We are commanded to love the stranger in our midst because we were strangers in Egypt. As long as the stranger accepts our societal norms then we are required to love them.
Loving the Stranger—and Belonging to a Society
Now for a quick devar Torah.
One of the striking commandments in this week’s parsha is: “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
The Torah is taking our own experience in Egypt and turning it into a moral obligation. We know what it is like to be outsiders. We know what it is like to be vulnerable in someone else’s land. Therefore, when a stranger lives among us, we have an obligation to treat that person with dignity, fairness, and even love.
But there is another side to the relationship.
The Torah and later Jewish law recognize different categories of outsiders. There is the ger, the stranger who lives among us, and there is the nokhri, the foreigner. Rabbinic law also discusses the ger toshav—a non-Jew who lives within Jewish society without becoming Jewish, but who accepts certain fundamental obligations. According to the major halachic view, this includes acceptance of the Seven Noahide Laws.
The principle is important: the stranger does not have to become Jewish in order to live among us and be treated with dignity. But living within a society also means accepting its basic legal and moral framework.
That reminds me of my mother. She came to America as a refugee from Europe in the early 1940s. At the time, there were German-speaking schools in New York, but my grandfather did not send her to one. He insisted that she attend an English-speaking school. Later, when she and my aunt went to high school to train as secretaries, again, the education was in English.
His reasoning was very simple: You are in America now. The language of business in America is English. America does not have to adapt itself to you; you have to learn how to function within America.
That did not mean abandoning who they were. It meant becoming participants in the society that had given them a home.
There is a lesson here about immigration and about society generally. A society has obligations toward the stranger. It must protect the stranger from oppression. It must administer justice fairly. It must recognize the stranger’s dignity.
But membership in a society is also a two-way street. The newcomer has obligations as well. You may disagree with particular policies. You may advocate for change. But you have to accept the basic rules by which the society governs itself.
In America, that fundamental framework is the Constitution and the rule of law.
In the Torah’s vision of the Land of Israel, the Torah is the foundation of the society. A non-Jew does not have to become Jewish, but living within that society means respecting its fundamental legal and moral order.
And perhaps that makes the Torah’s reminder about Egypt even more powerful. When our ancestors originally came to Egypt, they came because of famine. They were not trying to overthrow Egyptian civilization or impose their beliefs upon Egypt. They wanted to live there peacefully.
The tragedy began when Egypt stopped treating the stranger with dignity and turned the stranger into a threat to be feared, oppressed, and ultimately enslaved.
So the Torah gives us both sides of the equation: a society must treat the stranger with love and dignity, and those who join a society must respect the basic framework that holds that society together.
Welcoming the stranger does not require a society to surrender its identity. And joining a society does not require a person to surrender his own identity.
It requires mutual responsibility.
Something to think about.
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