“...for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9)
I never felt like a stranger in this country as a child. Growing up in the Midwest of the 1990’s, I was lucky to be surrounded by a wonderful Jewish community that provided me with a feeling of home. Even interactions with teammates and coaches from parts of Missouri in which no Jews lived were based primarily in respect and curiosity rather than judgement and alienation. At the end of a baseball season when I was a teenager one teammate said to me, “I never met a Jew before you, and you’re ok in my book.” While perhaps not the most eloquent way of sharing that feeling, I understood that he meant I was entirely part of the collective despite the differences between us in faith and creed.
I was, and still am, so privileged to have grown up during a time in which Jews in this nation have felt (almost) entirely accepted as part of society. This reality would have been a wonder even to many of our grandparents and great-grandparents for whom, even in this country, full acceptance, that feeling of being entirely at home, remained elusive.
It was not until after the events of October 7th, 2023 that I ever had the experience of feeling like a stranger in this country. Through both my own personal experiences as well as those of friends, acquaintances and even Jews I did not know, this feeling of being a stranger began to take root. I imagine that we shared many of these experiences: losing touch with people I considered to be trusted friends when they espoused views that, I believe, either constituted outright Jew-hatred or peddled in anti-Jewish tropes, watching as people told Jews to “go back where they came from,” seeing Jewish business and places of worship vandalized, Jewish artists and creatives pushed out of creative guilds and other organizations, Jewish voices in academia marginalized. The widespread acceptance I felt in my youth is no longer the prevailing spirit with which the Jewish community is met these days.
The shift from acceptance to stranger was, and continues to be, destabilizing. It is painful to feel betrayed by people with whom I had previously stood in solidarity. It is frightening to see the very real hate felt towards our community. It is heartbreaking to hear deafening silence from so many people whom I respect when my community feels vulnerable and threatened.
Feeling like the stranger is isolating. It is one of the reasons for the increase in participation in synagogues and Jewish communal affiliation across the country. We have sought solace amongst ourselves as a result of our fear and confusion. When we needed it most we reached out to our sisters and brothers and found open arms ready to embrace us.
There is great power and solace in the solidarity that Jews have found amongst our own over these past 16 months. We should take a great deal of pride from the love we have shown to one another. Yet, there are other potential consequences of being made to feel like a stranger. As our feeling of otherness increases, we paradoxically can find that it is more and more difficult to remember that there are others who feel, and who have felt for generations, like strangers, too.
This week's portion, Mishpatim, contains the first of the Torah’s 36 instances of a demand for proper treatment of the stranger, more than any other justification of the mitzvot. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (z’’l), the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, considered why the Torah does this:
“It is terrifying in retrospect to grasp how seriously the Torah took the phenomenon of xenophobia, hatred of the stranger. It is as if the Torah were saying with the utmost clarity: reason is insufficient. Sympathy is inadequate. Only the force of history and memory is strong enough to form a counterweight to hate.
The Torah asks, why should you not hate the stranger? Because you once stood where he stands now. You know the heart of the stranger because you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt. If you are human, so is he. If 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 – for your own and those of others, wherever they are, whoever they are, whatever the colour of their skin or the nature of their culture, because though they are not in your image, says God, they are nonetheless in Mine. There is only one reply strong enough to answer the question: Why should I not hate the stranger? Because the stranger is me.”
We have entered a new period of Jewish history, full of challenges and dangers, thrust upon us unexpectedly and against our will. It will, at times, demand of us different courses of action and responses than what was needed twenty and thirty years ago. Yet what remains constant is the agency that was granted to us as we left slavery in Egypt and stood together at Sinai, collectively accepting the incredible moral standard that God revealed to us. The question is how we choose to use this agency in our time. Our history is littered with periods of fear and isolation. Too often, these moments are presented as moments of dichotomous choice: that we must choose our own safety and preservation and abandon our moral obligations as dictated by the mitzvot or vice versa.
Rabbi David Hartman (z’’l) wrote in his oft-cited essay that this is a false choice. We can, and must, hold both the pain and uncertainty of being made a stranger and wrap it in the transcendent power of the revelatory experience at Sinai:
The model of Sinai awakens the Jewish people to the awesome responsibility of becoming a holy people. At Sinai, we discover the absolute demand of God; we discover who we are by what we do. Sinai calls us to action, to moral awakening, to living constantly with challenges of building a moral and just society which mirrors the kingdom of God in history… In this respect, it is the antithesis of the moral narcissism that can result from suffering and from viewing oneself as a victim.
May these portions of revelation renew our commitment to the parallel tasks of deepening our connection to one another and of creating a shared moral language with all nations of the world. Shabbat Shalom.
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