Within Our Reach

Last week I zoomed into a classroom in Missouri that studies the We Share The Same Sky podcast. I’ve visited this class every semester for a number of years and it has become something I look forward to. Twice a year I get to spend an hour with high school seniors at a Catholic girls school; I enter a room where the group knows not just my story and my grandmother’s story, but have spent time introducing themselves to Sergiusz, Rabbi Bent Melchior, Sine and her family, the Perssons, the Bergmanns, Danuta and Aleksander, and Moudi - the Syrian refugee whose story I weave into the narrative of my grandmother and Bent’s 1943 crossing of the Baltic Sea.

This biannual visit has become a marker of time for me. I get to speak about the podcast as it resonates now, and remember back to 2019 when I published it. Last year, for example, I met with the group just a week after October 7th; it was (and remains) a delicate time to speak to Jewish identity. And this fall, I brought with me the nervous energy of today’s election. 

I’ve always relied on students to keep me engaged in my own work. They ask questions that expose where my blind spots are and root me in the importance of teaching history through a contemporary lens. They encourage me to double down on my approach, which encourages all of us to ask the seemingly selfish question: what does my family history mean to me? And this year I got a question that cut right to the core of what’s been consuming my mind.

A student asked, “After Rabbi Bent Melchior tells his refugee story, he says ‘You cannot help the whole world, but those that are within your reach, you can treat and respect as human beings.’ Do you agree with Bent that you can’t help the whole world but only those within your reach?”

This is a really good question.

First I put a disclaimer on my answer: I said it was a critical question and one that weighs on me daily. It’s also a very big question and one that deserves years of group study that includes discussion with people who instinctively have different answers.

But then I said something like this:

“Yes, I do agree with him. But let’s make sure that we acknowledge that “within your reach” is not necessarily physical proximity nor is it the same for everyone. I know people who have money to donate, those who have the energy to march, and some who have the ability to write and teach. There are those who have the stamina to participate in governance or to raise funds. There are individuals who have the space to home people, and others who have the capacity to travel to where the needs are most dire. Our reach can extend far and wide, but it’s of vital importance that we also pay attention to who in our local community needs us. We have to ask ourselves if we are ignoring those in front of us for the sake of the zeitgeist crises across the world. These are important questions. I do think it is often easier to look to the problems out of our reach to solve because life seems simpler and more binary from a distance. It’s easier to be satisfied with our effort when the problem is far away. At home, when we look around our neighborhoods and to the people in our physical proximity and try to help, more is asked of us. We have to show up differently. We have to participate in the complexity and be a part of it. We need to wrestle with it by being in the weeds of problem solving. We have to sacrifice some comfort and some ego. And that’s really hard to do. But it’s where we can have a significant impact." 

Then we moved on to the next question… 

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A few other thoughts for those who want to hear my political point of view… 

I began We Share The Same Sky in 2009 and started pitching it around the journalism world in 2014. The chorus of reply that I received was that the story wasn’t relevant. I have watched steadily for 15 years as current events have proved that to not be true. (Here is an article I wrote in 2017 about some of the relevance I saw).

Today, America goes to the polls to possibly elect a man who dreams of being like Hitler. The felon running for president idolizes the Nazi way. He doesn’t imply that; he literally states that. He wishes to become like the other dictators and is empowering a next generation of hopeful leaders to feel the same. I cannot overemphasize how terrifying this is and it forces me to ask a question that I hear echoed by other Holocaust educators: What is even the point of studying these stories if we don’t learn from them? I’ve been grappling with this question since 2016. I’m angry, exhausted, and bewildered. But mostly I’m frightened. If Trump wins with his Project 2025 agenda, America’s “land of the free” aspiration will cease to exist. And like the oxygen mask on an airplane analogy, if we can’t take care of ourselves, how will we ever be able to help and protect anyone else?

I have written and spoken extensively about not being a fan of sides. But today in America, we have a choice of two candidates (it should be more, but that’s another rant for another day). I believe that Harris and Walz are the right choice for us. I trust that they will create an environment in this country where disagreement is allowed. We need that so we can keep asking hard questions. I want to live in a society where we have the ability to push back in order to move forward. That is democracy. That is the way towards peace. That is what we all deserve. At the voting polls, the whole world is within our reach.