Cities of Refuge, Cities of Sanctuary

 

Picture from Charles Foster, The Story of the Bible, 1884

Cities of Refuge, Cities of Sanctuary

        More headlines are coming in about arrests and charges made for the far-right, anti-immigrant riots. And peppered between those headlines in the “asylum and immigration” sections of news websites, between the pictures of fires and angry crowds, are the occasional haunting stories which sound something like this: 

         Boat on which at least eight died in Channel was ‘wholly unsuitable’

         Two people die attempting to cross Channel in dinghy

                 UK ‘stop the boats’ policy raising risk of deadly crushes on dinghies

         As we know, places housing refugees were targeted in those riots. It doesn’t make the land seem so much safer than the channel. And it’s impossible for me, this week, to not read the parashah a bit differently as a result of it. 

        It’s very clear that the Torah as a whole takes a pro-refugee stance. After all, our ancestors in the wilderness were refugees. For many of us, possibly most of us in this room, our grandparents or great-grandparents were refugees. We have members of this congregation who are refugees themselves. 

And even if that weren’t the case - even if we weren’t strangers in the land of Egypt, even if our immediate families were secure, the fundamental principles of the Torah come down to this: all human beings are made in the image of God. 

        We’re told to take care of the stranger in our midst 36 times in the Torah. And then, additionally, the Torah criticises our neighbouring nations for not providing us with food and water as we sojourned in the wilderness. And says that, even in a society that allows for slavery, an escaped slave should never be returned to their master. 

        And then, this week, we are reacquainted with a different kind of refugee. We are no longer talking about the person who flees from a country which has oppressed them, but rather a person who has fled a situation in which they are the subject, and not the object, of violence. 

        I am speaking of the Cities of Refuge. These cities were designated in Torah law for a person to flee to when accused of murder, so that they could not be harmed by the victim’s loved ones. If that individual was then found not guilty of deliberate murder, but rather of accidentally killing someone, the City of Refuge would be where they would stay. When this idea was first presented to us, back in Sefer Bamidbar (the Book of Numbers), there was an unpredictable end-date to their time in the City of Refuge. After the death of the High Priest, the accidental killer would be able to leave the City of Refuge safely and return home. 

        The City of Refuge, then, is a temporary place of safety. It is not home; it is a liminal space. Home is always on the mind, but the return is unpredictable. 

        I owe thanks to Mart Jan Luteijn for the following insight. It’s easy to read this week’s parashah as simply restating the place of the Cities of Refuge, but it’s also possible to read D’varim’s (Deuteronomy’s) conception as fundamentally different. What we read in this week’s parashah is that the inadvertent killer would flee to a City of Refuge וָחָֽי - “and live”. That’s the end of the story Deuteronomy tells about the City of Refuge. 

        Perhaps the City of Refuge in the Deuteronomic imagination is permanent. This is where the inadvertent killer now lives. Life is different after this tragedy. There’s no going “back to normal”; we have to learn to live in the new reality. This place is home now. 

        It is, I think, an obvious parallel to the concept of seeking refuge in general. Is this temporary? Is the intention always to go home, back to some sense of normality, back to the place where everything is familiar? Or does being in a situation which requires refuge   force us to accept that “home” does not exist anymore - at least not in the same way. 

        Of course, all refugees are individuals with their own stories and fears and dreams. I won’t dare answer for any of them. 

         But I think these two models could have something interesting to say about us   and what it means to be Jews in the diaspora. 

        Jewish communities exist, dispersed around the world, because we were refugees. Initially from the exile from the homeland itself, and then from various other exiles and dangers. The place that was “home” has remained alive in the Jewish spirit for two thousand years, a feat that would seem unbelievable if it weren’t so demonstrably true. And now here we are. Jews, thousands of years after the Second Exile, praying both for the safety and security of the homeland - may peace come soon - and also praying for the leaders of the country in which we live, as Jeremiah told us we should in the Babylonian Exile, the First Exile. 

        While the reason for seeking refuge does not parallel in the slightest, the experience of being in a City of Refuge maps fascinatingly onto life in diaspora. Is life here a liminal space, while we wait to feel safe and secure enough to go home? Or is this home now, because life fundamentally changed when we were exiled thousands of years ago? 

        In case you think this is the kind of sermon where I pose a question and then don’t answer it, don’t worry. I think I have an answer:

        I think it’s both. 

        I know they are somewhat contradictory, but here’s why I think that’s okay: the City of Refuge is both. It is both the city as described in Numbers and the city as described in Deuteronomy. Both the impermanent space as we wait and long for home, and the new home itself. And it gets to be both, because it is an idea. We have no actual evidence these cities existed, no other references to them as Cities of Refuge past Joshua. In a fundamental, on-the-ground, brick-and-mortar sense, the question likely never required an answer. 

        The truth of the matter, I think, is that both realities need to be allowed. We need to be able to long for a return to normality, for teshuvah, for repentance to return us to the previous state, for the possibility that not all has been lost. And we need to be able to recognise that upheaval is real, that we have to be able to learn to live with change, that what is broken can’t be mended perfectly to the state it was in before.    

        Perhaps this is part of the reason that Zionism is so difficult to describe to people outside Jewish culture. We can be okay with the tension. The contradiction of it all is healthy. Israel is homeland, and England is home, too. “My heart is in the east”, writes Yehudah haLevi, and yes, I feel that, too; I miss the land when I am away, I miss the sky in Jerusalem, but I can also call this land my home. And maybe there will be times that each of us will lean more toward Numbers and times we will lean more toward Deuteronomy - times in which an answer might seem real and tangible. And then, on the turn of a dime or a leaf, everything might seem suddenly very murky all over again. 

        It’s not an equation. I can’t solve Zionism for x. It’s an idea. It’s a state of the heart and soul. It gets to be contradictory and full of tension because life is contradictory and full of tension. 

        Rabbi Meir Levi wrote about the Cities of Refuge that they are better understood with a different English translation, one that means the same as “refuge” but has different religious connotations. They are Cities of Sanctuary. We use “sanctuary” in English to mean both a place where God dwells and a place that keeps us safe. I will let Rabbi Levi have the last word with this quote:

A sanctuary — be it a temple of marble and gold or a City of Refuge to which criminals flee — is a powerful, concrete symbol of God’s constant presence among people.