On Kindness to Strangers

Having immersed myself for the past several months in the judicial and political elements of Torah, I find it impossible to view certain current events without recalling imperatives and admonishments in the Bible.

This weekend has been full of horrors in the Middle East that recall millennia of hostilities among the people who call that part of the world their home – the Israelites and Canaanites, Moabites, Ammonites and so many other nations that fought over these territories for reasons not terribly different from what we witness today.

But my thoughts recently have been more consumed by issues of immigration and refuge, which have reached a fevered intensity in the United States over the past several months. Politicians of all stripes agree that we are in the midst of an immigration crisis. Some call for closing of our borders, others for greater attention to the causes of migration from places like Haiti and Venezuela. What strikes me most is that few call for kindness to these strangers in our midst, one of the Bible’s most urgent and persistent commands.

My own community, Quincy, Massachusetts, last month saw a neo-Nazi rally targeted at an immigrant shelter at a local college, a counter-protest the next day, and a few days later a tumultuous town meeting at a school auditorium that brought out 500 or so residents, all determined to be heard and few interested in listening.

“You shall neither mistreat a stranger nor oppress him,” God tells Moses in Exodus 22, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Strangers – also referred to as sojourners and resident aliens – are named over and over again, along with widows and orphans, as disadvantaged people to whom we should show generosity, sympathy and brotherhood. Often, God’s exhortations on this subject are framed in the notion that, as in the quote above, the condition of these strangers is akin to that of Israelites in the kingdom of Egypt.

But in a society that is quick to evoke the Ten Commandments as well as sexual and behavioral prohibitions named in the Torah, there is next to no acknowledgement of this requirement that we show kindness to strangers in our midst.

Instead, the mainstream effort appears to be centered on ensuring that these people get nowhere near us.

Hospitality to travellers has been a core value in the Middle East since time immemorial. The sin of Sodom was not, as is so often supposed, homosexual activity but rathe failure to of the Sodomites to show hospitality and respect to the angels whom Lot welcomed as strangers into his home.

How is it that we have lost track so thoroughly of this basic requirement from God, in a population that largely claims to be believers in that same God?

I’m not going to argue that the world hasn’t changed enormously in the three millennia since the Torah was set down on paper. The world is vastly more populated, as well as politically, economically and technologically more complex than that of the Biblical-era Israelites. But in human terms, we are largely the same as our long-ago ancestors. We live, die, scratch out a living, raise families, seek safety and shelter, provide for our children and our aging loved ones, and interact with those around us in ways very similar to those distant predecessors.

One of the reasons the Bible remains so central to our society is how shockingly familiar the emotional lives of the ancient Israelites are to our own. Reading about the rivalry between Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers, Sarah and Hagar, we connect immediately to the conflicts in our own personal lives. Moses’s many frustrations with the people he is leading to freedom, as well as the skepticism and stubbornness of those people, are nearly identical to feelings we encounter today. Is anyone surprised that the first person born on Earth turns out to be the first murderer?

While I don’t take the Bible literally, I do find it useful to discuss it as if its stories are real. I do the same thing with other great literature. We continue to read Dickens, Eliot, Fitzgerald and the other great writers because there is so much resonance in our own lives with the experiences of their characters.

So in that spirit I want to suggest that the reason God finds it necessary to repeat over and over again the requirement of hospitable and generous behavior to strangers is exactly because it is not the sort of thing that comes naturally to most people. We hardly need reminders to do what we were going to do anyway. As Jesus put it near the opening of the earliest Gospel, “They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:17)

We need reminders to care for the needy – for the strangers, widows and orphans among us – because it is both easy and tempting to ignore them. They get in the way of our easy enjoyment of life. Historically, churches and government institutions have provided reminders. But we live in an age where some churchgoers complain that teaching the words of Jesus amount to liberal indoctrination. (see “Evangelicals Are Now Rejecting ‘Liberal’ Teachings of Jesus,” Newsweek, 9 August 2023). Meanness has overtaken charity in much of our discourse.

It is unlikely that public policy would ever reflect exactly the teaching of the Bible – and I would be the first to complain vociferously if it did so – but I believe that in the past it informed public policy in a way that has largely disappeared. Today, we fight to post crosses and the text of the Ten Commandments as a substitute for thoughtful consideration of the meanings of religious teachings.

The Bible is used as a weapon rather than as a guide. When that happens, there may be little room for kindness to strangers.