But, it is the community of Jews - the collective Jewish people - who are told to be holy; to imitate God by becoming k'doshim, "holy."
-Kenneth J. Weiss, 2005
QUESTION 1: What do you see as your personal responsibility in creating a holy community?
QUESTION 2: Tell a story about how you helped your community be holy.
The following text comes from a section of Leviticus called "The Holiness Code," and discusses a number of actions that we must do in order to maintain our holiness as a community. This is one of those actions:
(33) When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. (34) The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Eternal am your God.
QUESTION 3: What makes someone a stranger?
QUESTION 4: How are we commanded to treat strangers? What should that look like in today's world?
QUESTION 5: How does our treatment of strangers relate to our being holy?
Jews have always been immigrants. We're always searching for a safe place to call home. That is one reason we are so invested in making sure that today's immigrants have the opportunity to build their lives in America like we did.
Right now, at least 11 million men, women, and children are living in the United States with the real fear that they could be thrown into a detention center, deported, and torn from their families at any time. These are our neighbors, our friends, and our children's classmates. Even if we don't have a personal connection to any of the millions of undocumented people in America, they are people whose innate dignity deserves respect...This is no way to treat people who have worked hard, paid their taxes, and contributed to the country like the rest of us — they are "different" only because they lack the right papers...
One of Judaism's central teachings is to "welcome the stranger," to offer shelter to those in need and to accept those who we perceive to be different from us...Jews believe that our fates are bound up in one another — that we're all in this together. Put in a different way, we are responsible for each other, and an injustice against one hurts everybody. It also means we are responsible for correcting the injustices in our world.
-Stosh Cotler, CEO of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice.
Excerpted from https://tinyurl.com/ImmigrationJewishIssue
QUESTION 6: How does our Jewish immigration history connect us to immigrants today?
QUESTION 7: What can each of us do to take responsibility for immigration injustices in our country?
QUESTION 8: What will I do to take responsibility?