Rabbi’s Update 8/15/2025

Dear Friends:

Before I share with you some other thoughts, I wanted to ask you to put something on your calendar. On Sunday morning August 24 at 10:15, on our Zoom link, you will have an opportunity to meet our High Holiday Cantor, Michael Garmise. Mike lives in Netanya, Israel, where he still serves part time as the Cantor for the Masorti congregation there. He has extensive experience as a Cantor for the leading Masorti congregation, Ramot Zion in Jerusalem, as well as in the United States. More information about Mike will be forthcoming, but I want to give you the opportunity to get this on your calendar now.

Some other thoughts: it’s a human tendency, I think, to make assumptions about people based on their appearance, their dress, and their religious or ethnic identity. But sometimes people surprise you.

There is a huge difference in voting patterns between the Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”, a term most Haredim dislike) community and the rest of the Jewish community in the United States. While estimates vary, it’s generally believed that in the 2024 Presidential election, 80 to 90 percent of Haredim voted Republican while 75 to 85 percent of the rest of the Jewish community voted Democratic. (It should also be noted that Haredim are among the most consistent ticket-splitters; in Kiryas Joel NY, a town populated exclusively by Satmar Hasidim, Donald Trump won 96 percent of the Presidential vote but Kirsten Gillibrand won 74 percent of the Senate vote.)

While the Haredi community certainly leans to the right on most culture war issues (abortion, same-sex marriage, trans rights, public funding for religious schools, etc.), it is also a community with more recent immigrant roots than most other American Jews. My anecdotal impression is that most American Jews my age (I was born in 1960) are grandchildren or at most great-grandchildren of immigrants, for the most part from Eastern Europe. But Haredim my age are much more likely to be children of immigrants, since the Haredi community in this country is descended almost entirely from Haredim who immigrated either in the late 1930s (a minority) or Holocaust survivors who arrived between the end of World War II and the early 1950s. In places like Brooklyn there is also a not-insignificant population of undocumented Haredi immigrants, primarily from Israel, who come legally on visitor’s visas and then find jobs off the books and remain in this country after their visa expires.

You may be aware that I authored this week’s D’var Torah for an organization called T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. Subsequent to its publication, I was pleased to see in the Religion News Service (religionnews.com) a column by Rabbi Avi Shafran, called “This coming Shabbat, the Torah portion commands us to care for immigrants.” Rabbi Shafran recently retired after a thirty year career as spokesperson and director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, the leadership and policy umbrella organization for Haredi Jews in the United States.

Rabbi Shafran grew up in Baltimore, the son of Rabbi Simcha Shafran, a Holocaust survivor who fled Poland. Rabbi Shafran writes:

My parents were among those who arrived on American shores from a faraway place, Eastern Europe. My mother, fortunately, immigrated as a child before World War II; my father immigrated after fleeing Nazis and spending the war years in a Soviet-Siberian labor camp. The kindness of those who welcomed and aided them from the start allowed them to marry, come to lead a Jewish congregation in Baltimore for many decades and raise a family. 

I knew countless others like them.  They came to love this country, which gave them new lives. And, although I was born here, I inherited that same feeling. I can easily imagine the pain and fear born of uncertainty that they all must have felt when disembarking from the ships that brought them here. I remind myself that similar feelings are felt by more recent arrivals from other places. 

He continues:

Immigrants these days are often immediately and unfairly judged to be freeloaders or worse. To be sure, there are immigrants who, by their choices to commit serious criminal acts, have earned the verdict of deportation. But the vast majority of the newcomers have not made any such choices, and are not invaders but guests. We are obligated to treat them as such.

That means not only helping them acclimate and offering them practical assistance, but also caring for their feelings. The Talmud teaches that our sensitivity to others extends even to the words we use. In Jewish law, verbal mistreatment, or ona’at devarim, is a thing. A big thing.

Whatever immigration policy one might favor — and there are legitimate differences of opinion about the larger issue — the Jewish attitude toward the “stranger” in our midst is . . . to have mercy on him and “not ignore him when we find him alone and far from those who can help him.”

It is an admonition that all of us, whatever our faiths, do well to internalize.

Amen, and yashar koach, Rabbi Shafran.

As a reminder, I am having drop-in hours on Thursday afternoons from 2 to 4 at the shul. For my drop-in hours, you do not need to make an appointment -- that would negate the whole point of drop-in hours -- but I’d urge you to check and make sure I am there regardless as sometimes there are unavoidable pastoral or other emergencies which might take me away from the building.

As always, if I can do anything for you or you need to talk, please contact me at rabbi@kehilatshalom.org or 301-977-0768 rather than through the synagogue office. I am happy to meet you at the synagogue by appointment; if you want to speak with me it’s best to make an appointment rather than assuming I will be there when you stop by. 

Additionally, if you know of a Kehilat Shalom congregant or another member of our Jewish community who could use a phone call, please let me know.

L’shalom,

Rabbi Charles L. Arian