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On January 26, 1988, a musical opened on Broadway that some of you may have heard of.  The story centers around a tragic love triangle that takes place near the dawning of the 20^th century in and underneath the Paris Opera House.  There is the requisite drama and passion and unrequited love, as well as the small matter of a large, crashing chandelier.  “The Phantom of the Opera” would go on to become the longest running musical in Broadway history; so much so that its most earnest devotees have a name for themselves.  Phans.  P-h-a-n-s!  

     Now, there have been other theater goers whose attitude towards Phantom is more … shall we say derisive, and others who simply passed it over in favor of smaller scale works.  No matter.  The production played for 35 years.  On April 16,  2023 after 13,981 performances, “The Phantom of the Opera” closed.

     Just as its tenure had elicited many different reactions, its conclusion did as well.  There was sadness, appreciation, apathy, incredulity (“wait, that was still running?!”)  And then there was the pit.  The orchestra pit that is.  During the decades of its run, the show maintained that traditional setup as opposed to having musicians onstage or working in separate quarters.  Together they sat, “tucked in like sardines in a can” according to one of the clarinetists.  Some players came and went, others – amazingly – were there for the entire run.  Babies were born, houses or apartments procured, side gigs pursued when possible, and questions around freedom and flexibility, good fortune and trade-offs as artists were eternally wrestled with.  They animated a whole world even as they remained largely invisible.  The pit crew brought wildly disparate feelings to bear on their work; in their own words: “I don’t get terribly sentimental over it because it’s a job after all… it’s not easy, it’s not a vacation.”     “You want to bring your entire being into that show – it’s got everything you’d want to express in an instrument.”     “What more can we ask for than to have had this show for 35 years?  Through all of the chaos of life, this was here.”

     I believe is what we all want.  A sense of rootedness, the feeling, in our bones, that we are home.  A place where all that we are can flourish.  Where our creativity can grow and take flight.  That this group of musicians found it, many for decades, is nothing short of a miracle.

     Where do we find it?

     Some of us find it right here at Temple.  A home for our curiosity, our desire to be part of something larger than ourselves, a longing to hear the words and music of our tradition in all their beautiful iterations.

     Some of us find home in our work.  In our families.  In many places near and far, if we are lucky.  Some of us find home in all these places and more.

     And this morning, we come home to the words of Torah we will hear: Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem.  You stand here today ready to enter into God’s covenant with you.  This is a threshold moment.  They are waiting, as they have been for so long.  But this time there is a difference.  They have emerged from the pit, as it were.  From the wilderness, from a landscape filled with unknowns and with a thorny history to say the least.    There is palpable excitement as they stand together now.  Even with fear, and the memories of past traumas, past scars.  Even with the stories each one carries in some underground place no one else can know.

     They share a truth now.  Once they make this crossing, who they were and how they lived will transform.  And that is so for all of them.  The Torah takes care to emphasize that the words that follow are not only for the officials and the elders.  They are also for the woodchopper.  The water bearer.  Even the stranger within your camp. 

     Today these words were and are for them too.  God’s covenant was expansive enough to hold them.  Today they are seen.  Aren’t they?

     Or like that pit crew of musicians, do they animate worlds – stories within stories – while remaining largely invisible?

     The Torah exhorts us to remember the stranger no less than 36 times.  On the surface, that may not sound like many.  But it is still the ethical mandate which shows up most often.    And for those who enjoy gematria – the sacred relationship between numbers and letters – 36 is a multiple of 18.  Double chai, we like to say.  More life.  What we are meant to understand is that without memory… we are bound for lesser lives.  We are in danger of becoming the strangers, but this time to ourselves.  To say nothing of the visceral dangers immigrants and longtime residents of this country are contending with, visibly and less so. And have we not all been imperiled by similar forces at one time or another?  Isn’t this our story too?  Aren’t we all from someplace else?

     We are.

     We are from cities and small towns and wide open spaces. We hail from across oceans.  Think further back to other voyages… other crossings.  Black and white photographs in silver frames sitting on living room tables of bubbies and zaydes and their bubbies and zaydes who took the biggest chance of their lives.  Many left behind gravesites and relatives they would never see again.  Who were they?  What were their names?  Some we may never know.  Some were welcomed here.  Some were taunted.  Some worked hard and some languished, never quite feeling at home again.  Some fought for everything they had so that their children might not have to.  Some never quite figured out how not to fight when they didn’t have to.  Some threw themselves into the labor movement and resettlement of other refugees, understanding how hard it is to become one.  Others couldn’t bear to remember. 

     What they all have in common is that they were border crossers.  They moved in and out of visibility in search of new roots.  And the commonality they bequeathed to us – stubbornly, determinedly, mythically -- is that search. 

     Is it any wonder that so many of us who spring from this long, long story watch with such despair as our communities, our schools, our country sink to subterranean levels of xenophobia? 

     Certainly it isn’t that our history as descendants of immigrants is rosy and uncomplicated.  My grandfather recalls being called “heeb” and “sheeny” during the stickball games of his Brooklyn childhood.  Friends in my demographic had pennies thrown at them on the bus, or their scalps felt for horns at their lockers.  Do you know where those incidents took place?  Connecticut. 

     Clearly, the United States was not a Garden of Eden for the immigrant or the undocumented.  Not then, and not now.

     Especially not now.  The comic and activist Cristela Alonzo recalls growing up in poverty and never telling anyone outside her family where she lived for fear of deportation.  Other families cover the windows with cardboard, or simply don’t venture outside their homes and apartments.  Right here, living invisibly so that they might live. 

     And then there are the ones who are detained.  Who are taken from their work, or from sites where they gather looking for a day’s work.  From their families.  As part of raids.  Some of them after decades of living on these shores.  With coldness and cruelty, and without due process or any real sense as to where they are being taken.  Huddled masses yearning to breathe free?!  Indeed!

     If these stories, true as our own lives, have not yet struck an internal chord, today of all days let us do what we must in order to hear it.  Today we stand – descendants of a people who also stood at the border, aware that life was about to change, and them with it.  We also stand together with all our human frailties, our vulnerabilities, our most fractured selves.  Our history has come home.  It breathes all around us as surely as we ourselves do.  For the woodchopper and the water bearer – for all who are disenfranchised, made to feel invisible, struggling for all that is ordinary in a world not made for them… let us extend a hand… just as hands have been extended to us.  For all who are carrying the weight of harmful untruths and stereotypes on their shoulders and are so tired, let us stand with them.  We know exactly how it feels.  “Remember the stranger.”  Remember them all.  It is hard to help those who are hurting when we ourselves feel so injured.  But it is not impossible.

     There are precious few maps for this.  But there is a moral compass.  Like God’s covenant, made and remade with us every Yom Kippur, “it is not beyond reach.  it is not in the heavens… neither is it beyond the sea… No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart.” (Deut. 30: 11-14). 

     Together, let us follow that compass towards better days.  Leave the pit; the songs will stay with you.  Leave the wilderness, and a measure of clarity will come.  Leave apathy far behind where it belongs, and let us join together with the tempest tossed who need us most.  May our own scars lead us to help the wounded, with radical empathy as our guide.  And may the imprint we leave be one that reflects our best selves, as lovers of justice, and pursuers of peace.

Ken Y’hi Ratzon/ May it be God’s will.