? It would shock us with the revelation that G-d’s presence remains at the threshold, the brink of *our* being, and can only be realized when we overflow ourselves and spill our wills into the world, transform ourselves and our society, and create the future of justice that remains locked inside us as a flickering possibility.