Shabbat 10 August 2024 EKEV – The Riots and the stranger
Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 12 August 2024
All in all it’s been a pretty shocking couple of weeks since the murders in Southport: mobs trying to attack mosques and asylum centres; graphic images of police being attacked; shops looted; a library set on fire, a children’s library, for goodness sake!; rumours that North Finchley was to be targeted by far right mobs on Wednesday night; immigration lawyers advised to take precautionary measures and so on. And, thankfully, on the other side, decent people turning out in their numbers to stand up against prejudice and hatred. All this with the ever-present backdrop for Jews of the apparently unending horrors of what’s happening in the Middle East.
Watching the TV I wondered just what is it about the stranger that provokes such animosity, anger, violence, fear; that brings the mob out in such numbers?
You can command people to do many things but what you cannot command is love. Love has to exist in the realm of our emotions and feelings before it can be expressed in specific loving behaviour. It can’t be summoned up in response to some external command.
That might explain why of all the 613 commandments traditionally found in the Torah, the command to love is only found three times. “You shall love the Eternal your God,” in the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:5); “love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) and “you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:33)
But why just those three? Maybe loving God, neighbours or strangers doesn’t arise automatically in the hearts of human beings? Love of God is shown, as the Shema goes on to say, in concrete ethical and ritual acts. That’s not easy, nor is loving your neighbour or the stranger. We may feel superior to them in wealth, intelligence, skin colour, good looks, knowledge, power, background. We might be full of love for the human race in general, but, as Leo Baeck reminds us, it’s harder to actually do something specific to help another person, for no reason other than they need our help. (Forms of Prayer, MRJ 2008, p553)
Such acts don’t necessarily come naturally; indeed they may even go against our natural inclination. Sometimes, indeed, doing the abnormal might be what make us into decent human beings.
I guess it’s clear enough that our ‘neighbour’ is the one with whom we have some sort of relationship; close or distant maybe, but somebody we recognise as being in some way like ourselves.
But just who is ‘the stranger’? In the Bible the stranger is primarily somebody who’s not Jewish but who is living among Jews. The Hebrew word is גר from a root meaning ‘to live.’ The גר lives among us, but is not quite part of our society. Why should we love the stranger? Because we were strangers in Egypt. We know what it feels like to be a stranger.
So make sure the strangers in your society don’t feel like strangers. The ger was to participate in your life – sit at your seder table, celebrate Shabbat with you and so on. The ger was protected by the law. It’s easy to exploit the stranger, who, by definition, is unfamiliar with society the way native-born inhabitants are.
In Biblical society the גר the stranger carried no negative connotations; by contrast with today when they are labelled ‘illegal immigrant,’ ‘asylum seeker’
‘Strangers’ are frightening – they represent the mysterious, the unknown; those who, it is believed, do not abide by the rules – as we define them – of normal, decent folk; they are devious, not to be trusted. ‘Strangers’ have been called ‘gypsies,’ ‘travelling people,’ ‘boat people,’ and Jews. The stranger is often perceived as a seducer or controller – think of how black men were so often seen as sexually more-potent. Strangers arouse suspicion, fear and revulsion. They live on the margin of society – sometimes by choice, more frequently, I suspect, because that’s the only place where society will let them live.
The Bible uses two other words to describe the ‘stranger.’ One is נכרי from a root meaning ‘to recognise.’ It’s the word used in modern Hebrew אני מכיר אותו to say “I know so-and-so.” It suggests that we recognise who the other is, but acknowledges that there is still a distance between them and us.
גר and נכרי therefore are both used to describe somebody who is not Jewish but who lives in Jewish society, having a closer or more distant relationship. Later on, in rabbinic times the גר became the convert: the person who started off as a stranger living among Jews but ended up becoming Jewish themselves. (Elie Wiesel, Paroles d’étranger, Seuil Paris 1985)
But another word is used suggesting another sense altogether of what it is to be a ‘stranger.’ It’s the most surprising use. So while גר and נכרי always refer to non-Jews, this third term for the stranger – the word is זר – refers specifically to somebody who is Jewish, which seems like a paradox. How can you be a stranger in your own world? Often translated as ‘alien,’ ‘outsider’ (Numbers 17:5); ‘lay person’ (Leviticus 22:10) it refers to somebody who feels no link, no connection with the people, their people, around them.
In any contemporary gathering of Jews, I would be surprised if there were not some who felt that זר was the most appropriate way to describe how they felt in relation to their Jewish life. You might have come to that because a particularly intolerant upbringing or Jewish education made you vow to have nothing more to do with Judaism once you grew up; of negative childhood experiences of being Jewish. Maybe nothing quite as specific as that – maybe earning a living, getting on in the world, simply got in the way of living as an active Jew. For some an awakening comes when they realise just how much of a זר they have become; sometimes an experience of antisemitism brings home to them the fact that they are Jewish and that’s how they’re seen by the world out there. I think for many, reactions since October 7th have been a real eye-opener. But whatever the cause, there’s that awareness of having become זר an ‘outsider’ to, alienated from, their identity as Jews.
Some become alienated from their core-identity out of, what seems to me, a misplaced understanding of what it is to be universalist and tolerant. If you want to discover who you are, in its fullest sense, you surely can’t do it by denying part of that identity. Ignoring a dimension of who and what you are is being neither tolerant nor universalist. Perhaps it’s only when we are anchored and grounded in the fulness of our own identity that we can go out into the world and encounter others on an equal footing. Otherwise it’s like harbouring some dark secret – we can never have a balanced relationship with anybody else because we are in constant dread of having our secret discovered. It distorts all dealings we have with the world.
We can only live an authentic existence when we are firmly rooted in what we are. Then we will no longer be alien to ourselves. We do indeed have to learn to love the stranger – not just the one outside, but the one within, הגר הגר אתך ‘the stranger who lives with you” as the Torah puts it; the Jewish stranger within, that part of ourselves from which we feel alienated.
These reflections have been prompted by two things: what I, we, have seen on our screens these last couple of weeks. What is it inside those protesters that led them to turn out the way they did, do what they did?
And secondly, there is a strange verse in our Torah reading. The people are on the threshold of the Promised Land. Moses can’t go in with them and Deuteronomy reads like his farewell speech to the people. Among his opening words, Moses tells the people they will pass through the territory of their kinsmen. “Though they will be afraid of you, be very careful not to provoke them.” (Deuteronomy 2: 4-5) Strangers have that capacity to induce fear and provoke violent reaction simply because they are strangers – as the events of this past fortnight have shown. Strangers, by contrast, look for nothing more than a place where they can feel secure and not be pursued by the mob, baying for their blood. It’s often said that the stranger is like a barometer for the health of a society. How society treats the stranger tells us a lot about that society, its decency, its humanity, its ethics.
May we, by our silence, by our indifference, by our “we are not like them,” never be party in any way to making the stranger feel insecure in our world.