Timeless Torah

The Biblical section of Mishpatim offers us the Torah’s vision of a just and equitable social order. Among its many complex rules is one that figuratively leaps off the page by its revolutionary moral stance. “Do not oppress a stranger; you yourselves know how it feels to be a stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.”

One insight into the reason for this mitzvah can be gleaned from an earlier verse that states, “Do not taunt or oppress a stranger.” The Sages comment that to taunt refers to verbal abuse (reminding a stranger of his origins), to oppress means to take financial advantage by robbery or overcharging. The Talmud further notes that verbal wrongdoing is worse than a monetary offense because one affects the person’s self-image, the other only his money; in one scenario financial remuneration is possible, but in the case of verbal abuse, even after apology the damage to reputation remains.

A stranger, in particular, is sensitive to his or her status within society. He or she is an outsider, conscious of their vulnerability. Therefore we must be especially careful not to wound them by reminding them that they are not, “one of us.”

The Talmud also mentions that, “Torah warns against the wronging of a stranger (ger) in thirty-six places; others say, in forty-six places.” Whatever the precise number, the repetition throughout the Bible is remarkable. This provision to care for the stranger is the attribute of G-d himself as it says in Devarim, “The great G-d, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those who are strangers, for you yourselves were strangers in Egypt.”

Why is this command so vital that G-d Himself (“who shows no partiality”) breaks His own rules for the stranger? The Ramban explains: we should not wrong a stranger or oppress him, thinking that none can deliver him out of our hand...“Because I behold the tears of such who are oppressed and have no comforter...” According to Nachmanides the relative powerlessness of the stranger who is not surrounded by family or friends ready to come to their defense, causes G-d to make Himself their protector.

There is something striking about this continuously reiterated concern for the stranger. It is as if, in this series of laws, we are uncovering the mystery of Jewish existence itself. Throughout the biblical narrative, we discover a lack of basic rights to which outsiders could hope for. Not by accident is the fate of Sodom sealed when they attempt to assault Lot’s two visitors. Nor can we fail to feel Abraham and Isaac’s danger when they take refuge in Egypt or the land of the Philistines.

In each episode they are convinced that their life is at stake; that they may be murdered so that their wives can be taken into the royal harem. Jacob’s daughter Dina is raped and abducted when she wanders into the territory of Shechem. And of course, in Egypt the Israelites are regarded as pariahs.

So it was in the ancient world. Hatred of the foreigner is the oldest of passions. The pages of history are stained with blood spilled in the name of racial or ethnic conflict. It was precisely this to which the Enlightenment, the new “age of reason,” promised an end. It did not happen. In revolutionary France (1789), as the Rights of Man were being pronounced, riots broke out against the Jewish community in Alsace. And in the “land of supposed intellectuals,” the mass deportation of Jews to the extermination camps occurred with little or no protest. Dislike of the unlike is as old as mankind.

This fact lies at the very heart of the Jewish experience. To be a Jew is to be a stranger. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is why Abraham was commanded to leave his native land and home; why long before Joseph was born, Abraham was already told that his descendants would be, “strangers in a land not their own”; why Moses had to suffer personal exile before assuming leadership; why the Israelites underwent persecution before inheriting their own land; and why the Torah is so insistent that this experience - the retelling of the story on Pesach, along with the never-forgotten taste of the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery - should become a permanent part of their collective memory.

That the Torah took so seriously the phenomenon of xenophobia, hatred of the stranger, is because the Torah knows with the utmost clarity: that reason alone is insufficient. Sympathy is inadequate. Only the force of Divine law is strong enough to form a counterweight to hate.

“Why should you not hate the stranger?” asks the Torah. “Because,” G-d answers, “You once stood where he stands now. You know the heart of the stranger because you were once a stranger in Egypt. If you are human, so is he. If you think he is less than human, so are you. You must fight the hatred in your heart as I once fought the greatest ruler and the strongest empire in the ancient world on your behalf. I made you into the world’s archetypal strangers so that you would fight for the rights of strangers, because though they may not fit your image, they are created in Mine.”