Hello, my name is Rabbi Rebecca Zimmerman Hornstein. I am the Executive Director of the Boston Workers Circle—a 1000 member, 125-year-old progressive Jewish community here in Boston. 

The Workers Circle was founded by a group of immigrant sweatshop workers to take care of each other and build solidarity in the fight for a better world. Our founders believed that the future of the Jewish people was bound up in a shared future with our neighbors, wherever we were. Today, I carry on their legacy as well as the legacy of my grandparents, who were Holocaust survivors—my grandmother was a partisan fighter in Warsaw who fought back and resisted fascism side-by-side with her neighbors of all religions and backgrounds. 

I am also from South Minneapolis, the area where Renee Good was murdered by ICE agents 2 weeks ago and an area at the center of a campaign of cruelty and brutality by our own government. When I talk to my friends and family in Minnesota right now, they all have the same message: “Whatever you are imagining it is like here—it is much much worse.” I hear their stories of teaching to empty classrooms because their students are too afraid to leave their homes. I hear their stories of being sprayed with chemical weapons by ICE agents for the crime of asking a question or asking for their legal rights. I hear their stories of being assaulted or asked for papers just because of their race. And I hear their stories of seeing neighbors snatched from cars and abducted from bus stops. And these are just the first- and second-hand stories from people I am personally in touch with. It is an escalation of the cruel tactics ICE has long used against our immigrant neighbors, and continues to use right here in our own communities. 

Right now in the Jewish calendar we are in the middle of reading the story of the Exodus from Egypt–the story of a tyrant obsessed with only his own power, and the people who stood up to say, “Enough.” The first resisters in the story are two midwives who bravely defied Pharaoh’s orders to kill Israelite children. One of these heroines is named Puah, and Jewish tradition tells us that Puah’s name comes both from the comforting cooing sound she would make when taking care of babies, and for the Hebrew phrase “Hofia panim,” which means “a confrontational face”–for the way she boldly and defiantly stood up to Pharaoh.  

The people of Minnesota are embodying this same spirit of both care and fierceness. Because there is another message I hear over and over again from my friends and family in Minneapolis: The people are rising to the occasion. Everywhere ICE shows up, people are there to protect each other and take care of each other. At their daycare centers, their schools, their workplaces and places of worship–they are connecting with their co-workers and the neighbors on their block, and they are fighting back. The response has been big, bold, beautiful and deeply, deeply human in the face of immense inhumanity. The people of Minnesota are standing up to say: 

“The more you try to scare us, the more of us will show up.”

And because we know that what is happening in Minnesota is a test to see what they can get away with and to try to make us afraid, we will also say as the people of Massachusetts: 

“The more you try to scare us, the more of us will show up.” 

So in the face of injustice, may we be like the midwives, and may we be like the people of Minneapolis. May we stay caring, and may we stay bold. May we hold each other close, and may we be relentless in the face of oppression. May we have the wisdom to follow the lead of those carrying the heaviest weight, and may we boldly stand up to our tyrants as though our own lives and liberation depended on it—because they do. May we keep our hearts soft and open to the pain of this moment, and let our grief spur us into the action this moment calls us to do. And may we walk towards liberation standing in solidarity with each other, bravely, fiercely and rooted in the deepest love and humanity and care. 

Read more about the action from this article by Raahi Mehta at The Daily Free Press.