This is the month of love. You may think that Valentine’s Day is not a Jewish holiday. It’s not. But the concept that Saint Valentine’s Day enshrines is actually very Jewish. Much of Valentine’s Day is shrouded in myth and legend. There are even at least two saints who were named Valentine. One Vallentine was a priest who continued to perform marriages after Emperor Claudius outlawed marriage because single men made better soldiers. Helping brides and grooms to rejoice in marriage is considered a big mitzvah and is enshrined in the Talmud.  

“These are the obligations without measure, whose reward, too, is without measure: To honor father and mother; to perform acts of love and kindness; to attend the house of study daily; to welcome the stranger; to visit the sick; to rejoice with bride and groom; to console the bereaved; to pray with sincerity; to make peace where there is strife…and the study of Torah is equal to them all, because it leads to them all.” 

~Talmud 

We will look at these texts more next week. Tonight we are starting a three part series on love. I recently took a class on Receiving and Extending Love offered by the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. It was about meditating on Ahavah Rabbah, the Great Love prayer, the Sh’ma, G-d’s Oneness and the V’ahavta.  

On this very cold night, I want to address these three prayers. I often see the Sh’ma as the central prayer of Judaism, blanketed, tucked in, surrounded by love. G-d’s love for us by giving us Torah, and our love of G-d with all our hearts, with all our souls, with all our everything. 

One day while meditating, my mind wandered, apparently that is quite common, and I remembered that there are three great commandments about love in Judaism. Love the stranger, which on this Refugee Shabbat we will address tonight. Love your neighbor as yourself which we will address next week, and Love G-d, the prayer we know as the V’ahavta. 

The Torah ends with the letter “Lamed” and begins with the letter “Bet” together, they spell Lev, heart. It is part of why we read the Torah every year, so we can go deeper and deeper into this heart. So we can experience love more deeply.  

Tonight, then, we begin to understand more fully the obligation, the commandment to love the stranger, the sojourner, more fully. 36 times according to the Talmud it exhorts us to take care of the widow, the orphan and the stranger. I think precisely because of this week’s Torah portion that reminds us that we need to keep telling the story when we were slaves in the land of Egypt, we were strangers there. We need to remember what that felt like and not do that to others. 

In my own family, this is a commandment that really resonates. Simon’s brothers are both attorneys in Tucson. His brother Fred is an immigration lawyer who spoke with us one year on this very topic. Fred and Trish adopted my nephew Henry after he escaped the killing fields in Cambodia. Fred has worked for HIAS, the Catholic Church, the Epsicopal Church and the Jewish Federation of Tucson all on immigration issues. He is now a judge. Trish has worked with the Catholic Church bringing people to bus stations in Tucson from the southern border. Simon’s mother sponsored any number of immigrants, all of whom attended her funeral in 2009. And I worked for Refugee Immigration Ministry. If you were to ask Fred why he does what he does, it would be a simple answer. Because our borders here in the US were not open during the holocaust. Then you would get a lecture about SS St. Louis being turned away. For him it is a clear mandate.  

It is therefore, my great honor to introduce to you, really to re-introduce Dianha Oretega-Eherth, the executive director of Centro de Informacion, a non-profit agency in Elgin, celebrating its 50th year of working with our Hispanic and Latino immigrants. She was born in Mexico CIty and she herself immigrated to North Dakota as a young child knowing no English. She has served on any number of non-profit agencies and boards, including Elgin Youth Leadership Academy, the Literacy Connection and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission for the City of Elgin. She is a member at Zion Lutheran Church where she teaches Sunday School (and I have taught with her) and now Centro. She says her favorite books are the Red Tent by Anita Diamant. She took such good pictures when Anita was here at the library. and Like Water for Chocolate. I’m sure she would also like On the Chocolate Trail by Rabbi Deborah Prinz.  

From Dianha Ortega-Ehreth, executive director of Centro de Informacion in Elgin, IL 

It is an honor to be here tonight. Thank you to Rabbi Frisch Klein for the invitation. She is an incredible blessing to this community. 

Refugee Shabbat = Prayer for the Refugee … will stick close to the concept of prayer, but will wander around the concept of refugee. 

It’s cold here in Chicagoland, but it is nothing compared to North Dakota. A good day in February in North Dakota means it’s above zero. Once when I was about eight years old, schools actually closed because it was colder than normal – around 30 degrees below zero but with wind chill it was around 80 degrees below zero. My grandmother lived in a house a few blocks away, about a quarter mile drive away from where my mom and I lived. My mom bundled me up in my snowsuit and sent me walking to take some food to my grandmother’s house. Upon arrival to my grandmother’s house, she called my mom and scolded her for sending me out into the cold. My grandmother kept me at her house for three days while school was closed and these were some of the best three days of my childhood. I got to stay inside playing games with my grandmother and getting spoiled by her for three days straight. 

Now imagine being a refugee with no housing, even in El Paso which was really, really cold earlier this year.  

I know how to run a non-profit organization, but I lack legal expertise. So, I am taking an overview of immigration law course right now. 

I am remembering what it’s like to be a student again. The pressure of keeping up with your reading, completing the quizzes, taking notes to reference for my final exam, which I hope to pass. Oh, and stress eating. But I digress. 

A good amount of this course is about legal definitions. 

Refugees and asylum seekers fall into humanitarian protections in this country. Their refugee or asylum status is grated to protect a person who has been persecuted or someone who fears persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, and / or membership in a particular social group or political opinion. 

You may seek refugee status only if you’re outside of the US. 

Asylum seekers meet the definition of a refugee, but are already in the US. 

Both are immigrants. 

And the immigration process – at least, how it functions today – is where immigration court and criminal courts meet. 

If we understand refugees and asylum seekers to be the strangers amongst us, then we know – these are people who God calls us to welcome and accompany. 

But before I talk about how we can do that, I want thank Rabbi Frisch Klein for the list of 36 references in the Torah about welcoming the stranger. (P.S. I’m a Lutheran, and have additional scriptures that emphasize these exact same points, but I haven’t counted them.) 

It struck me, in particular, that many of these references mention the law. “There shall be one law for you AND for the stranger among you.” – Numbers 9:14, Leviticus 24:22, Exodus 12:49, Ezekiel 47:21-22, and more. 

Well, the reason we have immigration lawyers and organizations like Centro today is because …. There are SEPARATE laws for “strangers” than there are for “non-strangers.” MANY laws. Complicated laws. And they CHANGE. And sometimes they repeat themselves ….as Rabbi reminded me that the borders were not open during the holocaust. 

So … if this crazy “same law for you and the stranger” idea was to be actually followed, this country would put a lot of people out of work.government agency employees, immigration lawyers and me. And I’ve always believed that non-profit organizations anyway should be in the business of putting themselves out of work. After all, many non-profits exist – in no small part – because the world is broken. 

Back to how we welcome and accompany. This is Centro’s business. We welcome, we serve, in our mission statement we use the verb “to empower.” 

It takes awhile to do this work. It takes awhile – often years – for “the stranger” to not feel like or be treated like “a stranger” anymore. Many of our clients have been living here for years, many are NOT new arrivals, and yet, they struggle. They struggle with paying for rent or for food. They can’t afford lawyer fees, and guess what, some of the more complicated cases, they require a lawyer. Some clients don’t have health insurance. They are learning English….. and English is HARD, especially for adults. They all want to work. Some of not permitted to work. Like any human, they have childhood memories from where they came. Many of them miss their families, they miss feeling secure about their futures. These struggles chip away at a person’s sense of personal power. 

Empowering them means giving them food, letting them they are eligible for a financial benefit and helping them apply for it. Empowering them means giving them information, navigating them through various systems so that they can …. Live long, life happily. Centro has thousands of “closed cases” …. People who were helped in a time of crisis or people who have completed the long road to citizenship. But we have many continuing and new “open cases.” 

There are many organizations, individuals and faith groups in this community to help do this kind of work. It takes ALL of us. 

Centro has been around more than 50 years, and I take credit for none of it. Right now, I am learning how to better equip my team, how to help the helpers. The helpers at Centro welcome more helpers. I welcome your help, and your prayers and your advocacy efforts on behalf of all strangers – old and new. 

So – because this is SHABBAT, I offer this prayer: 

May we empower the strangers amongst us, may we encourage an equal application of the law, may we move towards closing more crisis cases until we don’t need organizations like Centro anymore. Amen.