Banning Outsiders and Vetting Visitors: A Letter to a Community Rabbi

(Ed. note: The following letter was written by a friend to his local community rabbi. Let honesty reign)

Dear Rebbe,

Since I hear a lot of comments on the new President's Border Control policies, I thought that I would add my own, especially within the context of our own community. 

 
For several years now, we have employed our own CSS volunteers to stand at the entrance of our shul and walk the perimeter of our property. Their primary purpose is to screen out would-be intruders with evil intentions from gaining access to a synagogue where they could carry out mayhem against us, Chas V' Shalom. More recently, we have chosen to electronicaly lock our doors to further limit access to those seeking to do us harm.

How absurd would it be to tell our volunteers to disregard the ethnicity or appearance of possible intruders. Do we employ a system where people of "Muslim-Looking" appearance are expected to be stopped, questioned, and extensively vetted? I certainly would expect that such is their training and mission.

Would it be ridiculous to hand a key fob to random Middle-Eastern people? How about housing Syrian refugees in the shul without checking their background just because they claim to be indigent, hungry or ill?

Do you see where I am going?

Any standards that we wish to apply to our own shul, or to our own homes, should be the same standards that we apply to our nation's borders, or we are hypocrites to the core.

Any Jew who can take a moment to contemplate the true threats that lurk in today's world, especially to the targeted Jewish Community Centers, Yeshivas, Shuls, Day Schools, Kosher Restaurants and Shops, should applaud and support the new President's actions. Ganging up on him, by invoking similarities of Syrian Refugees, (most if whom were reared with visceral hatred toward us, arriving from countries that expelled us en masse in 1948) with the desperate, gentle souls who were the European Jews of the 1940's, is truly offensive.

What is the matter with us? 

Do we have a death wish?

Can we please hear some rational truth from our leaders, educators, and journalists?

We need to come to our senses soon before the very beneficial attitude toward us at the White House is destroyed by the overwhelming outcry of Jewish antipathy.