Refugees | HEART AND MIND

12 Aug 2016

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Refugees, The Jewish Year Permalink

For these things I weep

Sticky Post By admin On August 12, 2016

‘Al eleh ani bochi’a – for these things I weep’ – I write with a heavy heart, as is the wont on this Sabbath before the fast of the Ninth of Av, Shabbat Katan, ‘the diminished Shabbat’. This year it will indeed be diminished as the joy of the Sabbath yields in its last hour to the commencement of the bleak fast of Tishah be’Av which commemorate destruction.

To me the fast is less about the destruction of the First and Second Temples than about the sacking of the city in which they stood. True, the Temples were profoundly important, the centre of Jewish worship in the ancient world; to this very day, whenever we pray, we turn to face towards where they stood. But, like the vast majority of Jews, I wouldn’t want them rebuilt, even if that were a possibility. Judaism grew, remarkably, courageously and irreversibly, following their destruction. It developed into the religion of community, prayer and learning for all, accessible to all (at least ideally) and capable of replication anywhere, which we know and cherish today.

It’s the destruction of cities which pains and terrifies me, Jerusalem twice, and so many other cities and quarters, Juderias and ghettoes, stetls and houses of learning, through the centuries since. It’s the haunting descriptions of what parents suffered when they watched their children starve, and what children suffered when they realised that their all-providing parents were now powerless to help them. ‘“Where is corn and wine?”, they cried, as they fainted of hunger and died, curled against their mothers’. (Lamentations 2)

Those of us over a certain age don’t need to be told; such scenes inhabit sectors of their memory which revisit them in nightmares. The rest of us have seen and heard on the media, – from Sarajevo, from Aleppo this very day. How can one not feel pity for the people of Aleppo, for the hungry, terrified children, for the parents desperate to get their offspring out of there, for the victims of gas attacks?
“And a few minutes later, the smell of gas started spreading… and I felt my eyes burning and difficulties in breathing,” he said. “The smell was very strong – beyond any description”. (BBC News)

I heard a spokesman plead for longer ceasefires: ‘But there are two million people in that city; the convoys have to be very large. Three hours is not enough time!’

‘Al eleh ani bochi’a – for these things we weep’ – and also for the everyday sorrows we know too well: friends ill, dying, losing those they have loved and lived alongside most of their lives.

But, and it’s a crucial, transformative but, we would not weep, or even think to weep, if we did not love life. There is no sorrow in the loss of something hateful, no compassion for what one holds in contempt. We weep because trees are beautiful; because human life is capable of indescribable tenderness; because we deeply love the companionship to which we have become so familiar we take it for granted – ‘there, that’s your cup of tea and your biscuit’-; we weep because in the setting sun in the western sky there is something which haunts and humbles us with the intuition of a vast and timeless life-force of unfathomable power and inimitable delicacy. It is these things which make our hearts malleable to compassion and our eyes susceptible to tears.

The liturgy of Tisha Be’Av, and its repeated reality in today’s world, brings before us scene upon scene of destruction, disasters our own people has suffered, and, by extension, those suffered by others. It calls on us not to weep for our lives alone but to expand the circumference of our compassion, to our own people, and to others, and to act so that there is less destructiveness and more companionship, solidarity, joy and creativity in the world.

We should share our moment of existence, which we inhabit so briefly and with such frailty, not in mutual hate, or fear, or disregard; but with gratitude, compassion, and dedication to the nurture of life.

05 Aug 2016

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Refugees Permalink

Refugee children: how can we not help?

Sticky Post By admin On August 5, 2016

I’m never sure whether to call the Hebrew month which starts today Menachem Av, or simply Av. The Talmudic tradition is that the names of the months of the Jewish year ‘came up with the people from Babylon’. That is, they date from after the Babylonian exile in the 6^th century BCE and don’t mean anything in Hebrew. But Menachem is different: Menachem means ‘comforter’.

So what’s comforting about the month of Av? The first nine days are the most profound period of mourning in the Jewish year, culminating in the bleak fast of Tishah Be’Av. The period is marked by special stringency: no music, no entertainment, no wine (except on Shabbat), no meat (a relief for some of us) and the ritual slaughterer puts away his knife.

Instead, we recall the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the laying waste of the whole city of Jerusalem, especially by the Romans in 70CE. This is painful not just because it is history, our history, but because it is also today’s reality, not, thank God, in Jerusalem, but in Sarajevo in the 1990’s, in Aleppo, across much of Syria, and elsewhere in the world today. The street scenes are probably not that different from 2,000 years ago: smashed houses, the dead, the hungry, the fleeing, the terrified children.

Some of these children, alone, bereaved, left behind in killing zones or fleeing separately to Europe, are on our borders in Calais. Others in northern Greece are desperate for care, prey to traffickers and gangs. The Guardian carried a powerful feature last Wednesday.

I’ve spoken to many people spending their time, money and hearts to help. I’ve set out information below on several organisations and how we can support them. I have personal links to them all. I’m not taking my family on holiday with the thought that I’ve done nothing to help a single one of those children or families living with a traumatised past, a lonely and terrifying present and an uncertain future. I plan to put money where my mouth is, and believe we should all do so, according to our capacity. I thought, ‘If I’m spending x on my family, myself and our holiday, then surely at least y should go to others’.

I listened this week to Keren Simons, who grew up in our synagogue, whose family are active members, and who’s been working for World Jewish Relief, in partnership with the Greek NGO Praxis, in Lesbos, Athens and elsewhere with unaccompanied minors. She is so dedicated to the work that she now plans to volunteer. I’m committed to our community supporting her, if only through the small gifts one has to bring such children to offer them something creative to do, to spend the uncertain hours…

These current horrors remind me of a line from Lamentations, ‘Better the death-pangs of the sword than of hunger’ – better a swift than a slow death because nobody comes to help. We must not leave people, especially children, to suffer the slow dying of their hopes for friendship, companionship, reunification with their families, a future, a life…

So what’s comforting, what’s Menachem, about the month of Av? The 15th is traditionally kept as a festival Tu be’Av; in fact, it’s the original Jewish version of Valentine’s, a day of singing, dancing and dating. It redeems the month from sorrow; it constitutes a public declaration that whatever has happened in the past, we are determined to have a future.

Can we share that determination with these children? For them, and for us too as we survey our wounded and violent world, comfort will only come from what we can do to help.

I believe we have a constant responsibility to help our own people, and also to help all who are desperate and suffering, whenever we can. All of us are created in God’s image, words which have little meaning unless we live it out through striving for compassion and justice.

I don’t often write in this vein. Please don’t just forgive me, but support the values I have tried to express…

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov – a worthwhile month.

Here are ways to help…

This crisis is ongoing and we will be working further to ask for help in early September.

World Jewish Relief

World Jewish Relief is providing food, shelter and emergency materials to refugees in Turkey and Greece who are fleeing war and persecution. World Jewish Relief assisted tens of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe, including through the Kindertransport. We are now building on this history, using our expertise to respond to the current challenge.

WJR has a special scheme to offer employment to refugees who have been allowed to enter Britain which you can read about here.

Help Refugees

Help Refugees gives massive assistance in Calais and in Greece and elsewhere by providing shelter, sleeping bags, warm meals and other essentials on a significant scale, and by supporting Safe Passage (see below).

Help Refugees has also developed a buddy system together with Citizens UK to ensure a strong intergovernmental response, full humanitarian and legal protection for the children. Your generous donation will go towards ensuring the lone children are cared for whilst living in the camp, have legal protection and care when they arrive in England. For any further information please email Matty on buddy@helprefugees.org.uk

Safe Passage UK

Legal routes to sanctuary (can be supported via Help Refugees)
A campaign in support of refugee children by the British Jewish community.

There are an estimated 150 unaccompanied children in the refugee camps around Calais who have family living in the UK. They currently live in constant risk of violence, despite having the legal right to claim asylum in the UK. There is a legal route for them to be reunited with their families and afforded the care and safety they deserve. Safe Passage UK are this legal route. Safe Passage UK needs to raise £2,000 per child to cover the cost of the legal process, transport and support the child will need to claim asylum here in Britain. Ultimately it is £2,000 to reunite them with their families under the Dublin III and ECHR 8 orders. There is an urgent need right now – the camp in Calais is signalled to be demolished this autumn. These children are likely to go ‘missing’ and we fear for their safety and lives.

Refugees at Home

Refugees at Home are a group of volunteers who match altruistic hosts with asylum-seekers and refugees. We started setting up just over a year ago and rolled out properly in early February 2016. Since then we have made 117 placements. These vary in length and number of people – a placement may be one person for one night or three people for months and months. So we have a new measurement tool: we can count the number of nights people have been hosted. The current total is 3,283, which is a huge number of nights our guests have NOT spent in parks, on night buses, at train stations or in other uncomfortable, undignified and downright dangerous places. Our guests are referred by the Red Cross, the Refugee Council, St Mungo’s, the Passage and the drop-ins – including the NNLS one – across London.

Refugee Trauma Initiative

Refugee Trauma Initiative works to reduce the trauma and enhance the wellbeing of refugees by offering psychosocial support to individuals and families living in refugee camps, and training and supporting volunteers working there. A core value of our work includes respecting the humanity and dignity of all people. RTI draws on the founding team’s extensive personal and professional experience of both living as refugees and of working cross-culturally with people who have been traumatised by migration, political conflict and torture. We also draw on our vast experience of providing training and support for health care professionals.

New North London Synagogue

You can support volunteers from our community via my discretionary fund at the Synagogue. Contact Accounts for more details.

We must not forget the ongoing work of the Asylum Seekers Drop In. The Drop In supports up to 400 destitute asylum seekers and their children and is held on the first Sunday of each month at premises near to the synagogue. Our volunteers offer legal signposting, appointments with doctors and therapists, nutritious cooked food, nearly-new or new clothing and footwear and a welcoming, warm and friendly space. Every client also receives a supermarket voucher and travel expenses. To donate to the drop-in please click here to download donation form.

29 Jul 2016

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Ethics, Interfaith, Refugees Permalink

An attack on humanity itself

Sticky Post By admin On July 29, 2016

It’s hard to translate the phrase kevod habriyot. I can visualise examples more easily than I can put the words into English: a child taking an old man’s hand and gently leading him to the dinner table; a nurse addressing a semi-comatose patient ‘Now Mrs. X, would it be OK for me to give you an injection to help with the pain?’

Kevod habriyot, literally ‘the honour of creatures’, refers to the respect due to the state of being human. It knows no differentiations of gender, faith or nationality. It expresses that dignity which inheres in each and every human life by virtue of being created in the image of God. Whatever that endowment is, – intelligence, creativity, conscience, vulnerability, sensitivity to others, – it bestows upon each and every human being certain rights which it is criminal to breech: the right to personal safety, to respect for close family relationships and to justly acquired property. To violate those rights is to show that one has no yirat Elohim, no fear of God, no respect for the most basic, most universal, laws of life.

Neither youth, nor age, nor illness, nor disability can diminish a person’s kavod, It is a crime wilfully to hurt a person because they are too young, too old, too ill or simply too different from ourselves.

However, a person’s kavod may be heightened by virtue of age or office. Thus, a special kavod adheres to the elderly, before whom we are commanded to stand in respect. A particular dignity belongs to the priesthood and to those who faithfully serve God.

The violation we witnessed this week in the murder of a venerable priest, Father Jacques Hamel, while he was reciting mass in a small church near Rouen, in a place of holiness and sanctuary, is an attack upon the very foundations of human life and society itself.

This desecration reminds us of the vulnerability and exposure of each and every person to violent evil. Our very fragility binds us in an indissoluble bond of fellowship with all who respect and care for life, whatever their faith or nationality; with all who exercise kindness and compassion; with everyone who, in the words of Micah, ‘practises justice, loves mercy and walks humbly with God’.

As Jews, we know only too well what it means to be forced to die for the sake of our faith and identity. So, too, do members of other religions. It has been estimated that currently three hundred Christians are murdered for their faith each month. In parts of the world less documented than Western Europe Muslims are killed regularly in Islamist outrages.

Judaism has always understood any attack or disaster as a call to teshuvah, to return and repentance. This must not be taken to mean that we should understand the tragedy itself as caused by our sins. In the present circumstances such an accusation would itself be a blasphemous violation.

Rather, the very fragility of human life in the face of violence and disaster teaches us to return to our most basic values, to fellowship, friendship, sharing, generosity, kindness, supporting the hurt, the homeless and the needy.

I’ve just finished reading Samuel Kassow’s harrowing account of the Warsaw Ghetto, ‘Who Will Write Our History?’. In it he records how, after receiving the German expulsion order, the Jews of the small town of Skempa in Poland ‘asked their rabbi to give them personal letters attesting to their past status in order to remind strangers that they, too, were once respected householders, not beggars’.

To label others as less than human is easy. The challenge is the opposite, to recognise and respect the humanity of every person. We must never be driven to forget that kevod habriyot, respect for the dignity of each and every human being, is the foundation of our humanity, and of humanity itself.

24 Jun 2016

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Refugees Permalink

After the vote

Sticky Post By admin On June 24, 2016

It’s not long after dawn. Birds in the garden are singing, and over the radio voices are crowing which make me afraid and depressed. Beyond Britain, yesterday’s vote is a terrible signal to Putin and Le Pen, perhaps even to Donald Trump. The Leave victory is doubtless about many kinds of division in society besides those over Europe. I fear it contains within it many votes against diversity, against refugees, against the other, whoever that may be, and we as Jews have much experience of that. No doubt the remainers are seen by the leavers as having ‘others’ of their own, to whose needs they have been felt to be deaf. That’s very likely why Remain lost.

My only heroes of this horrid campaign are Jo Cox and her family, may God be with them; but I wish Jo was less well known for the heroic person she was, and alive and with her children this day.

I fear that the winter of peoples’ discontents will become the summer and autumn of greater discontents, and I’m troubled by some of those waiting in the wings of the stages of British and Continental politics, now that the lights are inviting them to enter and declaim.

I was lucky yesterday; I was knocked off my bike and fortunate not to be injured. For the rest of the day I was slightly shaking, and kept thanking God in my head. But I was well enough to go running and I took as my meditation Moses’s short prayer for his sister: ‘Please God, heal her please’. This is partly because the man who came to help me turned out to be starting a charity to help young people who had suffered breaks in their education because of cancer, as he himself had done. He’s one of the nicest and best people I’ve ever met. I kept thinking that God and destiny had made a special meeting out of a traffic accident.

So I ran several kilometres with those words ‘Please God, heal her please’ setting the pace for my feet. I’d be glad if they set the rhythm for my life; no other single sentence is so germane to my calling. How often I wish I could bring healing.

Time and again, I wish I could bring more healing to those who turn to me to seek strength for their spirit and comfort for their heart when they’re distraught, frightened or filled with grief.

But I also have in mind other kinds of healing in a far wider context.

My great inspiration is that all around me I find healers. I’m not thinking solely of nurses and doctors, though during the night I retweeted a message by a co-founder of HelpRefugeesUk:

‘EU nurses, carers, teachers, workers over here – I’m so ashamed of the message this is sending u. Pls know, so many of us value u so much’

I’m thinking of those who begin to heal the wounds of people who’ve fled their homes, seen their family killed. I’m thinking of those who feel for the injuries of the homeless and stateless, and who bring them into their own homes.

I’m thinking of healing between people of different faiths, whose knowledge about one another is so often mediated not by personal relationships and friendships but by the narratives and insinuations of suspicion and distrust, and the short, sharp, cruelty of social media.

I’m thinking of those who try to heal political rifts and rivalries, especially at a time when it feels as if more and more of the world is trying to exacerbate them.

I know, though days of rancour may well lie ahead, that what matters most now is healing, wherever it is possible. The vote is the vote now; the counting is pretty much over. We need to be with those who seek to heal whatever wounds in our society, country, continent and world we can most effectively address

18 Jun 2016

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Ethics, Refugees Permalink

‘Don’t stand idly by’

Sticky Post By admin On June 18, 2016

This has all happened in the very week when we were rejoicing on the festival of the Giving of the Torah, the Torah of life, the Torah of which the central image is the Tree of Life and whose core teaching is that ‘you shall live by them’, by commandments and values which promote justice, compassion and dignity.

I am utterly shocked by the murder of Jo Cox MP. When a member of parliament is murdered, democracy itself is under attack. The noun democracy is composed of two Greek words, demos – people, and kratos – rule: thus, when democracy is attacked in such a violent and lawless manner every single person, together with freedom itself, suffers assault.

I am horrified by the slaughter in Orlando. When a gunman kills 49 people and injures many others at a gay nightclub, whether motivated by homophobia, the violent creed of ISIS, or both, human society and solidarity themselves are under threat. Such crimes, facilitated by too ready access to guns, are an abomination.

It is not enough to condemn this exceptionally sadistic crime in general terms. As in attacks against Jews, gypsies, or any other group, especially a group which has good reason to feel vulnerable, the nature of the crime and the identity of the victims must clearly be spelled out. Pastor Niemoller’s much-quoted warning came too late to save us from Nazism, but it is apposite now:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews…

We can all add the apposite new lines… However, the reason for solidarity is not primarily because ‘they’ll come for us next’. It is a basic human responsibility towards the vulnerable, towards those who are part of the same society as we are, to those whose lives we care about and for whose dignity we must stand up. That is why I hope if practicable to walk however many miles it proves to be to join London’s Gay Pride after services next Shabbat (and I almost never join parades and always feel out of place).

When it is felt legitimate to use the rhetoric of incitement against refugees, – that is, against people many of whom have watched their closest family killed, their homes destroyed and their children hungry and terrified, – then the very notion of what it is to be a human being, conscience and compassion themselves, are under threat.

On all of these matters the Torah has one over-riding, simple, clear instruction: ‘Don’t stand idly by’. Don’t say, ‘It’s not me’. Don’t say, ‘Others are the victims’. Don’t do nothing.

Yet it’s not in the end because of the group they belong to or the public office they hold that our hearts are heavy with these horrors. It’s because those who were killed and those who now suffer are human beings, somebody’s child, parent, partner, colleague, friend. I keep thinking about the words of Jo Cox’s husband Brendan:

Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love…

She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her.

We are not empowered to put the love back into the world which has been stolen by murder; we can’t replace that unique tenderness, thoughtfulness, moral passion, loving concern.

But let us please all put something kind, good and loving back onto this sore-hearted earth.

15 Apr 2016

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Ethics, Refugees, The Jewish Year Permalink

A Seder needs to be real

Sticky Post By admin On April 15, 2016

Tomorrow is Shabbat Hagadol, ‘the great Sabbath’, the Shabbat before Pesach. There is no single reason why it bears that name. Some suggest it’s because the rabbi would deliver a lengthy and detailed sermon on the laws of the festival: how to keep kosher, how to celebrate the Seder. Others say it’s because of the closing verse of the Prophetic reading from Malachi which refers to the ‘great and awesome day of God’.

Whatever the case, this is the Shabbat on which we set our minds on the meaning of the forthcoming festival. My fear about Pesach this year is not that we won’t manage the cleaning, or arrange the details. That’s not to imply that I don’t care about such matters. I very much do. In life detail matters, so long as it’s not a fixation.

My fear is that my Pesach will be a sham, that it won’t be real. I asked some friends to write to me about what the Festival of Freedom means to them this year. Here is one response:

In Iraq, a little girl drew a picture of her mother on the floor of her orphanage.
She carefully took off the shoes, lay down on mother’s chest and fell asleep…

(The picture is below – you may well already have seen it. There’s a debate online as to whether the picture was drawn by the child, or created by an adult. Either way, it expressing a heart-rending reality.)

The sender added: ‘I really don’t know how to use human language to interpret such a picture’.

A refugee suffers numerous losses: home, country, language, friends, culture, status, work, possessions, money, – but worst of all is the loss of family. Many have not only lost closest relatives, but witnessed their murder.

The Hebrew Bible stresses family time and again: Noah and the animals come out of the ark bemishpechotehem, ‘in their families’; we leave Egypt and encamp in the desert in families. The whole story of how God redeemed us from slavery is structured round the familiar pattern of children asking their parents. I remember how as a child I used to ask and ask again: ‘What happened when you had to leave Nazi Germany?’

Our notions of security, love, perhaps even freedom, are nurtured in the hopefully safe circle of our parents’, especially our mother’s, presence.

All this little girl has left of her mother is her inner picture. What courage, what sweetness, to draw it around her and then feel safe enough to go to sleep. And what sadness!

Freedom is having your mother, your family, those you love around you, eating together, going to sleep and not being afraid, and waking up and knowing you can do it all again next day without worrying that someone’s going to kill you or blow up your home.

Why do we steal such freedom from each other? How can we give it back, at least some of it back, when it has once been taken away?

As Jews we’ve lived with such experiences and their pain, and sometimes still do. There are millions suffering them at this very moment, waiting at the gates of our humanity for permission to enter in.

These are some of the questions we have to address at our Seder table.

04 Mar 2016

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Refugees Permalink

‘He brought together into a community’

Sticky Post By admin On March 4, 2016

This week our Drop-In for Destitute Asylum Seekers celebrates its tenth anniversary. Over these years it has offered warmth, friendship, food, clothing, and legal and medical advice to thousands of people from babies to the venerable aged, rendered stateless and homeless by war and violence.

Whenever I’m at the Drop-In, I’m acutely aware that here are people whose stories I do not know, and, if I did, would not be able to fathom. I have sometimes reflected on what refugees lose, – home, family, friends, community, language, hope, capacity, financial means, respect, the daily knowledge of how to manage the thousand little things that enable one to function competently until one finds oneself cast up and cast off in an alien land. It’s not just the past which people tell me they have lost; of equal, or sometimes greater, significance is the loss of future: ‘I’m not wanted here and not needed here; don’t know where to sleep, or where to turn. I can’t even begin to create a future because I’m not allowed to work and all I want is to make a contribution, and build up my family once again.’

The suffering many people have undergone on their journeys of flight, the fear of deportation, the violence experienced directly or indirectly, – we who have lived safe lives do not have the wherewithal to comprehend such matters truly. A lady asked me years ago to pray for her children. ‘Where are they?’ I asked. She had received news from two of them, albeit they were still in danger; about the others there was only silence, in all these many months not one single word.

The Drop-In has been inspired by a deep sense of Jewish values. They derive from the injunction not to hurt, humiliate or oppress the stranger, ‘because you were strangers in the Land of Egypt,’ and, we might add, in Germany, Poland, the Middle East and many other lands. They derive from an understanding of Jewish history which commands us to transform the experience of past sufferings as the butt of society, at its margins, as its victims, as the recipients of every kind of hatred and contempt, into the urgent and irrepressible imperative to stand by, and stand up for, all others at whom such mistreatment is directed.

While the heart of support for the Drop-In is the synagogue, volunteers come from many faiths and communities and the body of people who help make the centre run represents in itself a great achievement. Perhaps it is more than fortuitous that this week’s Torah portion is Vayakhel, which means ‘He brought together into a community.’ The common purpose of creating sacred space, building a dwelling for God, brings together people of all ages and different gifts, and this itself is part of what makes the space holy. I have been moved to see volunteers from their teens to their eighties, from doctors to those who play with the children, come together to care.

I am deeply grateful to those who envisioned and founded the Drop-In and have kept it running for all these years, most especially Diane Taylor and Deborah Koder. The centre and its leaders have also provided the inspiration for other such projects established by fellow communities.

I am thankful for everyone who has in the past and will in the future take on leadership roles entailing many hours each month of devoted commitment, as well as to all who participate in and give financial support to the work of the Drop-In. It is neither a simple nor a cheap project to run and everyone’s help is greatly needed and much appreciated.

As the Drop-In marks its tenth year, the news grows more disturbing. The northern borders of Greece are being closed; people are being removed from the camp in Calais, including unaccompanied minors; and the lack of a coherent, compassionate and pragmatic response to the crisis of refugees, as well as to the crises which have made them flee their homes in the first place, is ever more deeply troubling.

Here on our door step is something practical and immediate we can and must do. The plight of many seeking asylum here, from the Congo or Cameroon, has often been passed over by the media in silence, yet they suffer no less. We can help by donating clothes and food, volunteering on the day, making a regular donation, and in offering help with housing.

As Lord Ashdown recently said, simply investing in walls and fences is never the final answer. And through walls and fences one is less likely to see the other person’s humanity, his or her tears, fears and hopes.