HARVESTS OF THE HEART: LOVING OUR NEIGHBORS AND WELCOMING THE STRANGERS
Chol HaMoed Sukkot 5780
Rabbi Ariel
Love without limits.
This memory tastes like Skittles. That’s what I was eating when Dr. Dulick asked me, “Why are you here?” It wasa school day. “Look around,” he suggested as he handed back our assignments. I looked. There were some empty seats. Ellen Goldberg. Alex. Andrew. The other Jewish kids. After class, I asked him where they were and my Catholic, religious, public high school English teacher sent me to the library where I learned from the librarian that it was Yom Kippur and where I checked out a book about the Jewish holidays.
The next Rosh HaShanah my Jewish mom and I walked into High Holiday services for the first time and Rosemary and Ray Sevett greeted us at the door.
You see, the subject of our class was English literature. We memorized parts of Canterbury Tales and spent a lot of time with the Wyf of Bath. We read Shakespeare. We worked hard. Really hard.
But Dr. Dulick wrote “god” with a little “g” and Human with a big “H” because it’s people he said who sometimes forget our worth . . . our value. Most of the failures of the characters of great literature are failures of love so love without limit, he taught.
We knew he meant it. We knew in part because on the first day he’d already memorized our names from a chart he’d made with our pictures. We also knew because every summer he’d go to Honduras to do as much good as he could and to live among his Honduran friends and loved ones, a circle of names that grew with each trip.
In the verses we read this Shabbat for Chol HaMoed Sukkot, we hear again that God and Moses knew one another by name. There is a kind of love, a bond, in knowing one another’s names, inviting us to reflect on whose names we know. . . and whose we don’t.
Asked, “What is the greatest principal in the Torah?” Rabbi Akiva answered, “v’ahavta l’reicha kamoacha” - love your neighbor as yourself. (Leviticus 19:18.) But the Hebrew for neighbor is shachen, and not reyecha. In context we are being instructed not to hate our brother, not to feel resentment against the children of our people. It’s intimate. If we translate reyechaas “neighbor”, what is our relationship?
I was reminded this week that our first impulse is evidence of how we’ve been conditioned, and what we do in response to that impulse is what defines us. If our first impulse is toward compassion, kindness, and the pursuit of justice . . . or if it isn’t, but our response is, we are a very certain kind of well-educated.
In 2003, my Teacher, Dr. Dulick, retired and moved permanently to Honduras where he is Miguel. Living on what he needed of his pension and giving the rest away, he stayed in touch with former students, colleagues, and friends writing updates about his neighbors. Ana Cristina. Fausta. Sindy. Necho. Little Miguel. Melissa. Chemo. For the twenty-five years since I graduated from high school, I’ve continued learning from Miguel what it means to be a Human – capital “H”. So when, around May 12th, his Facebook post made it clear that he needed help, and knowing my help wouldn’t be enough, I started a GoFundMe. On impulse. Miguel has been actively loving his Honduran neighbors since the 70s. I’m a new arrival to the neighborhood, but through our collaboration about 65 people – including many of you – have moved in with me providing funds to specific Honduran neighbors for specific needs of food, medication, building and repairing homes, school fees and supplies, medical treatment, and so much more.
I am excited that after tonight I can call “my” teacher, “our” teacher. I am honored to introduce: Miguel.
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HONDURAS IN ST. PAUL Miguel Dulick
First things first. Where is Honduras? Well, it’s a little country about half the size of Minnesota, about 2000 miles to the south of St. Paul in Central America. For the sake of comparison, Los Angeles is about 2000 miles to the west of St. Paul. So, not that far. The population of Honduras they say is about 9 million (as opposed to 5 1/2 million for Minnesota), but they include the Hondurans here in the United States. There are thousands right here, mostly “illegal” or “undocumented,” in the Twin Cities. So, not that far. They—THEY!—might be even closer if you check the labels on your clothes: Made in Honduras. And I might know the person who made it bringing home $3 a day at the maquilaor sweatshop. If you let the poor make your clothes, if you carry the poor literally on your back, let them also form your values, to give you a heart for the poor.
If Honduras is so close, why the huge difference between life in Honduras and life in the United States? People are running from Honduras like someone leaping from a burning building. Honduras is on fire, with poverty, corruption, and violence. Mostly because of drugs. And the source of that terror is drug addiction in the United States. To keep America “high,” about 10 to 15 mostly young Hondurans, including children and women, are murdered every day in the gang wars fighting for territory and control of the routes north.
People scream about the border: Oh my God, the kids are in cages! The kids are dying! The kids are sitting in filth! If it’s that bad here, can you even imagine what conditions are like back in Honduras, that people think it’s worth the trip? So please don’t wait till folks have made the thousand-mile trek across Mexico, beaten, robbed, and raped, before you open your heart to them!
That’s where I come in, trying, just trying, with really such limited success, with such limited resources, to help my friends and neighbors to stay in Honduras and be safe and healthy, go to school, get a little, just get a little LIFE!
I have no foundation, no plan, no projects. I’m strictly ground-level, one-on-one. There is no middle-man. Poverty is an emergency. All I ever wanted to do was to live and pray with the poor, who have welcomed me like a brother.
But, listen, horror is not the whole story! Let’s see WHY I, or anyone, would want to live in Honduras. How would you define “poverty”? What is POVERTY? Most people would define it with no’s: no money, no food, no shelter, no education, no job, no health care, etc. That’s what poverty is NOT! Can you define poverty without using a negative? How about this: Poverty is the revelation of our common humanity. Stripped of everything material, we see the essentials of the human community, a shared family.
Don’t judge people living in poverty. When I gave a hamburger to a hungry woman and her child by the cathedral in Tegucigalpa, she nodded solemnly and said, “Bien educado,” that is, you, sir, are well educated, well taught, to think of others first. I had passed her test; she did not thank me, she was thanking everyone who had raised me or taught me.
Hondurans have great faith.
When his younger brother David - who as a little boy had played in my house - was murdered, Alexis, pastor of a little church in our town, preaching the hardest sermon he ever spoke, declared: 'Yesterday I believed in God. And today I believe in God.' Faith runs through the climate of Honduras, like the river that pours out of the Temple in Ezekiel's prophecy, even when I resist it myself.
If I do have a “project,” it’s birthday parties! I was shocked to find so many kids who did not know how old they were or when their birthday was. So I went to work. Nothing elaborate, a big cake and some Cokes, and some chips, but everyone is invited and we celebrate LIFE! I mean you have to, considering that virtually every family has at least one little baby in the special section at the entrance of our cemetery for “angelitos,” little angels. Folks don’t even name their babies for a couple weeks, preparing their emotions for a sudden loss.
The last thing I ever expected in Honduras, or anywhere else, was to become a father! But in 2007, after I’d lived in Honduras about 4 years, I adopted a tiny orphan named Juan Anselmo, or “Chemo” (say, shay-mo) for short, who got kicked out of his older brother’s house for eating too much! I say “tiny,” but he was actually 13 years old. He had a very weak heart, and the condition kept him the size of an eight-year-old. He tired so quickly, he couldn’t play soccer, or even get down to the river without his friends carrying him on their back or their bike or even a branch of a tree. Thanks to a medical brigade from the United States, with world-class surgeons, Chemo got open-heart surgery—totally for free—and has been thriving ever since. He’s now 24 and married to a wonderful young woman named Mellissa. He drives a moto-taxi, a 3-wheeled converted motorcycle with a “car” for 2 or 3 passengers. And since that medical brigade in September of 2008, there have been 35 more, saving lives of little children, giving all of us hope.
Let me tell you about hope – and Sindy and Viktor. Sindy went to the doctor in our little town because she was having a lot of abdominal pain. That doctor said, “It looks like cancer.” He recommended a test that was only available at the Yoro hospital about 3 hours away. I went with them. I knew they’d need help with the bus fare and medical costs. Through Amy, folks from up here sent me that money. That hospital said, “No we don’t do this test here,” but they gave us the name of a gynecologist in private practice. Help from Minnesota made going to that doctor possible as well, and has made it possible for Viktor to be with her through all of this. So we went to the doctor, Dr. Salgado, and I said, “Well, doctor can you do this test?” “Oh sure we do this test.” “Can you do it today?” “Oh sure.” But he had a question for Sindy, “Are you pregnant?” Yes. “Oh, no, we can’t do that test, it might hurt the baby.” So I thought, the doctor in Las Vegas wouldn’t know that this test might harm the baby? Healthcare is hard enough to come by in Honduras without having the doctor give you the wrong information. So Dr. Salgado said, “We’ll do another test.” And he did, and he also did an ultrasound, which let them see the little baby’s heartbeat. Viktor’s mouth was wide open. “Come back in two weeks for the results, we have to send them off to San Pedro Sula.” When we came back, the doctor said, “I have good news, you do not have cancer.” I think maybe it was a cervical infection and not cancer. And now she’s about to have the baby, hopefully in a normal and healthy way. We were so scared, and then so relieved, I called him Dr. Salvado – which means Dr. Savior. He said, “No, Salgado.” Okay.
May I quote Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement? She was asked, “How can you love the poor?” She answered: “It is an act of faith, constantly repeated. It is an act of hope, that we can awaken these same acts in their hearts, too.” If I ask people living in poverty in Honduras, “What should I say to the people in Minnesota?” they will say, “Tell them we love them.”
Back to Amy
We are right now immersed in the world of Sukkot. Seeing the sky through the roofs and welcoming people through the open doors of our sukkahs, the boundaries between inside and outside are blurred, the line between the closeness of family and neighbor wavers. Or . . . it could.
As we walk through the world and gather in our ‘harvests’ during these days of Sukkot, may we seek to do as much good as we can, give as much as we can, and love without limit.
In the words of Judi Neri:
Love your neighbor as yourself, You said,
And light blinded we saw
That inner and outer worlds are one
As You are One.
Amy and Miguel together:
Shabbat Shalom
