As the German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote: “Only the person who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.”
What does this mean to us today, almost a century after the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany? Here’s my take.
If you don’t cry out against those who are taking food from the hungry, taking medicine from the sick, or shelter from the stranger—you have no moral right to sing your hymns or pray your prayers.
If you are not horrified by the cruelty of Donald Trump and his administration, the cutting off of aid to the poor and sick, the “chainsaw” firing of workers, the slamming of the door to refugees, and the deportation of those whose only crime is seeking a place of safety, I urge you to reexamine the principles you live by. I urge you to reacquaint yourself with the words of the One you claim to follow.
As Pastor Bonhoeffer said: “Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christian should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.”
Woodie Guthrie wrote the lyrics. Martin Hoffman set them to music. Since then, it’s been sung by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie.
It’s a ballad called “Deportees” and it tells of an airplane crash in California’s Los Gatos Canyon. On board were 28 migrant farm workers from Mexico.
The lyrics are as searing now as in 1848 when Guthrie wrote them:
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon, A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills, Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says, “They are just deportees.”
Guthrie wrote the ballad one night after news reports listed the names of the pilots, attendant and immigration guard lost in the crash, but referred to the farm workers only as “deportees.” After the braceros’ bodies were recovered, they were buried in a mass grave without names, marked “Mexican Nationals.”
The roundup of the Los Gatos laborers was just one episode in several government campaigns to remove Mexicans and those with Mexican ancestry. Mass deportation began in 1930 and continued through the Great Depression. Then in 1954, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) brought out “Operation Wetback.” Under this federal program, officials used strong-arm tactics to arrest tens of thousands of immigrants across the country. Caught up in the raids were farm and factory workers, including American citizens.
In July of 1955, several thousand deportees were found wandering the streets of Mexicali, a desert town bordering California. Yanked from their jobs and families, they had simply been dumped across the border. According to one account, 88 died of heat exposure in the 112 degree heat.
In Texas, thousands of deportees were crammed onto boats bound for Mexican ports. Testimony before a Congressional committee described conditions akin to those on slave ships. Other immigrants were packed into trucks. By the end of Operation Wetback, the INS claimed it had “repatriated” 1.3 million Mexicans.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita, Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria; You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane, All they will call you will be “deportees.”
Accompanying the mass deportations were media depictions of Mexicans as dirty, disease-bearing and lazy. News coverage focused on border and immigration officials conducting raids.
Only in time did most Americans come to see this as something shameful. In a 2012 ceremony in Los Angeles, Governor Jerry Brown and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa formally apologized for California’s role in the deportations.
On Labor Day in 2013, United Farm Worker President Arturo Rodriguez joined hundreds gathered at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California, to memorialize the 28 farm workers killed in Los Gatos Canyon. They were 25 men and three women. This time, inscribed in the headstone, was each person’s name.
Now, deportation planes are again in the sky. Planes to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Planes to India and Rwanda. Planes to Eswatini, a tiny country in southern Africa.
Through October 2025, the Department of Homeland Security operated 1,701 deportation flights to 77 countries. And it recently bought six Boeing 737s, expanding capacity.
Meanwhile, 66,000 men, women and children await deportation in detention centers. Arrested, often with brutal force, they were tracked down in streets, courthouses, parking lots, fields and construction sites.
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted, Our work contracts out and we have to move on. Six hundred miles to that Mexican border, They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
Compared to programs of the past, Donald Trump’s campaign is Operation Wetback on steroids. The president wants 3,000 arrests a day, or one million by the end of his first year in office. Each day, it seems, he expands his list of targets, Somalis, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans. What they have in common is their darker shades of skin.
As I listen to Woodie Guthrie’s song, I think of my children and grandchildren. I wonder, what song will they sing in years to come? Who will write the words, and who will remember the names?
Will there be, one day in the future, a public apology, a ceremonial mea culpa for the cruelty, the harm inflicted on so many? If so, what song will we then sing.
A fugitive, he got off the boat in Newport and continued by coach to New Bedford. There, in the whaling seaport founded by Quakers, he found safety. He also found work.
“There was no work too hard—none too dirty,” he would write. “I was ready to saw wood, shovel coal, carry wood, sweep the chimney, or roll oil casks.”
His name was Frederick Douglass and for first time in his life, he was working for himself and his newly married wife, Anna. “It was the first work,” he wrote, “the reward of which was to be entirely my own. There was no Master Hugh standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it.”
The year was 1838. Dressed as a sailor and using false papers, the young man (he was just 20) had fled Baltimore. Having found a haven in New Bedford, he was amazed at its wealth and absence of poverty. “I had somehow imbibed the opinion that, in the absence of slaves, there could be no wealth, and very little refinement.”
He continued: “Everything looked clean, new, and beautiful. I saw few or no dilapidated houses, with poverty-stricken inmates; no half-naked children and barefooted women, such as I had been accustomed to see.”
Instead, Douglass found a city bustling with commerce and men and women eagerly engaged in their work. “I saw no whipping of men; but all seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand his work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness….”
Most surprising was the condition of fellow fugitives and free Blacks. “I found many, who had not been seven years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland.”
His friends, Nathan and Polly Johnson, who had taken him and Anna into their home, “lived in a neater house; dined at a better table; took, paid for, and read, more newspapers; better understood the moral, religious, and political character of the nation,—than nine tenths of the slaveholders in Talbot county Maryland. Yet Mr. Johnson was a working man. His hands were hardened by toil, and not his alone, but those also of Mrs. Johnson.”
Even though New Bedford had become a refuge for escaped slaves, there was still racial prejudice. In Baltimore, Douglass had worked as a ship’s caulker, but was refused work with the white caulkers here, work which would have earned him twice his laborer’s wage.
Still, he and his wife made a living and found their own apartment. They attended church and socialized with others in the community. As a boy he had been taught to read by the sympathetic wife of his owner. Now he scoured the pages of The Liberator, published in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison.
Three years later, at an abolitionist meeting on Nantucket, he was asked to tell his own story, and the rest is history. He went on to become perhaps the most eloquent champion of the anti-slavery cause, lecturing, editing, writing and speaking throughout the Northern States, England and Ireland. A friend of all those yearning for freedom, he was an advocate for women’s rights as well.
Remembering Frederick Douglass is fitting as we celebrate Black History Month. But it’s also important given the threats to the human rights of millions of those in our nation today threatened with deportation. Like him, they have sought refuge among us. Like him, they will work at anything to provide for their families. Like him, they have stories to tell.
As the Trump administration carries out raids, as it dehumanizes men, women and children because of their immigration status or gender identity, I can’t help wondering what Frederick Douglass what would have to say.
They couldn’t vote, and they had been told to keep quiet in church.
The year was 1837 and they were women of Stoneham. Passionate about their cause, however, they found a way to make their voices heard. Led by the widow, Sarah Gerry, they wrote a letter.
There were 14 of them—married, single, mothers, grandmothers, wives of prominent men and workers in shoe factories. When they signed their names, addressed to the elders of the Congregational Church, they used their own first names, not their husbands, bucking the current custom. Sarah Buck, Mary Bryant, Abigail Green, Sally Richardson, Nabby Richardson, Mary Newhall and others.
Friends Freedman Association teachers in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1863.
What they were so upset about was slavery, practiced in the South and supported by many in the North. What particularly galled them was the fact that so many Christians supported it.
We are “deeply aggrieved,” they wrote, “that such an utter abomination in the sight of Heaven . . . is now sustained and defended by almost the entire Christian church in the South, with whom we are in fellowship.”
They continued. “By refusing to rebuke and remonstrate,” they wrote, “we do in fact participate in their guilt.”
Silence is complicity, the women were saying, and if we do not speak, we, too, are guilty.
The women closed with an appeal to church leaders: “We entreat you to take such action … that will show plainly that our influence is on the side of justice and humanity.”
For the church and the town, the letter was the start of something. Although it took years of conflict and violence, the abolitionist movement took root and bore fruit in Stoneham.
In 1838 twenty-seven women, again led by Sarah Gerry, formed the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Stoneham. The men formed a chapter a year later.
In 1840, church members passed a resolution calling on their pastor “to bear faithful pulpit testimony against the sin of slavery.”
Then in 1850, after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the new minister, the Rev. William Whitcomb, gave a fiery sermon calling on parishioners to ignore the federal law mandating the capture and return of fugitive slaves. Instead, Whitman urged, “Hide the outcast or help him on his journey to a safer place, even though you may risk personal security, property and life.”
Recalling the brave men and women of Stoneham is fitting as we celebrate the Tricentennial of our town. It reminds us that those who came before us were faced with daunting challenges to what they believe and how they should act.
As in the decades before the Civil War, Christians today are also divided. Some believe that our President was saved by God to “make America great again.” Others cringe at the threats and actions harming vulnerable people among us. Like Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde in her sermon last week at the National Cathedral, they call for mercy and tolerance and justice—for immigrants, for LGBTQ+, for all those on the margins of our society.
Now it’s our turn. How and where will we make our stand?
Romeo and Juliet used it. So did Ruth, David and Jesus, according to the early Bible translators. So, in the centuries that followed, poets, lovers and preachers have slipped back into this archaic dialect. Even Langston Hughes, who loved the American vernacular, chose it when he wrote to his “Black Beloved.”
I’m talking about the use of “thee and thou.” Although almost no one uses this dialect any more—that is, except some Quakers, and I’ll get to that later. We teach it to our children every time we have them say, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.”
To get a handle on this dialect, let me tell you why we English speakers find it quaint. First of all, it’s because modern English, unlike many other languages, has left us with only one word for “you.” That’s right. English, with its massive vocabulary, is so poor that it now only has one word.
It wasn’t always like that. In the Middle Age and Renaissance, English had more than one word for the second-person pronoun. There were three subject pronouns—the familiar “thou,” the formal “you,” and the plural “ye.”
First, let’s distinguish between singular and plural. In William Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the New Testament, we read: Ye are the salt of the erthe, and ye are the light of the worlde. Here, Jesus uses the plural ye when he is talking to more than one person.
On the other hand, when he is talking with one person, as to the woman at the well, he says, from the King James Bible: If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.
Nice thing, that ability in language to know if the speaker is addressing just one, or many people, by the pronoun he or she uses. Unfortunately, today’s Standard English leaves us stranded. We make up for it, however, with our own vernacular for the plural you. “You guys, y’all, youse,” etc. Not “proper” English, but it gets the job done.
But there’s something else going on in Jesus’ use of the “thou,” suggestive of his relationship with the woman.
In Shakespeare’s time, you had the option—as you still have in modern French, Spanish or German—of using “thou” or “you.” Common practice was to use “you” with your superiors, strangers, or in formal situations. But to your peers, your close friends, or with those below your social level, servants included, you would use the familiar “thou.”
In Romeo and Juliet, we first see this distinction in a conversation between Juliet’s nurse and Lady Capulet. Reminiscing on Juliet’s childhood, the nurse addresses Lady Capulet as “you,” showing respect, while Juliet’s mother responds using the familiar “thou.”
“You” was polite and formal. “Thou” was familiar. It was personal. But—and this is important—it was also the language of intimacy, the language of lovers.
Both Romeo and Juliet, when they first meet, without even knowing each other’s names, use the “you” form of address. At their next encounter, however, now love-struck, they slip into the language of intimacy: “O, speak again, bright angel! for thou art as glorious to this night, being o’er my head as is a winged messenger of heaven.”
And Juliet: “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” Why, my love, she is asking, must you have the name of my family’s enemy?
Whether the speaker uses “you” or “thou” is an indicator of their relationship, and this carries through in Shakespeare’s sonnets as well. To his beloved, as he is now an old man, Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 73:
“This perceiv’st thou, which makes thy love more strong/ To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”
It’s still that way in other languages today. When addressing someone in Spanish, you use tu or Usted. In French, tu or Vous. In German, du or Sie. Using the wrong word, however, can get you into trouble. Which it did when I was a teenager in Germany, when I addressed Frau Liebig, the mother of my friend, with the familiar du rather than Sie.
“Do you address your elders like that in America?” she asked. When I explained that in America we spoke to everyone in the same way, she smiled. “But you shouldn’t here,” she said.
I learned that I could use du with my friends and my immediate family. But with other adults, teachers, employers, seniors, strangers—be sure to use the Sie form, she explained, along with its appropriate verb conjugations and the correct objective and possessive pronouns. In all, I would learn, there are seven words in German for “you.”
At the same time, however, when I attended the local Lutheran church, I heard the pastor pray using the familiar form of speech with God. Wow, I thought. I could use du with God! And so I learned: Vater unser, du der bist in Himmel, dein Name werde geheiligt….
So it once was in English. What we think of as church talk, or high talk, was the opposite. Thee and thou was the language of low talk, used with those we were “down with,” with those we love, and, remarkably, with our Father in heaven.
That’s why Quakers, those radical reformers from England, chose to use “thee and thou” even when everyone else had stopped using it. And, in so doing, they were making a statement about the equality of all people.
So here’s to the “Thee and Thou” of the Lord’s Prayer, and to all the funny verbs and pronouns that go along with them, Here’s to our freedom to talk to God as if we are speaking with our closest friend—whether we use archaic or modern English, formal grammar or street dialect. It’s all there in the words we choose.
Art: detail of 1884 painting of Romeo and Juliet by Frank Bernard Dicksee
It was a gray day in Moscow, and a 7-year-old girl was on the way to the train station. Her mother had gone to the hospital to deliver, and the girl was being sent to her aunt. In the streets, she remembers, were soldiers with rifles, and everywhere people in shock, some openly weeping.
Why are they crying,” she asked her father. It was March 5, 1953.
“Stalin has died,” her father said.
A friend and colleague told me this story. She also said that in a little bag her father took with him to work each day he packed a toothbrush, razor and extra underwear, in case he didn’t return.
I could relate. Also having Russian heritage, I knew of the Soviet dictator’s reign of terror. My relatives, German-Russian farmers on the Kuban steppe in Southern Russia, were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. One died in a gulag. Another was shot. My Tanta Anna as a teenager was forced to work in a logging camp.
Meanwhile, my friend grew up under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. In a famous speech, Khrushchev had shocked the party by condemning Stalin’s crimes, coining the phrase, “cult of personality.”
In the following years, she excelled at the university, earning a doctorate. and began a career teaching math. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, she, her husband and their parents left Moscow and settled in New England. We taught together in Massachusetts.
As I had tea with her one day between classes, we talked about Stalin and the power he had over people. I recalled a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago describing a Communist party meeting in the 1940s, where, after Stalin had spoken, the audience jumped to its feet to applause. The applause continued. It didn’t stop. Looking around, members were afraid to stop clapping. Would someone notice? Would they be on the slow train to Siberia?
Similar scenes occurred in Nazi Germany. In a 1936 photograph of a rally held at a shipyard, one German worker stands in a crowd with his arms folded. He is the only one not giving the Nazi salute. Once a loyal member of the Party, August Landmesser had fallen in love with a Jewish woman. After his engagement was discovered, he was expelled from the Party, and his marriage application denied. They had a daughter.
In 1937 Landmesser attempted to flee Germany with his family, but was arrested at the border. The Gestapo also arrested his wife, who delivered their second child in prison. Sent to the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, she was murdered along with 14,000 others.
After three years in a concentration camp, Landmesser was forced into the German Army. He went missing in Croatia.
Many are the lessons we can draw from history. One we cannot ignore, however, is that authoritarian, autocratic governments cause great harm, not only to democratic institutions, but to vulnerable people.
Deportation of Jews from Muenster, Germany, Dec. 13, 1941.
As we begin life under a second Trump administration, millions of our neighbors are threatened with deportation. These include hundreds of thousands of DACA students and millions under temporary protected status (TPS) or awaiting action on their requests for asylum.
In the coming days, how shall we respond. Will we clap? Will we fold our arms? Will we speak what we believe? Will we act to safeguard the lives and liberties of others?
Today President Joseph Biden honored 19 Americans with the highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom. The recipients ranged from human rights workers to basketball stars, philanthropists to actors.
Although critics will snipe that some of the names were political choices, who among us did not cheer when our nation’s highest civilian award went to the José Andrés, World Kitchen chef, or Jane Goodall, animal biologist, or Michael J. Fox, actor and voice for Parkinson’s research.
Who didn’t chuckle when a towering Earvin “Magic” Johnson stooped down so the president could fasten the pendant around his neck? Or cheer when Bono, the U2 rock star who has fought for debt relief for poor nations, got the award.
The ceremony got me to thinking about the word “freedom” itself. What is freedom? Are there more than one? What freedoms are we talking about?
In a State of the Union address given 84 years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.”
He continued: “The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.”
He defined the third as “freedom from want” and called for “economic understandings that will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants.”
The fourth freedom, Roosevelt stated, was “freedom from fear.” He called for a reduction in global armaments to the degree that that “no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.”
Articulated eleven months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Four Freedoms theme was incorporated into the Atlantic Charter and later became part of the Charter of the United Nations.
Although the three-term president was now defining freedom in global terms, his administration had from the start applied them to domestic policy and public programs.
In 1943 in four Saturday Evening Post covers painted by Normal Rockwell, the Four Freedoms showed us what freedom looks like at home, at the table, in moments of worship, and at a town meeting. You can see the original paintings today at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge.
Thinking about the recent Medal of Freedom ceremony, I realized that each person honored had in some way contributed to expanding one of the Four Freedoms.
And that got me to wondering, if I were to pick individuals in Stoneham who exemplified these freedoms, who would they be?
What my choices would have in common is the desire to realize freedom not only in their own lives, but in the lives of others as well. I would look for people who lift others up. A teacher who teaches compassion as well as calculus. A banker who helps small businesses gain a foothold. A town moderator who keeps democracy on track. An artist who teaches seniors to paint. A tutor who helps immigrants learn English. A food bank or community dinner director. A legislator, coach, librarian, nurse, police or fire fighter, pastor, and more.
Who would you choose? Look around you. In the New Year, we will be challenged to honor and uphold the freedoms we cherish. It’s something each of us, in our own way, can do.
Autumn has passed now, and the trees are barren. Fall colors have given way to a winter spectrum of blacks and whites, grays and browns. It’s the season when the sky grows bigger, the horizon lower, when what was once hidden by foliage comes into sight.
Over at Stone Zoo, it’s easier to catch a glimpse of the Mexican gray wolves as they slip between the trees on the hillside. And the snow leopards on their ledges. I also look for the arctic foxes, now in their white coats for the season.
And if you walk up Cowdrey Street onto Farm Hill, as I sometimes do, you can look out over Stoneham to Winchester and Woburn. If you climb the tower on Bear Hill in the Fells, you can see Boston and the shimmering sea beyond.
Stoneham’s hills are a good place to see sunsets, the evening planets, and the new moon.
Living for many years in the Southwest, where clouds are rare, I grew accustomed to the presence of the moon. Like the agrarians of old, I slipped into a lunar calendar, feeling hopeful at the slivered new moon, happy in its fullness, and wistful with its waning.
Even though the Western world moves mostly in solar time, the lunar calendar is embedded in our observance of special days. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox. Passover, the 15th day of the month of Nisan, begins at the full moon. I think of the Hebrews fleeing Egypt. Nice to have light in the night sky.
Hanukkah, with its hopeful lights, carries us through the last quarter of the moon, when the sky is darkest.
Although the Jewish calendar follows the lunar cycle, every three years an extra month is added, keeping it close to the solar year.
Many Asian cultures observe a lunar calendar. China’s traditional calendar is lunisolar, that is, combining lunar and solar cycles. New Year occurs between January 20 and February 20.
This year we have a happy convergence of lunar and solar time, coinciding with our winter holidays. We started December with a new moon, which becomes full this weekend, December 14-15. Then it begins waning, so that by Christmas we will see but a thin crescent, early in the morning. After this, the moon will go dark as we pass through long nights before it returns with the New Year.
This dark period also coincides with the winter solstice, a solar time marker, and with Hanukkah, a lunar holiday, which, like Passover, is a “movable feast.” Hanukkah, also called the Festival of Lights, begins on December 25, and extends through the moon’s dark phase. On each of the eight days of Hanukkah, a candle in the menorah is lit, marking the miraculous lighting of the temple lamp, even though there was no more lamp oil. The holiday concludes, just as the new moon reappears in the sky.
In the Genesis creation story the heavenly lights were established “to divide the day from the night [and] for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.”
And so it is today. Winter is a good time to look around. The leaves are down, the nights are long, and the stars are bright.
May the lights shine for you, this holiday season.
Ben Jacques Stories 