Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio. Welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.

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Rabbi James Green:
We spent the period from the election to the inauguration really planning for a variety of scenarios. It was not a scenario that we planned for that the federal government would say to us, "Please leave these folks behind."

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Bryan Schwartzman:
I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman. Today, I'm speaking with Rabbi James Greene about his Evolve essay, Praying in the Language of Welcoming, Refugee and Immigration Advocacy. Rabbi Greene is the CEO of Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts, an organization focused in part on aiding refugees. We'll talk about how this work has been upended by the policies of the Trump administration and why helping refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants is grounded in Jewish values.
Okay, a little aside here, you may have read that Reconstructing Judaism, the organization that produces this podcast, joined more than 25 Jewish and Christian organizations in filing a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security. This suit seeks to prevent arrests and other immigration enforcement actions in houses of worship. Even the threat of such actions has produced a chilling effect on churches and synagogues and the whole idea of freedom of worship. To be clear, the issue concerning immigrants without documentation is a separate issue and about a separate population than the legally-admitted refugees that Rabbi James Greene works with and we're talking about today. But I mentioned it here because they're definitely related from a values perspective. You can read more about the lawsuit on reconstructingjudeism.org and I'll leave a few links in our show notes.
Passover is just right around the corner. Did you know that the Reconstructionist movement has its very own Haggadah? It's called The Night of Questions, and it's edited by Rabbi Joy Levitt and Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, who's been a guest on this show. Their retelling is both accessible and rooted in tradition. It also happens to be beautifully illustrated. It has traditional prayers, biblical text, historical context, songs. There's even a play for kids to perform. It also offers different outlines for the Seder depending on how you want it to go, including one geared for younger children, older children. There's also a version in there focused on the role of women in the Exodus, so there's many things to enrich your Seder. Find it on readandrite.com, that's R-I-T-E, or click or tap on the link in our show notes.
Okay. Let's get to our guest. Rabbi James Greene is a 2008 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and is the immediate past president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. He's also held executive leadership positions at Jewish Community Centers, as well as Jewish camps, and now, as we said, serves as the chief executive officer at Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts. Rabbi James Greene, welcome. Welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you for the first time.

Rabbi James Green:
Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here and happy to speak with you.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So I just wanted to start off by asking about the organization that you lead, Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts. Can you just tell us a little bit about the scope of its work, who it serves, what your focus is?

Rabbi James Green:
Sure. Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts is an organization that has a 130-year history serving mostly refugees and immigrants across the four western counties of Massachusetts. We were started in the late 1890s by early Jewish immigrants to the western part of the Commonwealth as a way of supporting other Jewish immigrants who were coming to the region. And in the generations that followed, we served waves of Jewish immigrants in the early 1900s after the Holocaust, again, during the arrival of large numbers of Russian Jewish immigrants. And then as Jewish immigration really slowed, our work shifted to continuing this really holy work of welcoming the stranger and we've served every wave of immigrants to arrive in the United States since then. In 2024, we resettled 481 refugees into the Commonwealth and additionally served hundreds of humanitarian entrants, Ukrainians, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghan parolees who came to the United States looking for safety and security.
We've grown from our start in Springfield to be one of the largest refugee resettlement agencies in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and it's work that I think is deeply meaningful and that we're really proud of. Although our work focuses on supporting, by and large, refugees and immigrants, we do that through a variety of services. So in addition to our resettlement work, we're also a DPH-licensed mental health center. And so last year, we provided just under 11,000 behavioral health sessions across 18 different languages supporting the behavioral health needs of a large immigrant population. We also provide elder guardianship services, so we support elders in the Commonwealth for a variety of reasons. They're not able to care for their own needs and don't have relatives who can take on that role. We also provide and support people who are preparing for citizenship, so we support folks who are taking classes to become US citizens who have been long-time, lawful, permanent residents in the United States. And we support the education, advocacy, and engagement of the Jewish community and engage thousands of Jews every single year in volunteerism, in educational programming, and in advocacy.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So a couple of decades ago, I was a student at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And I think coming from New York, I went into it with the expectation or the misconception that everything outside New York was kind of lily-white and being surprised that there was, at least even in the 90s, a pretty strong, immigrant, Spanish-speaking community outside of Springfield and Holyoke. I'm sort of just, from my own curiosity, wondering what the area is like today. I'm sure it's only more diverse than it was then.

Rabbi James Green:
The community is incredibly diverse. In 2023, the American Immigration Council's report shows that immigrant residents, people who were born outside of the United States, but who now live in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is just under 1.3 million residents. That's 18% of the population of the Commonwealth. They're neighbors in our communities and in our schools and in our businesses, and there's a real economic impact on the Commonwealth as well. Immigrants paid $20 billion in taxes in Massachusetts in 2023 and spent about $52 billion in the economy in Massachusetts in 2023. So you're right, Bryan. I think that there's a tremendous amount of immigration happening in the Commonwealth and it really is a part of how places like Massachusetts have continued to be successful and to thrive because we're able to continue growing and building our communities in large part because of the immigrant populations that come to call this place home.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So how does it work, or maybe I should say how did it work when an Afghan family or a Haitian family needs resettlement, or refugees? How do they get connected to Western Massachusetts? How do they get connected to Jewish Family Service?

Rabbi James Green:
So we partner with an organization called HIAS, formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and there are a number of national resettlement agencies that have local affiliates. And HIAS is the Jewish community's resettlement agency. It's the oldest resettlement agency in the country. And so the process of someone coming to Western Massachusetts starts years before they actually arrive. The vetting to become a refugee who has resettled in the United States is one of the most rigorous processes in terms of entrance that a person can go through. I would argue it's more complicated to become a refugee than it is to get a national security clearance. So a refugee is, by definition, someone who has left their home country, has crossed an internationally-recognized border, and then, for a variety of reasons, cannot go home. They apply for and become eligible for refugee status, and then the International Office of Migration supports their designation to be resettled in a third country.
So once that happens, there's health screenings. There's background checks that are conducted. There's a tremendous amount of investigation, very invasive processes that play out before they are designated for resettlement in the United States. Once that happens, they'll be assigned to one of these resettlement agencies that work here in the United States or did work in the United States prior to January 24th. And then after they are designated to HIAS, for example, HIAS will ask for us as a local affiliate to assure their case. And so in the computer system that we use, we'll get some very limited information about the family that's going to be resettled with us. And then a member of our staff, her name is Alda, has in her office a computer and she clicks the button that assures that case that brings that family to Western Massachusetts.
And once we do that, then our work as a local affiliate begins, we secure permanent housing for that family that's arriving. Once they arrive, we support them to get their social security card, to get health screenings, to get their children enrolled in schools. We provide wraparound services that help provide employment support. So refugees come into the United States work-authorized, eligible to work immediately, and many do go to work relatively quickly. And so we support them to find employment, we teach ESL classes, nearly a dozen classes around the region. And so all of these supports, all these wraparound services come together to make sure that that refugees are able to be successfully integrated into their community.
Along with that comes a very limited amount of direct assistance. So each refugee is assigned about $1,650 in federal funds for resettlement, and so we utilize those funds to help provide permanent housing for clients and to do some other pretty limited things because that funding is just pretty limited. And we partner that funding with private dollars that we raise here in the Commonwealth to ensure that refugees are able to be successfully resettled into their home community.

Bryan Schwartzman:
You told a pretty powerful story in your Evolve essay about just before inauguration in January of going with, I believe it was, your daughter to the airport to pick up a family.

Rabbi James Green:
Yeah.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Can you recount that for us here?

Rabbi James Green:
Sure. So the Friday night before the inauguration, Talyah, my 16-year-old daughter, and I got into my car and we drove to the Hartford Airport to pick up the last refugee family that we would receive prior to the work stop order and then the cancellation of resettlement contracts across the United States, a family of three that was coming was arriving from Venezuela. That family's journey had started years earlier, and they were finally coming to the United States to be resettled. Talyah came with me in part because she speaks a little Spanish, she's taking Spanish in school, and I unfortunately don't speak any Spanish, and because one of the kids who was traveling with that family was a 16-year-old girl whose birthday was about 10 days different from Talyah's. And I thought that after a long day of traveling, it might be helpful to see a somewhat familiar face. So we arrived at the airport, we picked up this family who, I think, was pretty weary from traveling for about 24 hours is the length of time it took them to get to us. And we drove them up to Amherst actually, Bryan.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Nice, nice.

Rabbi James Green:
There was a family in the Jewish community who had agreed to receive them and to provide them as a home host, to serve as a home host for a few weeks until we could get their permanent housing set up. And so we arrived in Amherst. We walked in to this really lovely home for a family who was ready to receive and welcome this family from Venezuela. I am continually amazed by the warmth and generosity that members of our community have for folks, in Jewish tradition, the most often repeated commandment is to welcome the stranger. We hear that 36 times in the Bible. And what's interesting to me is that the commandment, the obligation to love your neighbor, only appears once. So there's this idea that we recognize that welcoming people who are different than us, who maybe speak a different language than us, who've had a different life journey, life experience can be hard. It can be complicated. And the warmth and willingness of folks in the community to do that kind of welcoming work never ceases to be awe-inspiring.
So this family welcomed this Venezuelan family into their home, settled them in. They made challah because it was Friday night so they shared some freshly-baked challah. And on the drive home, Talyah and I talked about what that experience was like. She looked at me and asked, "Were other people going to come? Were other refugees going to be able to arrive?" because she now had this very personal experience of meeting a 16-year-old girl who listened to similar music and had a lot of similar dreams to Talyah. To go to school, to get an education, to find meaningful work, to build a life, those are all things that Talyah thinks about as a junior in high school. I really believe in that vision of what it means to welcome people.
We talked about where that desire comes from and I remarked to her that I was really thinking about a quote from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who's one of my favorite theologians, was a refugee himself coming from Europe, and became a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement, I think, in large part because of his lived experience. And he, after marching on Shabbat in Alabama, wrote to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that he felt like his feet were praying, right? And I've studied that text for decades and I've known it for most of my adult life. I don't think I'd ever lived that experience before. And so to live that experience, to live it with Talyah, with my daughter, was immensely powerful and, I think, speaks to the importance of finding ways to meaningfully continue this work in the years ahead.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I have to admit, there are very few emails I look forward to getting. My email inbox is always overflowing. But every month, I legitimately look forward to receiving the Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations newsletter. It's the way that I keep up with everything that's going on with Evolve, including new essays and upcoming web conversations. And my friend and executive producer, Rabbi Jacob Staub, always shares pearls of wisdom in these newsletters. Do you want it delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up at evolve.reconstructingjudeism.org or click on the link in our show notes.
So since then, so much has happened so quickly. There have been so many executive orders and court challenges. I'm wondering if you can sort of break down how your work has been affected.

Rabbi James Green:
Well, let me continue with that family. That family arrived on January 17th. And so typically, we work with a family to provide initial resettlement services for about 90 days. On Friday the 24th, I received a stop work order from the federal government asking us to abandon that family, to stop providing initial resettlement services not just to that family, but to the other 138 people who we had resettled in the seven weeks prior to the inauguration. So since then, we've been working to navigate how to provide services that are unique to what's called the reception and placement process, that initial 90-day resettlement period, to folks who are no longer eligible for those services, even though they were promised by the federal government when we received them, that we would provide those services.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Does stop work mean that you can't do it or just that the government won't pay for it?

Rabbi James Green:
The stop work order was an order that that contract was no longer allowed to be implemented. So we were not authorized to provide those services as part of that contract.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Right.

Rabbi James Green:
We're an organization that can provide, that can do whatever we want, right?

Bryan Schwartzman:
If you have the funds.

Rabbi James Green:
That's right. That's right. But we were told that the contract itself was on a work stop, meaning we were asked to not provide those services under the terms of the contract.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Wow

Rabbi James Green:
Let me share just briefly a story of another family ...

Bryan Schwartzman:
Please.

Rabbi James Green:
And how that impacted them. So on Christmas Eve, we received an Afghan evacuee family, a family of nine that had been waiting since the fall of Kabul to be resettled in the United States. The family of nine has a parent who worked on behalf of the US in Afghanistan, and so they have a special status called an SIV, a Special Immigrant Visa status. And again, they have that status because a member of their immediate family supported the US mission, that their life was in danger because they supported the US mission in Afghanistan. After four years, that family was able to get out and we received them when they arrived here in the United States. We had provided temporary housing for them for a few weeks through some local partners. And on January 24th, at about 4:30 as I was finishing my day, I wrote the check to place them into permanent housing, their first, last, and security for a home.
Finding a home suitable for nine people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that's affordable, as you know, is quite the feat. I wrote that check about half an hour after the work stop order was issued, and so I wasn't able to send it out. And so that family lost the permanent housing that we had been working toward for a few weeks. Thankfully, we were able to find some other funds and use some state funding that we had to eventually get that family into permanent housing. But the work stop order was immediate in nature. So once it was issued, we were told we couldn't spend any more funds in support of those clients at all.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So you've got no new refugees and you're scrambling to serve the ones who you'd started on this process?

Rabbi James Green:
Yeah. I mean, we are an organization ..

Bryan Schwartzman:
Scrambling is my word, not yours.

Rabbi James Green:
Yeah. I would say we spent the period from the election to the inauguration really planning for a variety of scenarios. It was not a scenario that we planned for that the federal government would say to us, "Please leave these folks behind." Right? That wasn't on our radar screen, frankly. But what I think our planning did allow for us to do is to think about how we would support our immigrant community in the challenges that we expected to appear. And so we've been able to move staff to different programs and to think creatively and differently about how we provide services. We've turned to our community and our community has really responded. We've raised tens of thousands of dollars to help us close the gap in that direct assistance to ensure that the families that we received prior to the inauguration, we would be able to place them into permanent housing and to make sure that they have their basic needs met.
There are over 100 people that work at Jewish Family Service. It's a large, multifaceted organization and none of the staff that I am grateful to work with come to the office every day because it's glamorous. They come because they feel called to this mission. They feel called by the idea of they want to go out into the heat of this moment and call people in and support them because they recognize that lives are at stake and that the work is critical. So we have a staff team that's been committed to being creative and as much as possible to be willing to bend and shift to make sure that we can support the needs of our clients. So since the 24th, all of those clients have been moved into supportive programs.
I want to be clear. The things that happen in the 90-day initial resettlement program, those things are unique. There isn't a tremendous amount of overlap from one program to another, and so we're being as creative as we can and it means that there are some things that we just can't do. In those places, we've had to acknowledge and work with our clients and say, "Here's what we can do for you and here are the things that we can't," and we've worked with other community agencies volunteers, other programmatic partners to ensure that those things get covered.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Have there been ICE raids in your community and are they happening in sensitive locations, as far as you know?

Rabbi James Green:
So in addition to serving refugees who come here with permanent legal status, we also serve, over the last few years, thousands of humanitarian entrants who are coming here with temporary legal status, and their legal status has been placed into jeopardy because the new administration has revoked temporary protective status, has revoked humanitarian parole in certain cases. So we are seeing real worry and real fear among that part of our client base and in the community for immigration and customs enforcement actions, what I can tell you is that we see the impact in the following ways. There are fewer children going to school, there are fewer parents going to work because they are afraid that they will not make it home.
We provide direct assistance to clients. Last year, we provided a little over $1.5 million in direct assistance to clients. So we are having to think differently about how we get direct assistance to clients because in many cases, clients are concerned about coming out and coming to the office to pick up a check. We have seen immigration and customs enforcement here operating in the local community and gratefully, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, there are some protections in terms of how local and state law enforcement work with federal law enforcement that I think provides not total security, but provides a better structure in which to understand how we can support clients.
So we partnered with one of the other immigrant-serving organizations in our community, MIRA, to do Know Your Rights trainings in a number of different languages. We worked with a Haitian Creole-speaking attorney to do some specific training for clients in our Haitian entrant community. We produced Know Your Rights red cards in eight or nine different languages, thousands of them that were distributed to clients in the community. And we spent time training staff on how to engage appropriately with Immigration and Customs Enforcement should they encounter them in the local community.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Standing on one foot, what's on a Know Your Rights card?

Rabbi James Green:
Things like, "Do you have a warrant? And if you have a warrant, can you show it to me? Is it a judicial warrant that's signed by a judge or is it an administrative warrant signed by an immigration officer, which actually doesn't entitle you to entrance into our facility or into a home?" It advises people that they have a right to remain silent, they have a right to not consent to searches and they have a right to speak to an attorney if they're being detained. And so we think, we believe, that educating people about their constitutional rights is critical to responding to the needs of this moment. And so it also has that language written in their native language and also in English so that you can place it up against a window or against a glass door so that you can also provide that information to federal law enforcement if they were to come.
We made some other changes. We changed how people enter our facility. We worked with the local ACLU office and with a local attorney who we have on retainer to help us think about how our protocols needed to change to be responsive to the needs of this moment and we, I think, have been really fortunate. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hasn't come to our office, but we have seen them active in the local community. And so the best thing we can do is try to ensure that we're giving access to knowledge that's going to keep our client base safe.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I mean, you noted your work isn't glamorous. And also, I'll say ... I mean, throughout American history, on and off, immigration has been sort of a hot-button, charged, political issue. The temperature's risen and fallen. I think at least since I can recall, the 2006 midterm election, it's been a hot political issue. But you're now weeks into an administration that just seems fundamentally opposed to the work that you do and, we've seen, not above potentially seeking reprisals against organizations it doesn't approve of. So how do you lead, how you go about your work under this kind of hostility, instability? It seems like a challenge you haven't faced before.

Rabbi James Green:
It is a unique challenge. So the origins of resettlement work of refugee status in the United States emanate from the ashes of the Shoah from the Holocaust. The first bill that references refugees comes in the late 1940s as a way of providing access for survivors of the Holocaust and other victims of Nazi Europe to come to the United States and resettle. The USRAP, which is the law that current resettlement work operates under, dates back to the Reagan administration. So I don't particularly believe that refugee resettlement work should be controversial, although I recognize that what I believe, not everyone always agrees with. And even though I find that frustrating, I've come to understand that that's not a thing I can change. But we're talking about legal immigration.
Every client of the thousands of clients that I work with every year, all of them are here with legal status. And there are, I believe, real, real problems with our immigration system that should be fixed. We should be working toward legislation that makes our immigration system more equitable, that makes our system function better, and that allows us to experience the kind of population growth that's sustainable and supportive of our communities and our society. And I think our current system struggles to do that for a variety of reasons. But the question you asked is about how do we carry forward, right? In Jewish tradition, the obligation to welcome and care for the stranger is an obligation that it's offered in the affirmative. You're not allowed to remain neutral. It's not a thing that we can set aside because the work is hard or because there are headwinds.
We recognize that the work, especially when it's hard, is critical. I think it's remarkable that a tradition who has, as its foundational story, our ancestors enslavement in Egypt, that it would've been easier. It would've been, I think, frankly, expected for us to say, "We were slaves in Egypt. We know what that's like. We don't owe anyone anything because we have been there and we have done that and it's not our problem," right? But Jewish tradition doesn't do that. It invites us to choose the opposite path. Because we were exploited, because we were oppressed, because we were enslaved, we have to make sure that no one else experiences that kind of degradation, that kind of dehumanization because we remember what it's like to be a stranger.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of Blessed Memory writes that at the Passover Seder, we don't say, "When our ancestors were enslaved in Egypt." We say, "Each person sitting at the Seder table should recognize that they, themselves, went free from slavery," right? Why do we do that? Rabbi Sacks wrote that it's about the difference between history and memory. History is something that happened to other people. Memory is about us recalling what happens to us and memory is powerful, that memory is what calls us to action. So in my mind, the memory of our ancestors' enslavement in Egypt calls us deeply into this work.
So yes, the work is hard and it's complicated. And in the end, I can't care about that. I have to care about the community that we serve and the people. Those 138 people, they're just not just numbers in an annual impact report. They're not just family names in Alda's computer, to come back to an earlier story. They're individual people with individual stories and with individual dreams about the life that they are going to build and the impact that they are going to have here in their new home. Even in moments when it's hard, that's what motivates me.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And without new refugees on the way, is the focus on doing everything you can for those 138 people?

Rabbi James Green:
I think that yes, we are focused both on serving those clients who have arrived recently and we work with clients, ORR-eligible populations. So the Office of Refugee and Resettlement says that people are eligible for different lengths of time based on the program that they're enrolled in. So we will continue to serve clients in ways where they're eligible, some up to five years after their arrival. And then we'll continue to support clients who have behavioral health needs beyond that. We'll continue to support their journey to US citizenship.
And I think as we go through this process, we're going to continue to find opportunities to lean in and think about what our clients need in this unique moment and how our community can be called into action to respond. So I don't know fully, frankly, what that will look like in part because I think the feature of the chaos we experience, it's not an accidental byproduct of this moment. I think it's a feature of the system. And so what we've tried to do is to remain calm and level in that storm. In my volunteer time and my free time, I'm a volunteer with our local fire department and our local ambulance service. So I'm an EMT.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Oh, wow.

Rabbi James Green:
I had a teacher in my EMT class who said, "People's inclination in an emergency is, 'Don't just stand there. Do something,' and actually the best path forward is to say, 'Don't just do something. Stand there for a minute.'" So right now, I think our organization is committed to standing here, being here in support of our clients and in support of our community and in support of the larger immigrant refugee community. So we are going to stand here and we are going to do things. We are continuing to do things. And I think as we see our way clear into what the impacts of some of the federal freeze will look like, the funding streams, the cancellation of contracts, all of that is in the midst of litigation.
And so as we get clear about what the impact of that will look like, I think then we can start to respond and act. But I want to do that from a place of proactive, thoughtful partnership with our communities, really looking at the communities and the populations we serve and saying, "How can we support you? How can we stand with you in this moment?" And I want to think about how we support the Jewish community's call to justice and action and support the Jewish community's engagement in these issues. And so I think that process, I expect, will just take time and it doesn't mean we're not responding in places where we need to. We're shifting and moving and trying to respond as best as we can. But in terms of the big picture of the agency, I think it's time for us to stand here, withstand this initial change process, and then to think about as the future is unfolding, where can we lean in to be most effective?

Bryan Schwartzman:
Elections for the World Zionist Congress are officially underway. You may not have heard of it, but this is really important. The results of this election determines how $5 billion gets spent over the course of the next five years. If you self-identify as Jewish, are at least 18 years old, and are a US citizen, you can vote in the American elections for the World Zionist Congress. Reconstructing Judaism is officially endorsing the Hatikvah Slate, which supports democracy, a two-state solution, and the return of all hostages. Hatikvah opposed to funding settlement projects, as well as an overall chauvinistic approach to Judaism and Zionism. A vote for the Hatikvah Slate is a vote for an Israel that lives up to its highest values. Learn more at hattikvaslate.net or click or tap on the link in our show notes.
I'm going to go on a limb and say, and guess that being a rabbi, having rabbinic training isn't required for the job you have. Somebody could be in your shoes and not be a rabbi. So I'm wondering if you could reflect on maybe what ways having Rabbinic training and experience are helping you now.

Rabbi James Green:
I was lucky and remain really grateful for the rabbinic education I got at RRC and the work and the wisdom that I'm able to share with my colleagues in the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association in large part because I have a hundreds of thoughtful partners who are committed to this value system. And for me, I think what is unique about my role as a rabbi in the community and leading Jewish Family Service, I think, is the vision-guided nature of my leadership. I think the thing that I got from my time at RRC is a really clear value set that guides my work, that guides from the moment I get up in the morning until the moment I hit the pillow at night.
And so that vision and value system and the values-based decision making process that is so fundamental to reconstructionist thought, I think, has supported my work as a visionary leader. And that's been true throughout my professional career. I think that when I look at our agency's mission/vision values, I look at those and they're not just words on a page. They are pieces of wisdom that have been mined over 130 years in our work and over a couple thousand years in Jewish tradition, and so I really believe that I'm able to lean into those values in moments of critical decision-making, and it guides the kind of visionary leadership approach that we have used at JFS, I think, to be successful in this moment. It guided our preparation because when we were planning and doing our scenario planning, we were clear about what things were off-limits and in-bounds based on our vision and our values. And I think that rabbinic tradition is really clear that your values are only your values when you make hard decisions based on them, and so we as an agency have leaned into them.

Bryan Schwartzman:
It's probably time for one more question. Somebody wants to live those values and welcome the stranger who sees America as a haven for refugees in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts elsewhere in the country. What can they do to help?

Rabbi James Green:
That's a good question. Like any public engagement, I am here with an ulterior motive so my interest is in calling folks into this community of advocates. I believe that our nation can look past the culture of scarcity and our lesser selfishness and can find a pathway forward that is one of welcoming and inclusion. And so I think that people have the opportunity and the obligation at this moment to not remain neutral and to join the faithful act of worship that praise in the language of advocacy and action. For me, I think that there are specific things that people can do. I think people can reach out to their elected leaders. This is a moment that calls for involvement of government in every local, state, and federal to ensure that we are creating communities that will welcome immigrants and refugees from around the world.
People can call their congressmen and their senators and advocate for refugees and immigrants and advocate that the administration should abide by the court orders that have directed them to restart refugee resettlement, to reestablish contracts that I would argue have been illegally canceled, and to otherwise continue this work that has been our nation's work for the last 80 years. People can and should, I think, support through their volunteerism, through their philanthropic dollars, organizations that are supporting those in our community who are most at risk.
And I want to be clear. I think that means refugees and immigrant communities, I think there are other populations who have been targets of the new administration, and I think our obligation is support to support those communities as well. I think that the other challenge for us is to align with groups that we are aligned with around the function of government and around the protection of democracy, and that we may not agree with 100% of the things that those groups may also talk about.
I was at a rally on Sunday and one of our local elected leaders, Representative Sabadosa, who is an incredible state representative, looked out into the crowd of several hundred people who were there and looked at all of the different signs that people were holding with the diversity of the opinion that was there. And she said, "Our call in this moment is to resist and act together, even if we don't agree on everything all together," and I think there's real wisdom in that. I think that we often struggle with the idea that our partners have to be with us 100% on 100% of the issues that we care about. And the truth is I think that there are folks who come from a variety of places and a variety of opinions. And our goal, if we want to act together, is to be in conversation, to be in thoughtful dialogue about the places where we disagree, and to march strongly together in the places where we are in agreement.
The last thing I'll say to come back to the work of resettlement is that in addition to supporting immigrant communities, to supporting lawful extensions of temporary protected status, other humanitarian entrance statuses, and the general refugee program, I think that there is currently underway a move to close the office of Afghan Relocation Efforts, what's called the CARE office. That office is the office that's designated with continuing the resettlement of approximately 200,000 Afghans who have a family member who supported the US mission.
I believe there's a particularly critical role for the public to play in demanding that our elected leaders support the communities that have supported us and that we made a promise, I believe. We made a promise to the Afghan community that supported the United States mission in Afghanistan and that to abandon those 200,000 people overseas would be not just an abdication of our moral obligation, but would be a loss of our standing in the world that I think will take generations to unwind. And so as I think about the place where people can stand up and act together, I think that's a place where I would encourage our community to lean in.
I grew up in a military family. My dad was a career Air Force officer. We spent a portion of my youth in Germany while my dad was attached to NATO and I saw the ways in which communities from across the world came together and worked together in critical moments. I was in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down and when the former Soviet Union collapsed.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Wow.

Rabbi James Green:
And my father was part of multinational teams that supported the US mission during the first Gulf War. We are stronger in the world and I believe we create more safety in the world when we act with and in partnership with our allies. And so for me, the potential abandonment of 200,000 Afghans who supported our work and who supported our military during the war in Afghanistan, as my grandmother of Blessed Memory would say, it's a shanda.

Bryan Schwartzman:
A shanda. Rabbi James Greene, thank you so much for the work you're doing and for this really thoughtful conversation.

Rabbi James Green:
Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity, and I'm grateful to you for lifting up this message of welcoming and inclusion. Yeah, thank you.

Bryan Schwartzman:
What did you think of today's episode? We want to hear from you. Evolve is about meaningful conversations and that includes you. Send me your questions, comments. You can reach me at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. Evolve will be back soon with an all-new episode. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu, is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm Bryan Schwartzman and I'd like to wish you a Happy Passover, a joyous, meaningful, and delicious Seder.

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