Good morning. Congresswoman Ramirez, thank you for convening us, and more importantly, for your immaculate history of demonstrating that you truly know none of our safety is separable, and that we are all fundamentally bound up in one another.

I am Eli Williams-Szenes, Director of Advocacy and Political Affairs for Bend the Arc: Jewish Action.

Tonight, Jews begin the observance of Tisha B'Av. Tisha B'av is a religious day of mourning commemorating the destruction of the first and second temples, and we are taught that the destruction happened because we sinned. We earned it. We read the book of Lamentations on Tisha B'av because it is explicitly about the aftermath of the destruction of the first temple, and knowing all of this, you might reasonably expect the book of Lamentations to mourn while pleading for forgiveness and begging for a chance to redeem ourselves.

But that is not what Lamentations actually does.

The chief argument of Lamentations - the goal of the text - is to make you look at suffering that is so egregious, so grounded in reality and in bodies and blood, that it is unjustifiable no matter the context. Lamentations does not ask why the destruction happened. The text accosts the passerby and demands: "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any pain like my pain, which was severely dealt out to me." It is not about whether people followed the rules. It is about suffering so terrible that no one is able to look at it and say, "Yes. That is what should have happened here."

Put another way, the main thesis of Lamentations is that regardless of what one believes about the right way to organize a society, up to and including the divine, there is a kind of human suffering that is a dealbreaker. That is a rupture of the highest order, and that demands attention, because there is a quality of human pain present that is in and of itself inherently unacceptable.

That is the tradition I am bringing here today.

I am not here to debate whether ICE is efficient, or whether its targets followed the correct procedures, or whether this regime has found the right legal framework for its abductions. I am here to bring the text of Lamentations into the conversation when it says “for these things I weep; my eye, my eye runs down with tears. My children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed.”

We are here because Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Johan Sebastian Guerrero, Ruben Ray Martinez, Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, Alex Pretti, and Renee Nicole Good are dead. Because people are being abducted in parking lots. Because children are watching their parents taken by jackbooted thugs in broad daylight. Because as Lamentations says, “panic and pitfall are our lot, death and destruction” abound. Because the torture and detention and disappearance of human beings is happening in our name, and it is not something anyone of good conscience and faith can look at and say, "Yes. That is what should have happened here."

And while they do this, the Trump administration is actively co-opting Jewish fear of antisemitism to justify this reign of terror. We reject completely the idea that our safety requires the destruction of our neighbors' lives. And we reject the framework that says we must debate the rules while the suffering continues.

The most Jewish thing we can do is to insist that it is precisely our familiarity with fear and state violence that provide us the tools and the clarity to look at what is being done in our name today and say: this is unjustifiable. That is not revolutionary. It is as Jewish as it gets.

Congress has the power to end this season of our mourning. Choke off the funding. Pass the MELT ICE Act. It does not require magical thinking to envision a world without ICE: it is younger than the youngest member of Congress. If this administration can dismantle the parts of government that sustain life, we can certainly dismantle this agency that destroys it.

Eli Williams-Szenes
Director of Advocacy and Political Affairs, Bend the Arc