Reflections on my time in Guatemala with American Jewish World Service

Our Torah this week teaches us, V’asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham. In the words of God to us, God says, Make me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them.

But how? And with what? And does this command still apply today? Here? In 2019?

How, we ask, do we make this place holy so that God will dwell among us?

We have, I’ve been told, a border crisis in this place. A crisis at our southern border. And from whose perspective is the crisis, really, I wonder. The people on this side or the people on that side, the people in homes or the people in tents. It is a crisis, but whose, I’m not sure. It’s a crisis of identity and values, I’ll give you that.

Having just returned from far south of our border, from Guatemala, one of the triangle of countries where the majority of those fleeing northwards are coming from, I begin by trying to understand their crisis.

What I know for sure is that the folks who are coming to our southern border don’t just simply pick up one day with a thought appearing out of nowhere to move northward. No, they are there because the conditions at home for them, in their own country, have become so unlivable that they are willing to endure a journey to come to a new land. I also know that at least for the Guatemalans, that this is not a story that began this year or last, or last decade or the decade before that and I also know that their story is intimately connected with the story of the United States.

I was shocked in my preparation for this trip how little I really knew about US activity and intervention in Guatemala. How little I knew about the power that the American-based United Fruit Company, once known as Boston Fruit Company had over the Guatemalan government and its people. How our government intervened for US business interests at the detriment of the people. How land was seized for US banana plantations. How an American coup led to decades of civil war. How that civil war, known in Guatemala as the internal armed conflict, lasted for 30 years before peace accords were finally signed in 1996. How during that internal armed conflict, the indigenous peoples of the land suffered greatly. How there were upwards of 50,000 forced disappearances. How in rural areas, whole villages were slaughtered. There was a genocide in Guatemala and I for one don’t remember reading much about it in my history class in school. Those who were killed were primarily indigenous people or left-leaning activists or suspected opponents of the government or anyone speaking up about human rights abuses.

A man who traveled with us told us his own story, of his family, his mother and four of his brothers being murdered before his eyes as he hid in the bushes at 6 years old. He described to us how he lived in the forest after that with his surviving family, his father and a brother, constantly on the move in order to avoid being found. How eventually, they made their way to a refugee camp in Mexico where he lived out the rest of his childhood until the peace accords were signed in the 90s. He’s now a human rights activist; he’s trying to lift up the stories of others as well as his own and that of his people and his village. He is not much older than me.

I don’t know if I knew it when I was first chosen to go on this journey, but I went to Guatemala to meet heroes. Heroes like that man. Heroes who take the circumstances of their lives and find ways to not just live on, but to live on in such a way so as to change the landscape for the rest of us. Lives of truth. Lives of blessing. Lives dedicated to making a difference.

I went to Guatemala to bear witness to human rights abuses and to those heroes who are trying to right these wrongs and change the direction in which this story is unfolding. Fifteen rabbis from across the country, from San Francisco to Nashville to Pittsburgh to Boston, came together under the courageous and phenomenal leadership of AJWS, American Jewish World Service to travel to Guatemala. We spent the last few months prior to our trip educating ourselves about Guatemala, about AJWS and the work that they are doing to end poverty and lift up human rights across our globe, and about the Jewish imperative to look beyond ourselves, to listen intimately to the suffering, to act with whatever power we have.

As we touched down a few weeks ago, Guatemala was erupting in a three-day mass mobilization of protests directed against the government accused of corruption. The Morales administration had just ordered CICIG, the UN agency investigating corruption, including the Morales administration, to leave the country. Amidst our own government shutdown here, very little of this made the mainstream news and the response from American leaders to this decision was lacking whereas in the past, a President kicking out a UN agency investigating it for corruption would have elicited more concern from our American leadership.

In Guatemala, this was, of course, at the top of the mind of any citizen concerned about their democratic government. People were taking to the streets. Police lined the streets as well. As I watched concerned citizens gathering, I realized how much I take for granted my ability to take to the streets, to share an opposing position, to protest without fear of losing my life or my freedom – and how staunchly we need to defend that right.

We continued to meet with heroes and human rights defenders throughout the trip, with the organizations that are grantees of American Jewish World Service. We met with two human rights legal firms while we were there, including one that put a former president and general on trial for genocide. We met with some of their clients, folks working on land rights cases, many of them indigenous people who had been forcibly removed from their lands. A man wept while telling his story and apologized for his emotions. He needn’t have apologized, of course. And anyways I was weeping, too.

We used our power and privilege as Americans, as American clergy, and as American Jewish World Service to secure a meeting with top leadership at the US Embassy, bringing along with us one of these human rights law firms to tell the story of what is really happening in the country, highlighting issues ranging from land rights to journalists who are getting arrested for bogus reasons and who are pressured not to report the truth to calling for the US government to condemn President Morales for exiling the UN.

We also spent time with a collective of midwives in the mountains committed not only to the education of indigenous midwives, but also to working towards positively influencing public policy for better relationships between hospitals and midwives whose knowledge has been devalued for too long. Given that most indigenous women are giving birth at home in their own villages, it’s necessary for the health of women and babies that relationships be forged. Women speaking and organizing around helping babies be born – we might ask how controversial this really is. We learned a horrific story of a husband who murdered his wife for her involvement in this organization.

We met with young journalists trying to expose the truth about human rights abuses in Guatemala. They’re scared; they’re putting their lives on the line in many cases when they expose government corruption, but they know that the only way to move forward is through the truth. At a time when journalists around the world are threatened by violence or discreditation of the work that they do, the work of these journalists, most of them in their 20s, is extraordinary.

We met with an indigenous women’s rights organization dedicated to finding room for women’s voices, especially indigenous women’s voices in the public sphere and elected office. One of the women asked me, Is it any better for women in America? And while I could definitively say yes in comparison, I also admitted that we were not yet through our own battle, our own journey towards full equality. It was not the same as her journey, but there was still much work to do. There’s still #metoo and glass ceilings and what happened on the national stage to Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford and abortion rights being curtailed what feels like each and every day. We shared a smile even as we bemoaned the plight of women the world over. Our journeys were different, but we understood one another. We were all walking up the same mountain.

Why did I go to Guatemala. Because there is suffering. Why did I go to Guatemala. Because there is hope. And we of all people know suffering and hope, don’t we? We of all people know what it is to dream of a better life.

We spent an afternoon at a museum that was dedicated to telling the story of the Guatemalan people’s oppression: from colonialism through the American coup, from the genocide to the human rights abuses still being perpetrated today. It was not just a story of oppression though; what I experienced as I wandered the halls was the story of resistance and persistence, the story of hope. Part of the way we yank ourselves free from the yoke of oppression is to name it, to articulate it, to see it, to feel it again even though it is painful. Exposing the abuses of the past will lead to a better future.

From the perspective of the Jewish calendar, the trip couldn’t be better aligned. We were reading B’shalach, the story of our enslaved people marching through the sea towards freedom. And it was the week of the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s birthday. And it was the weekend when women were marching across America. And I realized there is a common thread that moves not just through history but through cultures too; the thread screams: redemption is possible, change is possible, hold onto hope as if your life depends on it because your life does depend on it. We must continually work towards the redemption of all. As King proclaimed, None of us is free until all of us are free.

V’asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham. God proclaimed, Make me a sanctuary so that I will dwell among you.

What I hear in God’s words is that we have much work to do to make this a holy place. Humanity has to step up to bring out the holy. We merit the presence of God when we see God in all human beings. When we treat all human beings like the sanctuaries we truly are no matter what country we were born into and what country we come to call home.

We merit the holy when we speak up for the vulnerable. We merit the holy when our gut reaction is no longer, Do I help them because they are like me? We make this place holy when the words of God are not simply words we read in a scroll that applied once upon a time way back when, but when they cut deep into our hearts and they urge us to be better.

I met heroes who were standing up despite the risk to their very lives and the lives of their families. If they can stand up, then God knows I can certainly stand up with them and help amplify their voices with whatever power and privilege I have.

And you can, too.

In a few weeks, I’ll head to Washington DC with AJWS and with this group of rabbis to speak to our representatives about what we witnessed.

We can all use our power and our privilege. We can help put pressure on our representatives to push for the UN agency CICIG to return to Guatemala, to continue to hold its leaders accountable. We can support American Jewish World Service in their efforts to lift up human rights around the world. And if this issue is not for you, then find your issue and use whatever power and privilege lay at your feet to make a difference.

Sometimes the slog is long. The work takes forever. You wonder if you’re making a difference at all. When you feel that way, I urge you to remember the women and men in places like Guatemala who are fighting the fight, too. Who need hope. Is it better in America, she asked... If they’re still going, then we need to, too.

It would do us good to remember that our people’s journey didn’t end when that sea parted. We kept on marching towards the promised land. But on the way, we learned the precious lesson: V’asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham. Wherever we are, in Egypt, in the Promised Land, and everywhere in between, this place can be holy – if only we work to make it so.