"The Refugee" Lecture

How could I fail to identify with refugees when I myself am one? Yes. I too was a refugee. Something in me is a refugee. In a strange way, a person who has been a refugee remains a refugee.

I’ll give you two anecdotal examples. One is that whenever I travel abroad, I don’t buy anything, God knows I have no patience, no interest, in buying anything in Paris or London. Yet whenever I return to the United States from abroad, before going through customs, I, quite literally, am afraid. There is nothing to be afraid of but I am afraid, because I am a refugee. As a journalist I crossed many borders, and whenever I had to cross a border, it was hell. I never knew whether I would get in or out of somewhere from somewhere else. Everybody was looking at me suspiciously, because everybody looks at refugees suspiciously.

The second example is as anecdotal as the first, but more dramatic. I drive a car. I don’t know how I do it, but I drive. And, believe me, when I got my driver’s license, I was prouder than when I got an honorary degree. But when we have to make a U-turn in New York, I am so afraid of the policemen that I stop and let my wife do it.

There is a third beautiful anecdote that I remember from those times, and it is pertinent. In Europe during the war, the refugees passed their time waiting for visas. Always waiting for visas. They would wait for days and days and days, standing in line in front of all kinds of consulates, waiting for a visa to anywhere.

The main thing was to get out, out of occupied France, out of Europe, and to go. Two Jewish people finally managed to get into different consulates, and when they met, one said to the other, “Did you get a visa?” “Yes!” “Where to?” “I’m going to Brazil.” “Good.” The other person then asked, “And you also got a visa? Where are you going?” The answer was in Spanish: “Tierra del Fuego.” So the other person then said, “But that is so far!” And the first replied “Far from where?”

That, to me, describes the state of mind of a refugee. Far from where? Suddenly geographic distances no longer matter. One can live a mile away from the border, and it’s not a mile, it’s a lifetime. Those French people who, during the war resided at the Swiss border, for instance, saw Switzerland day after day; they saw people who lived freely. I could never understand them and still cannot . . . what did they think of their freedom?

Permit me to turn the question around. I could never understand and I cannot understand now how those people in Switzerland, who were free, could remain free and eat in the morning and at lunch and at dinner while looking at the other side, at occupied France. After all, they lived in the same time, and yet, time itself had its own divisions.

If ever time was a metaphysical notion, that was it: when good and evil were separated by a man-made frontier. Any frontier is man-made, and yet, on one side people died, while on the other they went on living as though the others didn’t die.

Those who know me will confirm that I am not a political person. I have never been involved in anything political. I don’t understand politics; to me, it is something extremely obscure. I come from a tradition that aims at conferring an ethical meaning on anything a person does or does not do.

I would like, therefore, to see this problem in its ethical perspective. And from the ethical perspective, it is impossible for human beings today, especially for my contemporaries, who have seen what people can do to themselves and to one another, not to be involved. We must be with those who have suffered, and we must be with those who have tried to prevent others from suffering. This is the real community: it does not deny the differences, but rather enhances and transcends them. Because I am a Jew, and profoundly a Jew, I have to be a part of that community.

I have been asking myself where the whole concept of sanctuary comes from. First I went back to the Bible, and I discovered that there the word sanctuary somehow is not what we think it is.

The sanctuary concept in Scripture is rooted in what we call in Hebrew arey miklat, meaning “cities of refuge.” However, we cannot draw a direct parallel. For a refuge-city, according to the Bible, is a place for guilty people, as distinct from refugees fleeing from Central America. A person who inadvertently was guilty, who unwittingly, unknowingly, committed a crime, would flee to one of the designated cities for a safe haven from revenge. Why? We are told in the Bible that it is natural to want to avenge a relative. It is an instinctive reaction. But there is one place where that avenger cannot enter. It is the refuge-city.

So I said to myself, that principle doesn’t apply in your case, because surely not one of you has committed any crime. If you are here, my friends, it is because you want to live far from crime. It is because you want to renounce a society that may, in its foolishness, believe that violence is the answer. That is why you are here. And therefore you deserve another kind of sanctuary. Not the biblical kind.

I went to the Talmud, and there I realized that the entire problem, the entire theme of sanctuary, is always linked to war and peace. So what is a sanctuary in the biblical sense? It is an outgrowth of violence. For this reason, we are totally opposed to war, not only war against peoples but also war against individuals. When a state declares war on individuals, that means that something is wrong with that state. Then we have to find another concept of sanctuary.

What is it? Here again I come to my Jewish tradition, and with delight I discover that when we speak of sanctuary in the Jewish tradition, it refers to human beings. Sanctuary, then, is not a place. Sanctuary is a human being. Any human being is a sanctuary. Every human being is the dwelling of God – man or woman or child, Christian or Jewish or Buddhist. Any person, by virtue of being a son or a daughter of humanity, is a living sanctuary whom nobody has the right to invade.

I have seen the opposite. I have seen the invasion of obscurity into light, of violence into wisdom. I saw it forty years ago. Most of you have studied the Bible. As you know, in the Bible forty years make one generation – which means we are one generation away from those times.

I remember when I became a refugee. Of all things it was on a Saturday, on the Sabbath. The gathering took place in the synagogue because the enemies, in their perverted imagination, tried so to hurt us that they sought to commit the worst crimes in our holiest place. Therefore they gathered the Jews of my town, Sighet, into the synagogue. And it is there that the first humiliation occurred.

We stood in line; there was a table with many gendarmes, feathers in their hats. We would come and give our papers. We were so naive. We thought that we were protected by our papers. Therefore proudly we took out our citizenship papers certifying us as citizens of Hungary. May I tell you, my good friends, what we had to do in order to obtain those papers? I cannot begin to tell even you. I remember the pain and the anguish that some of us had to go through to prove that our great-great-grandfather was born in a particular village, or town. Finally, we got the papers, and we felt good about them. We felt safe. But then, when I approached the table, in the synagogue courtyard, the officer didn’t even look at the papers. He took them, tore them up, and threw them into the wastebasket. I thus became a refugee. That feeling of being a refugee lasted and lasted for many, many years – in fact, until I came to this country.

You who are so-called illegal aliens must know that no human being is “illegal.” That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?

I was in France for many years, always as a refugee. Only here did I become a citizen, and I must tell you that I feel nothing but gratitude to this country, the first country that offered me a home and a refuge. I can tell you, my good friends from El Salvador, from Guatemala, and other places, that I hope you will soon feel what I feel. The twentieth century has created so many symbols, so many new concepts. It has also created a new human species: the refugee.

Now what is the characteristic of a refugee? It is that she or he has no citizenship. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of human beings have felt – overnight – unwanted. Now nothing can be more painful than being unwanted everywhere, undesired, and this is what a refugee is.

What has been done to the word refuge? In the beginning the word sounded beautiful. A refuge meant “home.” It welcomed you, protected you, gave you warmth and hospitality. Then we added one single phoneme, one letter, e, and the positive term refuge became refugee, connoting something negative.

What I hope this century will achieve before it reaches its end is to get rid of this species. No more refugees. Wherever people come they should be accepted in every society with friendship, they should be given a new way and a new measure of hope by becoming citizens of that country, our brothers and our sisters.

How does one achieve this? I know that American public opinion has political influence. If the American public were made aware – through newspapers and through television – of what is happening, if they were shown the suffering of the refugees, they would move Congress to act.

After all, Congress is our best ally. I am pleased to hear that Senator DeConcini has introduced a bill. I think we should work with all our friends in Congress so that the bill passes in the House and the Senate. I think that is the way we must follow. I think it can be done. It can be done because humanity is contagious. We have seen it.

I’ll give you an example. A few months ago I was in St. Louis with my friend Harry Cargas. I spoke for Christians and Jews; it was just a day or two after we heard and saw what was happening in Ethiopia.

Well, we tried to alert people, we spoke, we mobilized sympathies, and the American people responded beautifully. I know that in the places where I was every child in every school gave a dollar. Communities galvanized their strengths, and there too, Jew and non-Jew came together. For it was unbearable to see men and women suffering, dying in front of us. I literally couldn’t take it. Nor could the American people.

No comparisons should ever be made between tragedy and tragedy. Every tragedy is sui generis. It’s only for you – I mean you, victims – to find the name for your tragedy. I have no right to give it a name, but I will accept the name that you give me. The least I can do is to accept your testimony, the testimony of the victims, and give it full credence, because you are both victim of and witness to your own cause.

I believe, therefore, that those men and women who decide to leave a country because they are hungry, because they cannot see their children die, or because they cannot see their parents die of hunger, deserve our respect; they deserve our friendship; and they deserve our support, just as do those who flee the very same country or others for political reasons.

Not to be hungry is part of our human right. How to feed his children is the obsession of every father. When a father cannot feed his children, the humiliation of that father or mother or sister, the torture of that family, is something that we here in America should not be able to tolerate. And we cannot tolerate it. We must speak and we must act as one human being to another. We must show that we care.

A few months ago we had a conference in Washington, which we called Faith in Humankind, a conference of rescuers of Jews during the war. It was devoted to what we called the righteous Gentiles. The idea came to us because I wanted to understand what made some people care and, secondly, why there were so few. We brought seventy-five righteous Gentiles to Washington; we brought scholars and philosophers and moralists, and we met together and we tried to understand what it was.

One of the great surprises for me was to realize that those people who cared – or as we put it, who had the courage to care – were not people of high stature. They were not generals, ministers, university professors, or industrialists. Most of them were simple people who didn’t even know that what they were doing was courageous; they didn’t even know that their acts were heroic.

They did it because it was the thing to do. And I felt then, woe to our society if to be human becomes a heroic act. Today, the times are different; therefore, please never compare, never. But as long as people suffer, I think there must be other people, and more, who should come to help them.

It doesn’t even take that much. A gesture, an invitation to dinner, a smile, a meeting here tonight or a conference, or simply an idea that some young and old people come together for the best and most human cause in the world: to alleviate human suffering and to prevent humiliation.

My good friends, having received your calls and letters, how could I not come to be with you?

I am not sure that I can help you very much. I have no political power. All I have is a way of putting some words together, that’s all. I represent my words, but these words come from ancient legends and laws, and after all, those legends and laws are not only mine, they are yours as well. To make you feel better, I will tell you a story: Who was the first refugee? Moses? No. Abraham? No. Adam.

Adam was our grandfather. And Adam was our first refugee. I’ll tell you when and how it happened. It had something to do with his wife, but if not with his wife, it had to do with a serpent. The serpent was actually very good, because later, I imagine, the Bible knew that a certain Sigmund Freud would come along. I remember how it happened; we all remember that one day Adam fled; he committed a sin and he fled, at which point God said to him, “Aifo ata,” – what beautiful words in the Bible – which means “Where art thou?” Adam, “Where art thou?”

The specific story tells us that one day a great Hassidic master, the founder of the Lubavitch movement, was in jail. He too was a refugee. The warden of the prison came to see him and said to the rabbi, “I know that you know the Bible; maybe you can answer me. In the Bible it’s written that God asks Adam, ‘Where art thou?’ Is it conceivable that God didn’t know where Adam was?” And Rabbi Meyer Solomon answered: “God knew, Adam did not.”

Do we know where we are? That is, do we know our place in history? Do we know our role in society? I can tell you of my experience and of my learning, again, which I have inherited from centuries of sages and disciples.

My place is measured by yours. In other words, my place under the sun, or in the face of God, or in my own memory, is measured by the distance it has from you. In other words, if I see a person or persons suffer, and the distance between us does not shrink, oh, then, my place is not good, not enviable.

Where am I? I am where you are, and if not, who knows where or whether I am at all?

In conclusion, what is a sanctuary? The sanctuary often is something very small. Not a grandiose gesture, but a small gesture toward alleviating human suffering and preventing humiliation. The sanctuary is a human being. Sanctuary is a dream. And that is why you are here, and that is why I am here. We are here because of one another.