Like many children, I grew up being told not to talk to strangers, and especially don’t accept candy or car rides from them. If they offer, run to the nearest responsible adult. I was told kidnappers lurk in shopping malls.
At the same time, every 1950s science-fiction film about creatures from outer space were really about other, earthly aliens, serving as allegories about the Soviet threat.
But by the late 1970s, the tune changed. Films like “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) conveyed a different message: The aliens were not all that bad, and actually could be quite lovable. Others, like “Alien” (1979) and the remake of “War of the Worlds” (2005), brought us right back into the paranoia that could be seen allegorically as xenophobia.
As is true with many things, Judaism offers a different point of view. Yes, some strangers and foreigners are hostile, and in Jewish history, this was true more often than not. But not every stranger is an object of fear and scorn. The Bible tells us to care for the stranger — no less than 36 times, reportedly — which makes it the most often-repeated commandment in the Torah.
But, who is the stranger?
To answer that question, I turned to my friend and colleague Rabbi Shai Held, one of the Jewish world’s leading contemporary Jewish theologians and Bible teachers. He is the president, dean and chair of Jewish thought at the Hadar Institute, which he co-founded to build a spiritually vibrant and intellectually serious Jewish community. Held’s most recent book is “Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life.”
Judaism says that we must care for the stranger (the ger), the widow and the orphan, as they are vulnerable people. Other ancient Middle Eastern cultures have taught us to take care of widows and orphans, but the Torah’s unique contribution was that it added the ger into that bouquet of compassion.
Who is the ger? The usual translations are the “stranger” and “sojourner.”
But, Held offers us a better translation, and it could hardly be more timely. He teaches that ger means “immigrant,” or as the medieval rabbi Rashi understood it, someone who left their previous home because of some upheaval, like war or famine.
In a few weeks, Jews will sit down at their Passover tables, enjoy the Seder and remember that they were slaves in Egypt. In biblical times, that memory taught that we needed to build a society that was nothing like Egypt. I personally interpret the Star of David to symbolize that Judaism is not Egypt — the triangle depicts the Egyptian pyramid as the inverted triangle is superimposed on it.
Egypt back then worshipped death, while we worship life. Egypt was obsessed with power, while we are obsessed with compassion and justice.
How did we get into Egypt in the first place? In a time of famine, Joseph’s family sought refuge there. We came to Egypt as immigrants. That is why the Torah says: “You shall not oppress a stranger for you know the feelings of the stranger/immigrant, having yourselves been strangers/immigrants in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9).
When you consider that God says this right after we left Egypt, yes, it is a big deal. It’s not only not oppressing the ger, but that the ger can participate in rituals, such as the Passover sacrifice, observing Yom Kippur and resting on the Sabbath.
As Held teaches us, Judaism is about love. Whom are we commanded to love?
Notice the progression. First, in Leviticus 19, we learn that we must “love our neighbor as ourselves.” This does not mean that you need to love your next-door neighbor (in my case, my totally unlovable upstairs neighbor who insists on banging on the floor). “Neighbor” means “fellow Israelite,” or, the person who is like you.
Then, a few verses later: “… You shall love him (the ger/stranger/immigrant) as yourself, for you were gerim/strangers/immigrants in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God” (Leviticus 19: 33-34).
And only then, two books later in Deuteronomy, do we get around to the commandment to love God.
You start with loving the person who is like you, then the person who is not like you, and only after that do you get to God.
Think of what this means for our own inner lives. Your ancestors were immigrants in Egypt, and then slaves in Egypt. You have two basic choices on how to respond to that history.
You could say, “No one lifted a finger to help my ancestors in Egypt; therefore, I have no responsibility toward anyone else.” Or, instead, “No one lifted a finger to help my ancestors in Egypt, therefore everyone is my responsibility.”
The Torah is asking us to choose the second statement. That empathy becomes the cultural DNA of the Jewish people.
Think about how Moses prepares to become the leader of the Israelites. He becomes an immigrant in a strange land, the land of Midian. He learns sensitivity for those who are powerless, like when he chased away the marauders who were harassing the daughters of Jethro, the priest of Midian. That was Moses’ moral education — long before the Exodus, and long before he stood on Mount Sinai.
What does all this have to do with American immigration policy?
On the one hand, not as much as we would like. We cannot use these teachings to dictate policies, as that was not their intent. You cannot use a set of teachings that were designed for an agrarian economy in the ancient Middle East and automatically translate them into policy for the United States — though we should worry about the Pharaoh-like nature of draconian tactics in our cities.
But, on the other hand, quite a bit. These teachings give us a moral framework for thinking about immigration. To quote that old Levy’s rye bread commercial: You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate these ideas.
If you believe that America is a nation founded on biblical principles, just make sure you get all those principles in there. As Held puts it, the question is not, do you believe in God. It’s the God you believe in, whom does that God love? That is the question all of us need to ask each other and ourselves.
This transcript was generated using AI tools and may contain minor transcription errors
JEFF SALKIN: I cannot imagine that there’s any child in the United States living today — or any adult who remembers their childhood — who hasn’t heard the admonition: don’t talk to strangers. This fear of strangers, xenophobia — which, by the way, is one of the few great words that actually starts with the letter X — is a major part of American culture. Whether it comes in the form of cautionary tales about lurking kidnappers, or simply the fear of people who are different, and the fear of being different.
I’m a big fan of American popular culture. Like you, I’ve probably seen all those movies — the classic science fiction films of the 1950s, like War of the Worlds, which were basically thinly disguised cultural artifacts dealing with aliens. It was about creatures from outer space, but you and I know what it was really about. And then again, of course, in the late seventies and eighties, there were films like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which said that aliens were actually kind of okay. They’re not scary, they’re lovable.
One of the things that I share in common with my friend and colleague Rabbi Shai Held is this belief that Judaism is a counterculture — by which I mean that Judaism offers the world a different way of understanding itself. Yes, if you read the Hebrew Bible, some strangers and non-Israelites were hostile, and that is often true in Jewish history. But not all the time.
From Religion News Service, this is Martini Judaism, for those who want to be shaken and stirred. I am Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
Rabbi Shai Held is one of the Jewish world’s leading contemporary Jewish theologians and Bible teachers. He is the President, Dean, and Chair of Jewish Thought at Hadar, the institution he co-founded, which has as its mission to build a spiritually vibrant and intellectually serious Jewish community — and they are succeeding, I think, beyond even their wildest dreams. Shai is a widely respected scholar of the Hebrew Bible, theology, and Jewish ethics. What he does so well is bring classical Jewish sources into conversation with contemporary moral questions.
I first really came to love Shai’s work when I read his book on Heschel, and then his two-volume Torah commentary, which I often use in teaching. His most recent book is his most radical message: that Judaism is about love. It is, as it were, a Jewish Kama Sutra — a way of teaching us how to love.
A few weeks ago, I attended a virtual class, along with hundreds of others, that Rabbi Held taught on the meaning of what it means to love the stranger. And in the words of the title of this podcast and my column, it left me shaken and stirred.
This is a topic that is as fresh as this morning’s news. And this topic is not going away. So I decided to invite Rabbi Held to help me — and all of us — understand what it means for Judaism to create a new kind of society, and what that lesson could offer all of us, whatever faith we are, or even if we are those of little or no faith.
So, Shai, it’s great to have you here.
SHAI HELD: Good to see you, Jeff. Thank you.
SALKIN: You said something that I’ve always believed, but you said it better. I’ve always believed that the Torah offers us a counter-vision to the surrounding cultures in the ancient Near East — that we are not Canaan, we are not Babylon, and we are not Egypt. But that’s the piece that really came home for me when I heard you teach just a few weeks ago: that the Torah offers a radical alternative to Egypt. What does that mean, and how does it help shape what the Bible thinks should be society’s moral vision?
SHAI HELD: Thank you, Jeff. It really is a privilege, as always, to be here and in conversation with you.
I’ve tried to argue in a whole series of writings and classes exactly what you just said — that the Torah sees a central piece of its project as having Israel build a society that is the complete antithesis of Egypt. That is to say, a society that is not cruel, that is not callous, that is actively caring of its most vulnerable members. I think one way to understand a whole series of biblical laws is that they are an implicit critique and counterstatement to the way Israel had experienced life in Egypt.
Just to give a couple of examples: the way the Torah talks about not mistreating the widow and the orphan — it specifically, in the book of Exodus, uses the language that was used to describe Israel’s experience of being oppressed in Egypt. “If he cries out” — the language used to describe Israel’s pain. God says, “Surely I will hear” — the same word the Torah uses to describe the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt. That is to say: your experience of being vulnerable is meant not only to make you as an individual sensitive to the needs of those who are vulnerable, but you as a society.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is that we know in the ancient Near East it was forbidden almost everywhere to harbor fugitive slaves. The Book of Deuteronomy says you are obligated to harbor fugitive slaves. And I think part of what hovers in the background of that is a God who implicitly says: you were a nation of fugitive slaves. I did not return you to your master who was hunting you. I did not do that. Learn something from me.
And then, in a way, the culmination of all that is what you were so eager to talk about: what do you do with the resident alien, the stranger, the sojourner — what the Bible calls the ger — someone who is not part of the kin group, who has come to live among you? An immigrant, in other words, as Rashi already explains. What do you do with the immigrant? And the Torah’s answer is startling: you love them. That is a kind of direct, frontal assault on xenophobia.
And if I could offer one almost sad corrective — xenophobia is not an American problem. Xenophobia is a human problem, and a global epidemic at the moment. It’s one of the reasons I taught that class. I just wanted to say: it’s fine in political contexts to invoke slogans, but we’re also capable of thinking more deeply as Jews. What might the Torah say to us in this moment? How might it speak to an America where immigrants are quite literally being hunted?
SALKIN: What’s amazing to me — even though this will come out in a few weeks, I’m recording this from Miami Beach, here on a speaking tour and a small vacation — is that just today I went out for lunch, and I could not walk twelve feet without encountering immigrants and strangers. The whole specter of what is happening in our society, and how this fear, really went through my being. And I consciously tried to transform that fear into something like love.
Now, you just wrote this magnum opus about love. One of the things I’ve focused on over time is that Leviticus 19 speaks of loving your fellow Israelite — “love your neighbor as yourself.” Several verses later, it gets around to loving the stranger as yourself. And only two books later, in Deuteronomy, do we get to loving God. It’s almost as if the love of your fellow Israelite, then the love of the person who is not like you, is a pathway to loving God.
HELD: I would say it actually works both ways. Loving your neighbor is a path to loving God — but then also, in a way that I think is quite subversive and demanding, if you claim to love God, you will ineluctably be led to loving those who are most vulnerable.
The innovation — the chiddush, as Jews like to say — of Deuteronomy about loving the stranger is the juxtaposition of two claims. Deuteronomy 10:18: God loves the stranger. Deuteronomy 10:19: so you too must love the stranger. If you want to love God, Deuteronomy is claiming, you have to love those whom God loves.
And one of the things I wish I had said more emphatically in my book — I do say it, but it’s been something I’ve been thinking and talking about more — is that the God of the Hebrew Bible is fundamentally a God of underdogs. A God who sees those who are unseen. It’s the God of Hagar. And what does Hagar call God?
“You are the God who sees me” — El Roi.
You see those whom others ignore.
SALKIN: And years ago we noticed that Hagar is actually — Hagar. (laughs)
HELD: That name is very, very significant. And by the way, if we’re already pushing this point — Genesis is wild here, because the fundamental story of empathy toward an immigrant is about an Egyptian slave woman oppressed by her Israelite masters. It’s totally playing with the notion of victim and victimizer, oppressed and oppressor. The Torah is willing to ask us to hold up to the light the possibility that Abraham could become a victimizer. And I think that’s a very powerful ethical lesson: never convince yourself that you are immune from the possibility of mistreating people who are subject to your power. That’s all of us in our own lives. Very daunting.
SALKIN: I just started as co-producer of a new podcast called To Be Continued, which is interviews with second and third-generation Holocaust survivors. One of the things I’ve discovered in talking to children and grandchildren of survivors — and survivors themselves — is that there is often a battle within them. The first side: no one helped us, therefore it’s not my responsibility to help anyone else. A kind of antagonistic posture toward the world. Or the flip side: because no one helped us, everyone is my responsibility. How does the Torah help us negotiate those paths?
HELD: This is something I talk about at some length in the chapter on loving immigrants in my book. I’ll share an experience I had in college. I heard Leonard Fein — [FLAG: confirm spelling] the legendary liberal Jewish political activist — say something that, as a college student, I thought was very beautiful but didn’t seem quite right to me.
What Leonard said was — and I should note it was about 40 years ago, so I may be misremembering — Leonard said: there are two kinds of people. People who think about having been victimized in the past and conclude, “No one lifted a finger to help me, I don’t owe anybody anything.” And then people who say, “No one lifted a finger to help me, therefore anyone who needs help feels like my responsibility.”
And I remember thinking: Leonard, that’s very powerful. But what I would want to say is — that’s not two kinds of people. That’s two voices in almost all of us.
My parents were the age of most of my friends’ grandparents growing up. My father was from Poland, my mother from Kovna, in Lithuania. My parents both escaped with their families in the late thirties. The Holocaust is very much part of my life — it was their life story. They lost everyone. And I felt that raw sense of empathy, and rage. And they are not actually mutually exclusive, I think, in the DNA of a person carrying a lot of trauma.
What I’ve tried to suggest is that it’s important for readers of the Torah to realize how non-obvious the mandate to love the immigrant really is. People could have said: we were immigrants in Egypt and it was a nightmare for generations — to hell with the world. That’s not crazy. And instead, the Torah invites us to cultivate the other voice — the voice that says: we were immigrants for generations and it was a nightmare, therefore immigrants are our responsibility.
SALKIN: So your preferred translation of the term ger — which we often translate as “stranger” or “sojourner” — is “immigrant.” What difference does that make?
HELD: The word ger is extremely elusive. The way to know that is simply to open up fifteen Bible translations and find twelve different renderings. So we know what a ger is historically: it is someone who is not part of the kin group who has come to live among you. And because they are not part of the kin group, they are not part of the in-group, and therefore subject to exploitation.
As a somewhat obscure footnote: some scholars believe that some gerim were actually Israelites from other tribes. I was a member of the tribe of Issachar, for whatever reason I had to leave, and I went to live among the tribe of Reuben — I could be a ger.
The old translation most people know is the King James: “sojourner” — the connotation being a person who has come to dwell with you, most likely temporarily. The JPS uses “stranger,” which is why so many Jews know that translation. The trouble is: no matter how many times you explain to people that it doesn’t mean the guy across the street I’ve never met, that’s what they hear. I’ve been doing this for thirty years. It’s very hard to get people to realize that “stranger” is being used in a totally different way.
A few years ago I noticed that a whole series of academic scholars had started translating ger as “immigrant.” I tried to figure out why. It predates Trump — I don’t think it was a particularly political thing. What I found is a scholar named Frank Spina [FLAG: confirm] who says: I prefer “immigrant” because “stranger” or “sojourner” just describes the present predicament of the person. But “immigrant” reminds you that they’re a person with a story. In the ancient world, people don’t uproot themselves unless they’ve survived something — some kind of crisis, political oppression, economic struggle. “Immigrant” connotes: this is a person who’s carrying a lot. And I found that arresting. The word actually does something to how I think about the person.
Then I noticed — it’s actually in a footnote in my book, I had completely forgotten — that Rashi, the greatest Jewish Bible commentator, on the book of Exodus, says: a ger is someone who used to live in one land but has now moved to live with you in your land. That’s called an immigrant.
And one of the reasons I think it’s helpful: “stranger” or “sojourner” allows us to fend off the intensity of the claim. “I don’t know any sojourners, do you?” But I know a lot of immigrants. Just this morning, I walked into a restaurant for coffee, I was at a dry cleaning shop — as I went about my business, I interacted with all kinds of immigrants, new and old. When the Torah says “love the immigrant,” that makes a claim on me every single day of my life. If I hear “love the sojourner,” it neutralizes it. The word “immigrant” is much more lively. It shakes me right up. I’ve started using it because I think it does ethical and psychological work.
SALKIN: I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I now admit I was probably wrong about something. I’ve written about ahavat hager — the love of the ger — quite often, and I often translated that commandment as the commandment to take special care of people who are not only immigrants, but the people who were already in the land when you got there. Certainly the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua are not exactly friendly toward the ancient Canaanites. But what would this have to say about how we are to deal with, let’s say, an indigenous population?
HELD: I have to be honest — I find this a very difficult question.
I was speaking to a friend about this recently, and on a friend’s feed, a Palestinian friend of his said — I don’t remember the exact context — something like: “I really don’t like it when well-meaning Jews refer to us as gerim. It makes it sound like you’ve always been there and we recently came seeking refuge. And whatever happens in this land, that’s not actually the story. My great-great-great-great-grandparents lived here. I’m not a ger.”
And then a student of mine — a young Israeli Orthodox leftist, quite traditionally observant and politically very far left — said to me: “I don’t like referring to Palestinians as gerim, because I know they were there first in some fundamental way. But I’m scared not to, because I’m scared that extremists will say: if they’re not gerim, then what are they? The seven nations?”
SALKIN: That is a real problem, historically. And we can circle back. Certainly there are Palestinians who can trace their roots back more than a thousand years to the land of Israel. And there are also Palestinians who can trace their roots back two or three generations — who came in the fading years of the Ottoman Empire around the same time my grandparents or great-grandparents could have made that choice, instead of coming to America, of going to the land of Israel itself. “When someone got here” is a childish game, as we know. It’s about how we treat those people.
But what I really want to zoom in on is something you discuss in your book. It is clear in Deuteronomy that God is described as loving the stranger, the immigrant, the ger — providing food and clothing. And you’ve said something very powerful: this is imitatio dei. The act of imitating God. In my entire way of thinking about what it means to imitate God, I never thought of it this way. What does that mean for our spiritual lives in practical terms?
HELD: Let me explain where I get that from, and then make it more contemporary.
There are some things in the Jewish tradition that the rabbis of the Talmud refer to as imitatio dei — visiting the sick, comforting the mourners, burying the dead. There are also certain things the Bible itself already implies are imitatio dei. One of them is keeping Shabbat — that’s right there in Genesis. You should rest because God rested.
And then if you’re reading Deuteronomy closely, you go back to the verses I mentioned: God loves the stranger; you too must love the stranger. In loving the stranger, you are learning to emulate God’s love. You are learning to love as God loves. Or, to put the point more radically: you learn to love those whom God loves. You show special favor to those to whom God shows special favor.
The Torah says, in an interesting way: God shows no special favor — but loves the stranger, the immigrant. And I think what that means is: God is not impressed by how much money you made on Wall Street. That is not how God measures our lives. God is impressed by whether you actually love in the way that God loves.
I would push the point one step further — and this is something I got from a contemporary Bible scholar named Daniel Carroll [FLAG: confirm full name] — the verse says that God shows love for the immigrant by giving the immigrant food and clothing. And we might wonder: how does God do that? I don’t see heavenly care packages dropping from the sky. What Carroll says is: maybe the Torah is saying that God provides the immigrant with food and clothing — and do you know how God does that? By summoning you.
SALKIN: You become the means.
HELD: Exactly. Is that homiletical or is that the plain sense of Deuteronomy? I’m not sure, and I don’t know how much I care. It is a very powerful message for how to live in a world in which we don’t see God working manifest miracles on a daily basis. The idea that if I internalize that God loves widows, orphans, strangers — people who are vulnerable, subject to exploitation, actively being exploited — and that I become the means by which God resists that, I become the means by which God provides love and care: I find that very daunting and very inspiring. Let me underline both of those words.
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SALKIN: Hi, welcome back. I’m Rabbi Jeff Salkin. This is Martini Judaism, for those who want to be shaken and stirred. We are hanging out today with my friend and teacher, Rabbi Shai Held. We’re talking about how the Torah views immigrants.
I want to say something about your scholarship, Shai. One of the things I noticed when I first started reading your Torah commentary is how incredibly generous and hospitable you are to the insights of Christian and non-Jewish secular biblical scholars — in a way that I was trained to be when I did my doctoral work at Princeton Theological Seminary, where I had no choice. But it really is a blessing, Shai, how you bring those insights in. You didn’t have to, but you do.
HELD: I appreciate your noticing that and saying it. You know, Maimonides says at the beginning of his Eight Chapters — his introduction to Pirkei Avot — in a very well-known statement: hear the truth from whoever says it. And I sometimes feel: if I take seriously the idea that the Bible is the word of God — whatever we mean by that, that’s a different podcast — then wouldn’t I want to look absolutely everywhere for its meaning? And it is also important to me as a principle to bring the Jewish tradition into conversation with as many voices and cultural contexts as possible.
SALKIN: You really exemplify “who is wise? — the one who learns from all people.” So let’s tell some stories. One of the things that impressed me in your class is how you use the narratives of the Torah to express the opportunities, the dangers, and the vulnerabilities of being an immigrant. When we talk about how Avram and Sarai — who will become Abraham and Sarah — descended into Egypt, can you retell that story? Because when you taught it, you said that at that moment Avram experiences the vulnerability and the powerlessness of being an immigrant in another society.
HELD: Yes — and I’ll give attribution, because attribution matters to me. This is an insight I got from Patrick Miller [FLAG: confirm], who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary for many years. The experience of reading a text you think you know, and then being shown something that never crossed your mind — I love that.
What Patrick Miller says about the story of Abraham and Sarah going to Egypt — they go there lagur sham, to be immigrants there, to seek haven there — is this: the debate that Jews often have is whether Abraham did the wrong thing by telling Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister, thereby making her subject to exploitation and vulnerability. There are all kinds of discussions about this, and Jews are very passionate about it, and it raises genuinely difficult questions. All of that is true and right.
But Miller holds the story up to the light from a totally different angle and says: the point of that story was in part to show how Abraham and Sarah, as immigrants, face impossible choices and are powerless to get out of the situation that haunts them. Abraham doesn’t know what to do. It’s not about defending or evaluating the choice he makes. What Miller wants to say is: just look at how hard it is to be an immigrant. Look at the ways you are often faced with impossible choices. You don’t have any means of protecting yourself. What is he supposed to do when Pharaoh decides, “I want what you have”?
What I think — and I’m honestly not sure if this is Miller or just how I read it — is that all of a sudden these foundational narratives become lessons in empathy. You hear the story of Abraham, you imaginatively enter his space, and you think: what would I have done? This is hard.
And there’s another story Miller retells that I found so beautiful, and actually devastating. In the famous story where Lot is trying to protect his guests from the hostile men of Sodom — he says, in Hebrew, al na achai tare’u, “please, my brothers, don’t do this horrible thing” — they then remind him: “You’re here as an immigrant. You came here lagur. You are not one of us.” And Miller says that moment is meant to introduce us to the crushingness of an immigrant wanting to be seen as part of the society and being told: never. Not ever. You’re not one of us.
SALKIN: It’s devastating.
HELD: It’s so powerful. You talk to people in this society who are Latino, who have been living here for decades, and they’ll tell you they are terrified — going to work every day. It reminds me of the Lot story. And honestly, it suggests that we are behaving like Sodomites.
SALKIN: Just yesterday, I was renting a car — long line of people — and this Hasidic kid is trying to rent a car. Black coat, long peyos, and he can’t make it happen because he doesn’t have the language. So I say, Atah medaber Ivrit? — do you speak Hebrew? He says: only Yiddish. And I’m not able to help him because my Yiddish is pretty schwach. There was no one else there who could help him, even though this was Miami Beach.
I’m feeling protective toward this kid who’s wearing the mark of differentness in his clothes. I’m just waiting for someone to pounce. I’m feeling like a mother lioness.
So this brings me to where we are today. One of the things you said, which I’m glad you said because I believe it to be true, is that if we’re going to look to the Torah for a standardized evaluation of modern immigration policy, we’re going to wind up very disappointed — or we might use it in intellectually and spiritually non-rigorous ways. What is it there for? And what are the dangers, maybe even the opportunities, of using this material to talk about contemporary policy?
HELD: That’s a really important point, because my sense is that people on both the right and the left often fall prey to the temptation to imagine some kind of one-to-one correspondence from the Torah to their own day. And no matter how sacred, holy, or even divine you think the Torah is — that is asking it to do work I’m not sure it can do, or even was intended to do. It’s not a book of public policy for a struggling democracy in a global capitalist economy.
There’s a temptation some people might have — one I actually understand and at moments even relate to — which is: well, if that’s true, then what is it? A bunch of clichés? And what I want to argue is that the Torah, although it can’t give me the number of Syrian immigrants America should take in, surely can and does articulate an ethos. That word has become very important to me in thinking about the Bible and contemporary life.
At baseline, at minimum: you cannot read the Torah with integrity and conclude anything but that demonizing and dehumanizing people who come to your land seeking a new life is an assault on God’s own values. Now, that doesn’t tell me how many Syrians. We should not pretend that it does.
And I would want to argue — and I’m sorry this is going to come out in a rambly way — that most of the ways that ICE has behaved in the last year: I don’t actually care if you’re a liberal or a conservative on immigration policy. Some things ought to be intolerable. In the language of the tradition, in a different context: lo zu haderech — this is not the way you do it. I don’t care what your immigration policy is. You do not behave this way.
SALKIN: And you’ve argued elsewhere — in that same class — that the greatest danger here is also a violation of what it means to be a sovereign nation. The king in Deuteronomy had to have a copy of the Torah that he himself had written, which he kept on the throne. So it’s a violation of what it means for us to be a society of laws.
HELD: What I said as the conclusion of the class you attended is actually something I added almost at the last minute, because it suddenly dawned on me: the discussion about the biblical approach to immigrants is crucial — but it’s not the whole story. Because just as integral, and maybe even more urgent, is the question: what does it mean to have people in power who mock the very idea of being subject to the law?
SALKIN: And there’s something deeper than that. I’m really glad we’re talking about biblical text, because — notwithstanding the fact that Christianity essentially declared the laws of the Torah to be null and void, substituting the belief in the risen Christ for Jewish law, as Paul did — they are very good at quoting selective biblical verses from Leviticus about homosexuality, for example, in Leviticus 18. But they don’t go one chapter further, to Leviticus 19, which would teach us about loving the ger, the immigrant in our midst. It’s incoherent.
HELD: I think there’s a fair bit of truth to that. To me, the more I think about it — and it’s funny, in my own thinking I find the Catholic notion of the “seamless garment” to be really interesting. That is to say: if you want to be pro-life, then be pro-life. And by the way, the Pope just said this very recently — if you want to be pro-life, that’s not just about fetuses. That’s also about immigrants.
SALKIN: I find Catholic moral teaching — going back to the Bishops’ letter on the economy, the Bishops’ letter on nuclear war, things I have a memory of — to be, while it irritates me along some of the edges, at the very least coherent.
HELD: And at the end of the day, that’s this notion of ethos: does the plight of the vulnerable make a claim on you?
I have a very dear friend who does not share my political views — he is very right wing on all kinds of issues. But I have tremendous respect for him. Even though I disagree with him very strongly on a lot, when he says, “I really believe it is not government that should be taking care of people who are poor — it’s private philanthropy” — he happens to give millions of dollars a year to soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and so on. I don’t think he’s going about it the right way, but what he says, he says with integrity.
SALKIN: In other words, you may not love his philosophy, but you’re looking at the dollars he gives away.
HELD: More importantly, I’m looking at someone who is actually true to what he says he believes. And he would say: “I do think the plight of the vulnerable is my responsibility. I think about how to implement that differently than you do.” Okay — that’s a conversation we can have with integrity.
At very minimum, demonizing people needs to be entirely beyond the pale. You cannot have a president of the United States who speaks about human beings in the way that Donald Trump speaks about human beings. It is intolerable. I don’t care if you’re a right-winger or a left-winger. You cannot have the so-called leader of the free world dehumanizing people three times a day before breakfast. You can’t do it.
SALKIN: There was a time — and it wasn’t that long ago — when we expected an American president, whatever their private views and actions were — the private immoralities of Bill Clinton, the public immoralities and lawlessness of Richard Nixon — all of this aside, in our lifetime there was never a president whom you wouldn’t want your kid to grow up and behave like in public.
So before we finish — because we could get stuck on this and I would love to get stuck on this — the exciting conclusion: the ger, the immigrant in the Torah and in the rabbinic imagination, comes to mean someone who has converted to Judaism. My own little take on that, and I think I’m quoting you: we move from someone who has immigrated into a Jewish land into someone who has now immigrated into the Jewish people.
HELD: Yes. And if I’m not mistaken, it was Yehezkel Kaufmann [FLAG: confirm spelling] — the legendary Bible scholar — who first said this, though it may go back further. The term threatened to fall into meaninglessness once there was no longer a Jewish Commonwealth. And so: what is the closest parallel to someone who has immigrated into your sovereign country? Someone who has become part of your religious community.
And of course, the Torah already includes the ger in certain fundamental religious rituals. So the path toward understanding the ger as a convert is made possible by biblical law itself.
It’s also worth saying — and we should say this with appropriate nuance — that also means the ger, the immigrant, is expected to take steps to assimilate into the mainstream culture. Every seven years, I think I’m remembering this correctly — when the people come together to hear the Torah read at Hakhel, the ger is included. I think that is symbolic of the fact that the ger is not invited to come and remain utterly separate. He, she, they also have to take steps toward integrating into the culture.
But interestingly, the Torah’s main lens is to speak to the residents about their obligations to the immigrants, more than it speaks to the obligations of immigrants toward them. I think that’s interesting and worth reflecting on — where responsibility lies. That’s something I need to think about more.
SALKIN: One of the things I really love about you, Shai, is that you’re not shy — forgive me — about admitting the unfinished work you have before you. Whenever I sit and learn from you — and that’s happened so many times over the years — I wind up saying: now I really have to think about this more deeply.
You shared something in your class that I want to end with. You said — and I love this, and maybe it should be on the doorpost of every house of worship in the world — the question is not, do you believe in God? The question is: whom does the God you believe in love? Take the God that you believe in. Who does that God love?
I think that is the overriding theological, moral, and ethical question of our time. Write that down on an index card or put it on your phone and keep it with you — because you’re going to meet people every day who claim to love God. And you’re going to have to figure out, and help them figure out: the God they love — whom does that God also love?
With special thanks once again to our friend and teacher, Rabbi Shai Held. Please look up his work at hadar.org — H-A-D-A-R dot O-R-G. They are doing revolutionary, transformational work in the Jewish world. And you’re going to want to find and read his book, Judaism Is About Love. It’s a very, very important message.
I also invite you to follow my regular column, Martini Judaism, on religionnews.com. Many thanks, friends — and we’ll see you again soon.
