Well here we are, the final sermon of High Holy Days, and so far we’ve heard some great tunes, haven’t we? All kinds of songs that inspire us to think about issues facing us this past year and in the year to come. So, what will be the last song this High Holy Day season? Let’s see:
[Plays Woody Guthrie “This Land is Your Land]
This land is your land, this land is my land
From the California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
And saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me
Written in 1940 and released in 1951, this song has been covered by Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen. Based on a 1930 gospel recording, the song’s lyrics have gone through several changes with some verses seen as radical for their day, and frankly, quite fitting for today as well. Overall, the song is a reminder that the land of America, in its greatness from every side, was made for everyone, you and me, meaning anyone. When researching the history of the song, I was especially moved by the history of some very specific and pointed lyrics, as reported by NPR:
[Guthrie] was irritated by Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” sung by Kate Smith, which seemed to be endlessly playing on the radio in the late 1930s. So irritated, in fact, that he wrote this song as a retort, at first sarcastically calling it “God Blessed America for Me” before renaming it “This Land Is Your Land.” Guthrie’s original words to the song included this verse:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.”
Well man, you go ahead there Woody. Four years ago, our President captured the attention of many voters with a very specific campaign promise, “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.” Now, this idea, the idea to build a wall or fence along our southern border, does not originate with Donald Trump. Fences have been built along parts of our border since 1986, and over the next thirty years, under the guise of many presidents, by 2009 there were 617 miles of physical barriers.
Of course, no one has made building a wall more central to American politics than our current President Donald Trump. “Built that wall” continues to be one of his strongest campaign slogans but the big beautiful wall that he promised Mexico would pay for is, in fact, a logistical nightmare. Now, spoiler alert. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Mexico is, in fact, not paying for the wall. Shocking, I know. But beyond the cost, there are countless other issues. For starters, the Federal Government only owns 1/3 of the land needed to create the wall along the border. The rest is owned by individuals, Native American tribes, and other states. Just to acquire the land for building, then, Indian burial grounds would be desecrated, individual owners would be bullied into selling or having their land taken, and water rights and flood issues would need to be addressed. To say nothing, of course, of the most important question of all. Does a wall or barrier even accomplish the goal of restricting illegal immigration? Fences can be cut, walls erode, they get holes, they can be climbed with ladders or from the roof of trucks. As Woodie Guthrie so eloquently pointed out in his original words, a wall might try to stop someone, but the keyword is try.
As the CATO institute reports:
In 2006, the Pew Research Center calculated that more than a third of all unauthorized immigrants entered lawfully and then simply overstayed their visas. People who come to the U.S. as tourists or temporary business travelers are forbidden from working, so a small number remain after their visa expires to work under the table. For every three border crossers in 1992, there was one overstay. But by 2012, visa overstays accounted for 58 percent of all new unauthorized immigrants. A wall not only will do nothing to stop these people from entering, but it may actually incentivize more people to stick around without authorization.
But most of us know all of that; even the politicians know that. The wall is more symbolic than anything, and has deeper resonance than just a flurried attempt to stop illegal immigration.
Back in high school many of us had the pleasure of reading the works of Robert Frost, who wrote:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
His poem, the “Mending Wall” is most famous for the misunderstood words, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Of course, Frost was being ironic, and if you read the poem, you realize that. In 2010 when Sarah Palin learned a critic was moving in next door to her, she posted on Facebook:
And you know what they say about “fences make for good neighbors”? Well, we’ll get started on that tall fence tomorrow, and I’ll try to keep Trig’s squeals down to a quiet giggle so we don’t disturb your peaceful summer. Enjoy!
And, as Eleanor Barkhorn of The Atlantic pointed out in her article about the incident, Palin, like so many others that did not study Frost, missed the point of his work “Mending Wall”:
Palin’s desire for a tall fence is completely contrary to the spirit of Frost’s poem. ‘Mending Wall’ is a polemic against building walls that separate us from our neighbors
Good fences, good walls, do not make good neighbors. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, and it’s those on either side.
Frost writes later in his poem:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
How I wish, so much, that we, as Americans, would think about these words when we talk about borders and walls, fences, and moats. Recently, a New York Times article reported on this very subject in regards to the President’s view:
Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.
Obviously there is a cruelty within these words that needs to be addressed. I is a disturbing dehumanization of our neighbors to the south. But, that’s not on my agenda today. I’m more interested in one word: neighbor. I think of this word a lot as a rabbi, especially as Leviticus, the book that teaches us how to be holy, tells us:
וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ
V’ahavta l’reyacha kamocha – love your neighbor as yourself. The Hebrew word here, “reya” could mean fellow, companion, brother, or friend. And yet, there is so much evil speech about our neighbors today with these talks of walls, electric fences, spikes, and trenches. I found it ironic how close the word רֵעֲ (reya) was to the word רָעָ֖ה (evil). How easy would it be to mix those words up if no vowels were present, or if there were a slip of the tongue? All too easy. It is just as easy to fail to understand what a neighbor is and to fall down the abyss of xenophobia, slipping down the path of paranoia, overprotectiveness, jingoism, and nativism, and believing that our neighbors are evil. It’s an easy typo to make, but there is great gravity in that mistake, when instead of loving our neighbors, we love evil instead.
Judaism teaches us that our neighbors are human beings, each with the divine spark inside of them, no matter their religion, their skin color, or their culture. They are humans. They are our fellows, our friends, our companions, our brothers and sisters. Frost was correct: something there is that doesn’t love a wall. They all crumble eventually, either by force or by time. They become useless. They become outdated; eyesores; relics of a forgotten era. As Frost tells us, the frozen ground swells under the wall and the boulders fall down, leaving holes and gaps. Nature hates walls, and so should we. Somehow, we fail to learn what the world teaches us, that walls are simply symbols of ideologies, not true dividing lines.
The walls that were built in Medieval times to keep the poor away from the aristocracy were a symbol of the wealth gap. Walls that were built around ghettos to keep Jews away from Italian and then German citizens served an important symbolism as well, that Jews were not worthy of walking the same streets as others. A wall was built to divide East and West Germany as a symbolic fight against fascism. Even the West Bank wall in Israel, which I have stared at from both sides, while claiming to stop suicide bombers, actually serves as a strong symbol to legitimize the settlements.
As Eric Schewe, from JSTOR Daily, wrote:
Every border wall has a particular historical context behind its creation. Yet they all announce the same message to the world: Our diplomatic and economic relationships with our neighbors have failed, and we are unwilling to repair them.
Even our Tanakh teaches us wisdom in regards to barriers and walls. In Exodus, we read that the Sea of Reeds was “straight like a wall,” keeping us from freedom; Moses tells us in Deuteronomy that the cities we were to defeat in the holy land were surrounded by “walls, sky high”; we saw Joshua collapse the walls of Jericho with just the blast of the Shofar; the laws of Sukkot tell us that when we build the sukkah we must only have two walls in the dwelling place, to leave the others open so as to not keep anything but the wind out. As Jews we’ve stared at walls, metaphorical and real, for most of our history. We’ve been expelled from almost every country in the world; we’ve lived in ghettos with gates and walls surrounding us; we’ve been barred from universities, from work, from hospitals; our ships have been turned around at borders. The wall is a symbol of what has kept us out for our entire existence. It is the sign that says, as Woody Guthrie put it, “no trespassing.” How many times have we seen the sign that says “No Jews”? The wall is a symbol of fear of the “other.” It is a symbol of exclusion. It is a symbol of a failure to institute peace, policy, and justice. It is a symbolic but non-practical solution, and the symbol is not positive.
And as Guthrie sang, “The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’ But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.” You can’t say it better can you? A wall says absolutely nothing.
Good fences do not make good neighbors, and strong walls do not make good places. Robert Frost knew it, Woody Guthrie knew it, and so should we. This land was made for you and me.