On the Road to Providence — Cruelty
January 27, 2009
As a youth I worked in my family’s delicatessen and since we had a mixed clientele I was instructed in Jewish Dietary Laws (Kashrut). Later in life I discovered there were good reasons why certain foods are kosher; some because they have been prepared in a clean and merciful manner or the animal was free of disease or defect. Sometimes the food is to fulfill some religious ritual recalling an event in Jewish history. Some food is forbidden because in Biblical times such food could not be properly harvested or prepared and thus would endanger the consumer.
However the one overarching rule I found fascinating was the prohibition for consuming meat and dairy products together. This was to prevent cooking or preparing an animal in that which would nourished and sustained it; the milk of its mother (Ex. 23.19: Ex34.16: Dt.14.21). To avoid even accidentally doing this cruel act, food is marked as meat (fleishik); dairy (milchik) or neither meat nor milk (parve).
While I am impressed that Rabbinic Laws strives to avoid cruelty in this manner, I am disheartened that secular practice in Rhode Island goes the opposite way and tries to inflict as much cruelty as possible. The Donald W. Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls might qualify as cruelty in Rabbinic Law; it certainly is cruelty in my opinion. In a city of mostly immigrants, this detention center sits at the edge of town, beside the public ball fields. From behind its walls and barbed wire fences, fathers can look out and see their children playing baseball. They can look out across a struggling mill town where they tried to support their families until they were incarcerated as a consequence of this nation’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. The Wyatt Detention Center is part of the new growth industry in poor neighborhoods: immigration detention.
Instead of providing jobs and federal funds to help pay for police and fire services, Central Falls began to lose the very people that were trying to improve Central Falls. Their crime was seeking to improve their lives, the lives of their families and their community; the same as wave after wave of others have been doing since the first European set foot on this continent and began displacing the native tribes. Immigrant detention in maximum-security facilities is a growth industry that enhances the revenue of the facility owners and slowly kills the surrounding neighborhood. Often the government officials in the community are blithely unaware of the cruelty they have welcomed.
Citing fears of “Arab terrorists,” they enforce racism and classism and never see the Latino communities – the backbone of their service industry – are being destroyed by their cruelty. They turn a blind eye to a system that dehumanizes and inflicts punishment without regard to the individual.
As Unitarian Universalists, we must raise our voices and condemn the cruelty in Central Falls and elsewhere in this country. As Unitarian Universalists, we must help the people of Central Falls, because they are our sisters and brothers.
~Rev. José Ballester
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