The Interfaith Imperative of the 21st Century

Rev. Heidi Neumark, New York

I reflect often on the accidental nature of faith and the impact it has on our lives – on how one’s religious affiliation is mostly determined in the first instance by the happenstance of birth. We may move away from religion as we grow older, or change our theological and philosophical dispensations. But the influence of our formative years, when we follow the lead of our parents and cater to familial expectations, stays with us for most of our lives.

I continue to identify as a Lutheran because I was born into a family that was deeply involved in the Lutheran Church – my father was a Lutheran pastor in New Jersey and my mother a devoted and faithful spouse who played to perfection the role of pastor’s wife. As a preacher’s kid, or “PK” as we were called, I was expected to put on my best clothes and attend church and Sunday school each week without complaint. Although I fulfilled my churchly duties with occasional grumbling, the Lutheran church influenced greatly the young lives of my sister, brother and I. And despite the rapidly changing social mores and generational conflicts then brewing over Vietnam, civil rights, and the sexual revolution, churches and other religious institutions retained a degree of respect in the 1960s and early 1970s that no longer seems apparent today.

I would gradually drift away from the Church after leaving home for college and discovering a world filled with doubt and ambiguity. I became disenchanted with the public representations of religion that dominated American society, especially in the judgmental harshness of Christian fundamentalism and the growing influence of Evangelicalism. By the 1980s, these forces had begun to push aside the more theologically liberal, mainline Protestant churches to which I had become accustomed. In later years, when I married a woman of the Jewish faith and raised Jewish children, the many assumptions of my childhood faith and relationship to Christianity became further strained.

And yet, although I attended church less frequently, the influence of my upbringing never really left me. I remained connected through family and the pull of heritage to my religious roots. I sought out Lutheran churches and pastors concerned with social justice and that practiced a more nuanced, ecumenical brand of religion. I was theologically and intellectually comfortable in such churches, which allowed me to reconcile my conflicting religious sensibilities. I also came to appreciate and connect with the Reform Judaism practiced by my daughters, and I found solace in meaningful participation in their Jewish education.

As I look back on my religious origins and the faith of my childhood, I find myself decades later with a broader perspective, more attuned to the many faces of religion in the world today. I am less attached now to the institutions of religion than to the human search for God in the 21st Century. I wonder how different my life would have been had I been born into a Jewish, Hindu, or Muslim family, or had I entered the world during another place and time. So much of our fate is determined by our life circumstances at birth, a matter so fortuitous and yet, so determinative of what is expected and assumed of us during our formative years. Still, I am proud of the deep and loving connections I experienced in the religion of my youth, however far I may have drifted from those shores in later years.

I am fascinated by the pursuit of God in modern times, by the human quest for meaning and purpose, and the many ways in which humanity expresses its hope and need for a divine presence. It is abundant in the faces of the people I have seen walking the streets of places as diverse as Philadelphia, New York, Rome, and Jerusalem; human beings made of the same biological design that differ only in appearance, language, customs, and beliefs.

I am presently reading Hidden Inheritance: Family Secrets, Memory, and Faith (Abingdon Press, 2015) by Heidi Neumark, a Lutheran pastor in New York City who recently discovered her German Jewish roots and learned that many of her father’s family members and relatives perished in the Holocaust. As a young girl in New Jersey in the 1950s and 1960s, and as the daughter of first-generation German immigrants, Neumark was proud of her German Lutheran heritage. She attended church every Sunday and developed a love of liturgy, a deep and abiding faith, and a strong sense of justice. After graduating from Brown University in the early 1970s, she attended the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and became an ordained Lutheran minister. For the past thirty years, Neumark has devoted her life and career to urban ministry, serving congregations in the South Bronx and Manhattan. She has lived and worked in some of New York’s poorest communities, contending with the everyday struggles of her congregants, with crime, drugs, prostitution, abused and broken homes, AIDS and gangs. Neumark thrived and was strengthened by serving among people who had originated from radically different backgrounds and life experiences.

In Hidden Inheritance, Neumark explores her family’s past and discovers that she descends from a long line of German Rabbis that ended with the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. Many of her family members experienced the horrors of Kristallnacht; a cousin was murdered on the streets of Dresden, her grandparents and several great aunts, uncles, and their children were deported to the concentration camps of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, where many of them died. A few fled to other countries. Years earlier, perhaps to evade anti-Semitism and in an attempt to assimilate into German society, her father was baptized as a Christian. In 1938, before the Final Solution had materialized, before the worst of the pogroms and death camps, he immigrated to America, never to reveal the secrets he took to his grave.

It is a fascinating tale of history, heritage, and the legacy of conflicting faiths. Among the most compelling parts of the book are Neumark’s reflections on how insight into her newly-discovered past affects her own inner faith journey.  I was particularly moved by her reflections on the sacrament of Holy Communion, in which Lutherans break bread and drink wine as symbols of the body and blood of Christ, the spiritual nourishment of the Christian faith. For Neumark, the newly-discovered knowledge that family members perished in the Shoah with the partial complicity of the Church in its failure to oppose centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, has forced her to reflect in a new way on the very sacrament that gives her sustenance:

“On the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread.” I feel partly like a traitor myself – that I have betrayed my own Jewish kin, albeit unknowingly. And yet I cannot turn away from the altar where for me, in spite of everything I now know, these remain life-giving words. . . . [offering] the hope that life can go on, that one day, we can sit together and share a healing, liberating meal, that shalom is possible.

Neumark’s experience is a dramatic example of how thinly veiled is our religious heritage. Had her father not been baptized, had he retained his Jewishness and passed it along to his daughter, Neumark might today be a Rabbi. But instead of lighting Shabbat candles or reciting the kaddish at Friday evening services, she preaches the Gospel on Sunday mornings. Hers is a compelling story that naturally leads me to wonder how any one religion can legitimately lay claim to exclusive truths, for what we believe and what religious rituals we practice are so often determined by chance and the circumstances of one’s birth.

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Jerusalem's Old City, April 2015

Last week I listened to an episode of On Being with Krista Tippett, in which she interviewed Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and a prominent author, religious leader, and philosopher. A leader in the Modern Orthodox movement, Rabbi Sacks spoke of the challenges and opportunities presented by a world of diverse faith traditions.

“I think God is setting a big challenge,” he explained. “We are living so close to difference, with such powers of destruction, that [God] is really giving us very little choice.” Sacks believes that we can either accept the beauty and life affirming nature of the diverse and multi-dimensional world in which we live, or find ourselves on a more negative course. Ultimately, it comes down to whether we can see the presence of God in the face of a stranger.

Two months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Rabbi Sacks stood at Ground Zero in friendship, fellowship, and shared prayer with leaders of most of the world’s faiths. “It was then I realized it is either we go in this direction or a more negative way.” When we understand that we are enlarged and not threatened by other faiths, it becomes more difficult to practice religious arrogance and exclusivity.

Wisdom lies in the bio-diversity of life. “Everything that lives has genetic code written in the same alphabet,” Sacks explained. “Unity creates diversity. . . Don’t think of one God, one truth, one way, think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways.” If we consider that the human race has developed nearly 6800 spoken languages, why should we think there is only one language to speak to God?

Sacks contends that the 20th century witnessed the collapse of moral language, and that today only the loudest and rudest voices win. And yet the greatest single antidote to violence and misunderstanding remains conversation, in speaking and listening to others. In On Being, Sacks observed that one of the most powerful movements for peace in the Middle East is a group of Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children to violent conflict. By their example, they witness to the world that through empathy and understanding, speaking and listening, one can change hearts and minds. When we can get Israelis and Palestinians alike to think of what is best for their grandchildren, rather than focus on individual claims of injustice and victimhood, we can make real progress towards peace. “It is when you can feel your opponent’s pain that you begin the path towards reconciliation.”

The world will forever remain a complex place, full of disappointment and despair. Religious extremism and religious conflict are part of the problem, but so is religious illiteracy -- the failure to understand the "other" and the many dimensions and faces of religious belief and practice in the world today. Perhaps if we recognize how fortuitous are the origins of our own  religious identities, we will make more meaningful connections to people of other faiths, or of no faith, and the many who remain conflicted about faith. Then, too, we may see more clearly that which we have in common -- the desire for community and fellowship, the need for foundational principles, and the search for God in a broken world. 

And Then the Sun Set at Wrigley in October

The Last Out

The sun set in Chicago this year, on the 13th day of October. It happened on a pitch in the dirt, a slider down and away, far beyond the reach of Stephen Piscotty, the Cardinals promising rookie. One last desperate swing, one last strike for the final out, and there ended an entire season of baseball, and with it the hopes and dreams of a million young boys and of older men with young boy’s hearts. For a few days in October, the Baseball Gods were inclined to permit those lovable losers, the Chicago Cubs, who last made it to a World Series in 1945 and last won it in 1908, a taste of post-season glory.

For me and aggrieved Cardinal fans, the baseball season, or what matters of it, is at an unceremonious end. It is how we know that winter lurks, that the cold winds of autumn have eclipsed the annual rites of spring and the observances of summer. The days are shorter now, the sun retiring by late afternoon; the leaves are turning brown and dry as an irritable chill glosses the morning air. With one last pitch, one last swing, one last out, darkness has descended over Cardinal Nation.

“I have sensed that there is more losing than winning in our sport,” wrote Roger Angell in Season Ticket (Ballentine Books, 1988). Baseball lends itself to such meditations. Though if truth be told, I have been luckier than most. For the past dozen years, ever since the miracle of satellite technology brought televised Cardinals games into my home on a nightly basis, I have been blessed with a consistently winning team. This year was no exception. The Cardinals finished the regular season with 100 wins and the best record in all of baseball. They accomplished this despite season shortening injuries to starting pitcher Adam Wainwright, eighth inning setup man Jordan Walden, first baseman Matt Adams, and All-Start leftfielder Matt Holliday. By season’s end, they limped into the playoffs with tape and bandages and a special cast for Yadier Molina’s injured thumb. In the final weeks, starting pitcher Carlos Martinez, a young star with a lightning bolt for an arm, fell to a shoulder injury. In the end, it was simply too much to overcome.

Though it pains me to write this, by October the Cubs were simply the stronger, better team. The Cardinals finished this season with a 2.94 team earned run average, the best in the major leagues and their lowest team ERA since 1969. But by September, Cards pitchers showed signs of fatigue. In the NLDS, they were undone by a young Cubs lineup with relentless power and palpable confidence. It seemed that every time the Cardinals took a lead or came within reach, some young slugger on the Cubs hit another home run and shifted momentum in the wrong direction.

“Sports teams live on confidence,” writes Angell. “It is the air they must breathe to survive at all.” As I sit and write from my study on this mid-October day, the Cubs are a talented and self-assured team. In spite of their youth, or perhaps because of it, they believe in themselves and trust that destiny is on their side. They may be right. After all, they’re too young to really know better, for unlike their fans, these young players have not experienced decades of suffering, painful defeats, and excruciating bad luck – of black cats and a cursed Billy goat – that is the lore of Chicago baseball history.

Baseball can be a cruel and unforgiving game. It will lift your spirits and offer hope for a weary soul, only to break your heart in the end. As a Cardinals fan, I have experienced just enough joy and disappointment to become skeptical and cautious whenever October baseball arrives. The NLDS began hopefully this year, the Cardinals winning Game One in a 4-0 gem in St. Louis that temporarily suppressed the Cubs youthful cockiness. For nine innings, the Cardinals looked and played like the best team in baseball, with near perfect pitching, good defense, and timely hitting. They were smooth and fluid of motion, and everything went their way. The next night, a leadoff homerun by Matt Carpenter staked Jaime Garcia to a 1-0 lead. For a moment, I sensed that something special was in the works.

And then . . . .

A throwing error by the Cards’ second baseman Kolten Wong and a misplay by Garcia on a safety squeeze led to a second inning meltdown. Three runs had crossed the plate before the Cubs hit the ball out of the infield. By inning’s end, almost instantaneously, the Cubs had scored five unearned runs and taken control of the series. The Cardinals never recovered. After the Cubs won Game Two and the series moved to Chicago, the Cardinals pitching fell apart and their bats could not match the Cubs display of power. By the ninth inning of Game Four, before I processed the cruel swiftness of it all, the series was over. And then . . .  the Cardinals packed their bags and flew home for winter.

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Out by an Inch

The desire of the true baseball fan – the one who lives and dies for a particular team every night – is for the end of fortuity and bad luck. We understand that a significant part of the game is beyond the control even of the players and managers. A broken bat, a bad hop, an injury, a blister on the pitcher’s forefinger, a bloop hit by the opposing team’s pitcher with two outs and a runner on second, a gust of wind at the wrong moment, a throw home that beats the runner and nullifies the potential go ahead run – your team’s run – by an inch. All too often it is the little things that affect the outcome of an at bat, an inning, or a game.

What we desire, if we are honest, is an unrealistic string of good luck. We wish, we hope, we pray…we wear the lucky hat and drink from the lucky mug, ready to bargain with the devil to make things go our way. But deep down, in the inner reaches of our soul, we know everything about the game, and how the players perform, are matters beyond our control. As in life, we can only hope for the best and brace ourselves for the worst.

In writing of the fan’s predicament in the summer of 1986, in a New Yorker essay called “Fortuity,” Roger Angell recounted an essential truth:

Because I am a fan, all I can do is care, and what I wish for, almost every day of the summer, is for things to go well – to go perfectly – for the teams and the players I most care about. . . . I think every true fan wants no less. We wish for this seriously, every day of the season, but at the same time I think we don’t want it at all. We want our teams to be losers as well as winners; we must have bad luck as well as good, terrible defeats and disappointments as well as victories and thrilling surprises. We must have them, for if it were otherwise, if we could control more of the game or all of the game and make it do our bidding, we would have been granted a wish – no more losing! – that we would badly want to give back within a week. We would have lost baseball, in fact, and then we would have to look around, without much hope, for something else to care about in such a particular and arduous fashion.

Baseball is a game of exuberance and disappointment, of great achievement and skill mixed with failure and crushing defeat. The more I watch and learn, the more clearly I see how difficult the game really is. It is why one of my favorite movie scenes of all time is from A League of Their Own, when Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) informs her manager, Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), that she is quitting the Rockford Peaches of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). Although Hinson wishes to return to Oregon with her husband, who days earlier had returned injured from the Second World War, Dugan is unmoved:

Dugan:  . . . I'm in no position to tell anyone how to live. But sneaking out like this, quitting, you'll regret it for the rest of your life. Baseball is what gets inside you. It's what lights you up, you can't deny that. 

Hinson:  It just got too hard. 

Dugan:  It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great.

The more we understand baseball, the more we realize it is intended to break our heart. Failure and disappointment, thoughts of what might have been, are part of the game. Winning it all is so cherished because it is so rare.

I realize that, compared to the average baseball fan, I have lived a charmed life. Consider by comparison the wretched Cubs fan. Is there anyone even alive today who was around when the Cubs last won a World Series – precisely 107 years ago? In the half century since I became a Cardinals fan in the summer of 1967, when Gibson and Brock led the Cardinals over the Red Sox in the best of seven series, only the Yankees have exceeded the Cardinals in postseason appearances. In that time, the Cardinals have played in nine World Series and won four of them. 

And yet, in 46 of those 50 years, the season ended badly, in defeat, or worse, irrelevance. It is why I will never tire of the game or take winning for granted. I will continue to care deeply about each game, the scores and statistics, the ups and downs of 25 men I know little about, who play the game I loved as a child, and still love, and wished I could have played forever. And I will continue to care about the Cardinals, just like that seven year-old boy who first fell in love with the game, with the feel of a leather glove, a wooden bat, and the smell of grass on a July afternoon, and who came to care about the destiny of a team for which he had no control.

Call me immature, childish, a hopeless romantic, it matters not. Year after year, in hopeful anticipation of a new season that will end in joyful exuberance or disappointing heartbreak, I will keep coming back for more.

Francis Goes to Washington: A Call to Serve the Common Good

Politics is . . . an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build as one the greatest common good: that of a community which sacrifices particular interests in order to share, in justice and peace, its goods, its interests, its social life. – Pope Francis, September 24, 2015.

Pope Francis has come to America and he has not disappointed. His inspirational words and gestures of compassion, his genuine humility and the elegant simplicity of his presence, have allowed him to give witness to a broken and divided world. Although he is the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, there is something about this Pope that appeals instinctively to non-Catholics, to Protestants and Jews, to the unaffiliated, even to non-believers. His voice is one of reasoned wisdom, a refreshing and eloquent call to the real and pressing issues of our time. He speaks with a moral clarity often lacking in religious and political leaders today; and he leads by example, living simply and acting compassionately, as he reminds us that love, forgiveness, grace and understanding, not judgment and condemnation, are at the heart of the Gospel message. His words resonate with an authenticity and an ethical consistency of significance to Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

On Thursday, when Pope Francis addressed a joint session of Congress, I set aside the hour to watch and listen. Revered as the Vicar of Christ by a quarter of the world’s population, here was the Pope of the Holy See addressing the Congress of the United States for the first time in history. He spoke with the familiar tone of a gentle pastor and was, for a day, the nation’s most influential teacher, a wise sage holding forth in the halls of power. As he slowly articulated his words in English as Members of Congress, the Cabinet, and the Supreme Court politely listened, Francis encouraged and prodded, advocating civility, a unity of purpose, and a concern for all of God’s children and the environment we inhabit. For an hour on Thursday morning, I was filled with the hope that perhaps this one man could change the negative dynamic that is Washington politics today.

Francis called upon our legislators to do what is their basic responsibility – to care for those they serve. He spoke of a shared responsibility to “defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics.” He invoked the image of Moses adorning the walls of the Congressional chamber as a symbol of “the transcendent dignity of the human being” and “the image and likeness fashioned by God on every human face.”

Francis reminded us of our common humanity and the need to care for all members of the human race. He implored the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” – on refugees, immigration, the poor, and the environment. This son of immigrants reminded Americans of our immigrant roots, for we and our families were at one time strangers in a sometimes unwelcoming land. Historically, said Francis, the rights of those who made their way to America were not always respected, and many were treated badly. But “when the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past.” Today’s refugees and immigrants simply desire “a better life for themselves and for their loved ones. . . . Is this not what we want for our own children?” The numbers of people seeking refuge may be daunting, Francis said, but each number represents the face of a living, breathing human being; we must “view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories.”

Francis noted that we live in a world full of “violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion” – implicit references to the brutality of ISIS and to acts of terror by radical Islamists. But he reminded us once again that “no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism” and that “we must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism.”

I have frequently asserted in my writings and in everyday life that the world is not easily divided into black and white, that there is good and bad in almost everyone and every nation. The world is a complex mixture of many colors, of nuance and shades of grey. Thus, I was particularly heartened by the Pope’s words that we must “guard against the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world . . . demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.” For this humble servant of God, our response as a nation must be “one of hope and healing, of peace and justice.”

In this light, Francis’s words endorsed the President’s recent efforts to re-establish relations with Cuba and engage in dialogue with Iran, both of which have helped “overcome historic differences linked to painful episodes of the past.” Dialogue and diplomacy is always better than militarism and conquest, he said, for diplomacy requires “courage and daring” and “a spirit of openness and pragmatism. A good political leader always opts to initiate processes rather than possessing spaces.”

While describing America as a land of dreams and a nation of promises, Francis comes from a broader, more global perspective. He understands and admires the American promise and singled out four historically significant Americans who sought through words and deeds to make us better. Two of them needed little explanation: Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, who Francis cited as representing America’s progression to a liberty grounded in pluralism and equality for all. He also highlighted two lesser known Americans, Catholic pacifists who devoted their lives to the betterment of humankind: Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and radical activist for better working conditions and the rights of the poor; and Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and student of comparative religion who authored more than 70 books of poetry, spirituality, social justice and peace.

“A nation can be considered great,” Francis said, “when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to ‘dream’ of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.” In highlighting “[t]hree sons and a daughter of this land” as an embodiment of service and compassion, Francis appealed to America’s history of social reform and political activism, for each devoted his or her life to making America a better, more perfect union.

As I wrote about this Pope in January 2014 (“Bringing it All Back Home: Pope Francis and a Return to Compassion”), there is really nothing new in Francis’s emphasis on love, justice, and compassion for all. It is the essence of a faith that has been overshadowed by the more judgmental and, in my view, deeply misguided expressions of conservative and fundamentalist versions of Christianity that have dominated American public life for the past thirty-five years. I am grateful for this Pope’s efforts to reemphasize the message and shift priorities in a more compassionate, forgiving, and less judgmental direction.

In the words of the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “the task of the human being is to represent the Divine, to be a reminder of the presence of God.” Francis’s words express the same sentiment, and their political implications are unambiguous: the face of every human being is the face of God; to injure another human being, to lack care and compassion for another, to do harm to the planet for the sake of profit and greed – these are transgressions against the Creator. “Whatever I do to man, I do to God,” Heschel explained. “When I hurt a human being, I injure God.”

For Francis, this enduring concept is inspirational and obligatory; to see the face of God in every human being and to treat the Earth and nature as God’s precious creations should inform our everyday lives as citizens and serve as a mission statement for those in power. To serve the common good thus demands that we care for and protect our “common home” and engage in the proper “use of natural resources.” This requires “a courageous and responsible effort . . . to avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity” for which the nation's policymakers have an important role to play. Although Francis shied away from specific policy prescriptions, attached to his words are clear public policy implications:

Now is the time for courageous actions and strategies, aimed at implementing a culture of care and an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature. We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology, to devise intelligent ways of developing and limiting our power, and to put technology at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral.

As a nation we have much work left to do. It can start with members of Congress working together in meaningful ways to address our most pressing needs and concerns. To talk of shutting down the government once again, as are certain members of Congress; to deny the human effects of climate change as an excuse for inaction on our over reliance on fossil fuels, as several right-wing Republicans continually do; to talk of erecting huge walls to keep people out and to call for mass deportations, as Donald Trump and others have loudly and cynically proclaimed, are not the words of responsible, caring, and compassionate leaders. We need political leaders who believe that for the promise of America to succeed, we must do the hard work of diplomacy and peace, take care of our most vulnerable citizens, repair our public infrastructure, educate our children, and allocate our resources in meaningful and responsible ways. We need leaders who will, as Pope Francis does, bring out the best in us as people, as a nation, and as a beacon of light to the world.

Pope Francis came to America this week and offered us a lesson in compassion, witness and responsibility. Immediately after Francis addressed Congress, he went to a local shelter and fed the homeless. The Pope spoke truth to power and then broke bread with the powerless. In his address to Congress, he challenged the most powerful and richest nation on earth to break its cycle of political dysfunction and paralysis. He heightened the national conversation, urging Congress to work cooperatively to restore a planet torn by hatred, greed, poverty, and environmental degradation. Let us hope that our leaders have listened with an open mind and a willing heart. Can this humble man of simplicity and justice turn the tide of our divisiveness and despair? Or will Congress and our political system revert to obstructionism and division by refusing to advance the common good?

The Syrian Refugee Crisis: Will America Welcome the Stranger and Be a Light Unto the Nations?

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to be free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

--Emma Lazarus (The Statue of Liberty)

As a father, I was deeply moved by the images of Aylan Kurdi, a three year-old boy who washed ashore after drowning in the Mediterranean Sea during his family's failed attempt to escape the Syrian civil war. Aylan's mother and four-year old brother also drowned on their journey in search of safety, security, and the dreams of a better life. The faces of the men, women, and children I see on the nightly news, arriving on the shores of Greece and Turkey in rubber boats, or walking along the railroad tracks of Hungary, are heartbreaking. “All over Europe and the Mediterranean world, barriers are being breached,” write the editors of The Nation. “[T]he natural and man-made barriers of fear and grief that keep people from fleeing war or poverty until they have no choice; the barriers of indifference that enable the rest of us to get on with our lives as if those men, women, and children were no concern of ours.”

As a nation, as individuals, as empathetic human beings, we cannot simply sit and do nothing. History has taught us otherwise.

In July 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt convened a conference at Evian, France, in the hope of convincing our allies and friends in the international community to accept large numbers of Jewish émigrés desperately seeking refuge from Hitler’s Germany. In cooperation with Rabbi Stephen Wise, his friend and close confidant, Roosevelt had advanced an ambitious proposal to ease the plight of refugees by spreading the burden to friendly nations across the globe. Although delegates from 32 countries attended, the conference was a huge disappointment. Only the Dominican Republic offered to admit significant numbers of refugees. With a deep global recession lingering, convincing Americans and the world to welcome hundreds of thousands of foreigners was a hard sell.

At Evian, Roosevelt discovered that the resistance of world leaders to assuming responsibility for resettling refugees resembled the opposition he faced on the home front. Back in the United States, Roosevelt contended with stringent immigration quotas, an isolationist Congress, the anti-immigrant sentiments of organized labor, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, and a nation weary of engagement with the world. Many of our friends and allies were equally ungenerous. As described by American University Professors Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman in FDR and the Jews (Harvard University Press, 2013):

Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Panama stated that they wanted no traders or intellectuals, code words for Jews. Argentina said it had already accommodated enough immigrants from Central Europe. Canada cited its unemployment problem. Australia said that it had no “racial problems” and did not want to create any by bringing in Jewish refugees. Imperial countries such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands said that their tropical territories offered only limited prospects for European refugees. League of Nations High Commissioner Sir Neill Malcom was openly hostile to the idea of a new refugee organization. . . . The Washington Post headlined one story on the conference, “YES, BUT ---” [and] noted . . . “that delegates take the floor to say, ‘We feel sorry for the refugees and potential refugees, but---.’”

Many asked why other countries should absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees when the United States and Britain failed to do so. It was a question without a good answer.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., after Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and following the Kristallnacht pogroms in November of that year, the nations of Western Europe and the Americas feared an influx of refugees. By the summer of 1939, 309,000 Jewish refugees had applied for visas in the United States, but existing immigration quotas allowed for only 27,000 (1939 was the first year the United States attempted even to fill the quota for German and Austrian Jews). Some Jews found refuge in Great Britain and Palestine, though Britain actively blocked much Jewish emigration to Palestine. Still others fled to Central and South America. In the end, six million Jews perished in the Holocaust along with millions of other dissidents and “undesirables.” Although Nazi fascism was eventually defeated, when given the opportunity, the international community failed to act with the compassion and urgency needed to protect the most vulnerable among us.

Four million migrants and refugees have so far fled the bombs of Assad and the brutality of ISIS. The countries of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey are overwhelmed with migrants, with Jordan and Lebanon having absorbed numbers approaching 20% - 25% of their respective populations. Despite the efforts of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and international aid organizations, there is a tremendous shortage of food, water, shelter, and medical care. The conditions of the refugee camps in these bordering countries are unsustainable. Something must be done.

President Obama announced that the United States, which to date has admitted only 1,500 Syrian refugees (out of 4 million), will admit 10,000 more, though with no easing of administrative and bureaucratic restrictions that typically require two years of paperwork before a family can be admitted. This is pathetic. I tip my hat to the people of Germany, Sweden, and Iceland, where extraordinary efforts are underway to ease the plight of refugees, to offer shelter and a welcome mat to people in need, and to reconcile differing cultures and religions in ways that offer hope and optimism for the future.

Leadership requires the ability to appeal to the best in people, to inspire individuals, churches, and institutions to act for the broader good. “We need to decide right now what kind of Europe we are going to be,” said Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven. “My Europe takes in refugees. My Europe doesn’t build walls.” Sweden’s employment minister, Ylva Johansson added, “To feel empathy with the suffering of another person, a person who is not like ourselves, is part of being human.”

We can debate forever whether American foreign policy in Syria and the Middle East is partly to blame for the current crisis, whether we should have intervened militarily against Bashar al-Assad, or provided more support to the rebel movements, or sent ground troops to fight ISIS – none of which, in my opinion, would have been feasible or productive. There are few good military options in Syria. However one resolves those issues, it is the responsibility of this country and the nations of Europe – and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, among others – to welcome and shelter people whose only crime is seeking safety and security for their families. The refugees need medicine, blankets, and food; they also need human warmth and compassion, people who will listen to them and grant them dignity and respect.

The people of Iceland who volunteered to pay for the flights of Syrian refugees and provided temporary shelter in their homes have set the high water mark for this crisis. Thousands have responded to the slogan, “Just because it isn’t happening here doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.” It is encouraging to find idealism alive and well in one small corner of the world.

Germany and Sweden are also showing the world what it means to take seriously the obligations of privilege and wealth. Germany will accept 800,000 migrants this year alone, an astonishing figure that should set a moral example for the rest of us. The German people who have welcomed Syrians with flowers and food and hospitality can teach all of us what it means to respond to a humanitarian crisis. Sweden’s efforts, though smaller in total numbers, are even more impressive in light of the proportional burden that small country has accepted.

Assimilating refugees is difficult and complex. It can strain a nation’s economy and requires the acceptance and absorption of people with different cultural and religious practices, languages and values. It is true that we cannot save everyone and we cannot solve all of the world’s problems. But we can and should do more, much more, to stem the tide of human suffering and despair. As the most powerful and prosperous country on earth, we should follow the lead of the Germans, Swedes, and Icelanders in welcoming the stranger and offering hope and shelter to the tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

I know we live in cynical times. I can think of a hundred excuses for why we cannot or will not open our borders to Syrian families in need of a helping hand. We don’t know these people, it will cost too much, and it will be too difficult; where will they stay, and work, and go to school? Practical concerns always obstruct the feasibility of compassionate idealism. But “without idealists there would be no optimism,” American author Alisa Steinberg has written, “and without optimism there would be no courage to achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never come to fruition.”

The humanitarian crisis that is Syria today is a stark reminder of the world’s failure to come to the aid of Jewish refugees during the Second World War. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, once a refugee herself, suggested that the political refugee, more than any other human being, exposes a society’s actual devotion to human rights; the wandering refugee has no legal status, no home, no state, nothing "except that they [are] still human." In the 1930’s and 1940’s, when confronted with millions of potential refugees, Europe and America offered insufficient refuge. We say never again, but do we mean it?