The Stranger Among Us
By Rabbi Reuven Hammer
Two different groups have recently begun to gather lists of stores and employers in Jerusalem who declare that they do not and will not hire Arabs. Their plan is to post and distribute these lists so that people will know which stores to patronize and which to avoid. Personally, if I saw such a list I would avoid the stores that refuse to hire Arabs. Can you imagine the reaction of the Jewish community in Britain, Canada or the USA if a Moslem group created such a list concerning the hiring of Jews? I would hope that the propagation of such lists would be considered a violation of the democratic principles upon which Israel is based and would be declared illegal.
This undertaking, however, is not alone a problem for democracy. It is also a violation of Judaism and of Torah law and should be denounced by any believing Jew. The Torah is very clear on this matter. Moses, under Divine guidance, in formulating the laws that would apply once the Israelites entered their own land, took into account that there would be others living there as well and was seriously concerned with their rights and their treatment. As I have shown in detail in my recent book The Torah Revolution, the Torah recognizes three categories of people who may be living in the Land of Israel – ezrah, ger, nochri. The first is an Israelite, the second a non-Israelite living here permanently, the third is one who is there now but is not a resident. Although later rabbinic law extended the category of the ger to included converts to Judaism, the original meaning of the term in the Torah was not that at all and would easily apply to the Arabs and any other non-Jews living here.
The urgent message of the Torah is that “You shall not wrong a stranger [ger] or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20). This is repeated again even more explicitly in the very next chapter: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). The holiness code in Leviticus reiterates this and equates the stranger to the native: “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God (Leviticus 19:33-34). Unlike other religious codes in the ancient Near East that virtually ignore the rights of ‘strangers,’ the Torah goes out of its way to offer them protection, and that protection includes the specific protection of the God of Israel! “For the Lord your God….upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing. You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:17-19).
It was the experience of being strangers and then slaves in Egypt made us sensitive to the suffering that people undergo under foreign rule. Surely the later experience of two thousand years of Exile should have made us understand the soul of the stranger even more deeply. It is therefore doubly painful to hear of attempts to keep Arabs from working in stores and restaurants or living in our cities, especially when these come from rabbinical leaders who speak out against equal treatment of Arab citizens of Israel, going so far as to call all of them “our enemies.” How can we forget who it was that called for boycotts of stores owned by Jews and for the dismissal of Jewish workers of all professions?
“You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer, whether a fellow countryman or a stranger… (Deuteronomy 24:14).Those words of the Torah speak powerfully to our times and our situation. If we as Jews cannot appreciate the feelings of the stranger, who can?