Dear friends,
There are so many reasons to be thankful these days: Sunlight, Springtime, Easter, Passover, Eid. Celebrations that mark the end of dark days and the beginning of hopeful ones.
And yet—I feel it now more than ever—there are so many reasons to get stuck in darkness. My neighbors and colleagues inhabit a well-founded fear as their status as legal refugees and immigrants has slowly been not only questioned but denied, and as the dignity and hope offered to them by our country has been snatched away, policy by policy.
If you’re a Princess Bride movie fan, you’ll remember the scene when Magic Max and his wife wave goodbye to a “mostly dead” Westley and friends, cheerily shouting, “Have fun stormin’ the castle!” And then, aside to each other, “Do you think it will work?”
“It’ll take a miracle.”
This is how our community feels these days… even though we listen and empathize, as our team does everything we can to equip our people for every eventuality of the current times (we’ve had working sessions with our police chief and an immigration attorney, and we have created “emergency plans”), I find my words are hollow. I dare not say, “I know how you feel,” because I don’t, and I never have.
I know nostalgia is not the best antidote for hopelessness, nor is it always accurate in its assessment of the past, but listening to the men and women who have lived in a similar time can be an exercise in hope. Their hope is contagious.
Last week, I read about Gerda Weissmann Klein, a Polish-born human rights activist. President Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 and said this to say about her:
By the time she was 21, Gerda Klein had spent six years living under Nazi rule—three of them in concentration camps. Her parents and brother had been taken away. Her best friend had died in her arms during a 350-mile death march. And she weighed only 68 pounds when she was found by American forces in an abandoned bicycle factory. But Gerda survived. She married the soldier who rescued her. And ever since—as an author, a historian, and a crusader for tolerance—she has taught the world that it is often in our most hopeless moments that we discover the extent of our strength and the depth of our love.
And then Gerda herself said this:
To perpetuate the miracle that is America, we must teach our children about its rich history as a nation of immigrants who chose this country and have given meaning to its ideals.
Here’s my brief takeaway from the life of this woman who endured the violent, systemic, horrific unwelcoming of the holocaust and, finally, the “miracle” of welcome here in our country:
Unwelcome is inhumane and horrible.
Welcome is a miracle.
Together, survivors and those who rescue them create that miracle.
I am sitting with these words today (President Obama’s, Gerda’s, and my own stunned inability to say much more). I invite you to sit with them, too.
It’ll take a miracle,
Kitti
