No Mi Molesta

Bitachon. Trust.

Dear friends, 

Before I start, let me wish all of your loved ones in countries at war safety. We have in our community people with family in both Israel and Iran, and we wish them all well in this scary moment.
 

Tuesday morning, I walked out of 26 Federal Plaza with Rabbi Ellen Lippmann and a young Mexican man who had just finished his hearing. We walked him out through the platoon of 10 ICE agents in full military gear and face masks at the exit of the courtrooms, where they wait for their prey. They stopped and surrounded him, checked his paperwork and eventually let him through. Rabbi Ellen and I were part of a group of 20 volunteers who had shown up as protective presence for our immigrant neighbors (along with Comptroller Brad Lander who you probably heard got arrested that day). Without people to accompany them out of the courthouse, immigrants are often taken into custody, at times with no proper cause, and many get lost in the system with no one knowing where they are or what happened to them. As we walked out into Foley Square I said to our Mexican neighbor in my broken Spanish, “that was aggressive.”  

“Yes,” he answered. “But it doesn’t bother me,” he said calmly as we walked toward the 1 train. “No me molesta.” He pointed up toward the gray sky and said, “I only fear God.” 

In that moment, I felt honored to be by his side. I felt inadequate in my trust in the universe. I asked myself why I expected the world to always treat me with satin gloves. I was inspired, strengthened, invited to keep walking the path seeking what Rabbi Bahyeh Ibn Paquda called Bitachon, full trust. Here is a person who made it into the country God knows how, escaping God knows what, with a legal work permit, a standing application for asylum, a job and a new life in a new country, all suddenly and for no apparent reason at risk because the government lawyer asked the judge to drop the case. And this man is walking confidently with his God.  

The day before, I was sitting with Lucy, talking about the Torah portion for her Bat Mitzvah in the fall, where it tells us that Noah, in the midst of a completely crooked and nasty society, “walked with God.” I explained to Lucy that the Hebrew is much richer than the English (as is often the case!), and the untranslatable phrase “את האלוהים התהלך נח” actually means something like “Noah walked God.” I had to qualify - “not like you walk your dog, but Noah’s walk was actually God’s walk.”  

We might be living in Noah’s world. We all feel like we are sometimes. Whether it’s our personal lives or the world around us, we have moments in which we want to stop walking. To freeze in place with our anxiety, to cocoon in our parents’ lap and cry, to stray from our good way in order to rage at some person or some God who doesn’t seem to care. But we also possess the ability to remember deep into our bodies that like the blade of grass popping out of the ground, we also know what to do. We can say “no” to all of the forces of oppression surrounding us: the anxiety, the fear, the anger, the bewilderment, the depression, the despair, the call to darkness. That brave "no” in our neighbor’s “no mi molesta” can allow us to be the God-walkers of this world. 

In his book, Freedom and Despair my father wrote a soliloquy to the word “no” from the perspective of a peace activist fighting a seemingly unwinnable fight. 

"“No,” the music of defiance, is a word that, in some situations, creates the alive human person. I stand in the middle ground between the attackers and their victims, I am doing my best to protect the latter and also to take care of my friends and colleagues, and no matter what happens to me, by standing there I am saying "no." This word has the most remarkable plenum of being that flows inside it. It must be the most capacious and elastic word in the language, any language. It can unravel in a second the whole tissue of lies that we live with hour by hour, especially those that envelop us on all sides from without, the specious inanities of the government and the self-righteous mendacity of the nationalists. "No" belongs to the zone of risk. It's like alchemy: you take the risk, opening yourself to it out of the most diverse and paltry motives, you embody the protest, and the next thing you know is that you are a little more free. But there is a necessary condition: the freedom that is ours to win comes from the attempt, successful or not, to enhance the freedom of another being, whereas even the slightest complicity in denying another’s freedom condemns the denier to servitude."

Let’s keep walking the path we know will lead us toward freedom. 

Shabbat shalom, 

PS. If you'd like to volunteer in the courts please reach out and I'll connect you with our friends at JFREJ.

Rabbi Misha