Rabbi Amelia Wolf
This week’s Torah portion is Acharei-Kedoshim: Leviticus 16:1 – 20:27
There are two categories of people whom we are commanded to love as we love ourselves. The first category is quite familiar. It is our neighbor. Our peer. Our fellow Israelite, the people with whom we identify most deeply. This injunction is simple and direct. The text provides no further elaboration.
However, when addressing the second category of people we are commanded to love as ourselves, the text provides more.
When a stranger resides with you in your land, do not oppress them. Like the citizens among you shall the stranger who resides with you be. And you shall love them as yourself for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the ETERNAL your God.
The Torah is given to us as imperfect human beings. It recognizes that we may resist extending our love to those who are different from us. And so this instruction, to love the stranger, comes with an explanation: we, who know what it is like to live as a minority, targeted and scapegoated in Egypt (and Russia and Iraq and Germany and Yemen and Spain and Ethiopia and the list goes on); we, who know what it is like to be depicted by Pharaoh as a too-numerous demographic threat, must never put others through what we ourselves have been through. We are commanded to cultivate empathy.
And yet, once we get past the differences between the commandments, they remain strikingly similar. Love this person as you love yourself. And how does one do that?
For the 12th-century commentator Ibn Ezra, loving the stranger is the same as loving your neighbor. It means loving what is good and what is right for them. Because, as both verses end, I am the ETERNAL your God. God has created us both.
But Ibn Ezra also points out a difference between the stranger (a noncitizen) and one’s neighbor (an Israelite). Why should the law specify not abusing the stranger? Because, he says, the stranger has less access to the power structures that enable one to protect themselves. They, like the widow and the fatherless with whom they are so often legally grouped, are left vulnerable in a legal system that privileges the citizen: the male, adult Israelite. And yet here we are taught that we should be treating them like citizens all the same.
Loving the stranger as yourself means extending the protections that you enjoy and that your neighbor enjoys so that the stranger may shelter under them.
The 19th-century commentator Shadal teaches that in the ancient world it was the norm for people to love only their own people and that strangers and immigrants were debased in their eyes. It is for that reason we were given the specific instruction to love the stranger.
Sadly, it is clear that debasing, defaming and abusing immigrants was not only the norm in ancient nations but is actually quite in vogue. Our laws, rather than protecting ourselves and others from our crueler instincts, are being used to encourage that cruelty. And so this instruction, Shadal might say, is all the more relevant for us now.
It is not enough to say that we care about people in the abstract or even that we feel love for them. The Torah is clear that love comes in the form of concrete legal and social protections. It means treating people with respect and dignity. And when it comes to noncitizens and immigrants, it means extending protections and safeguards that we might have thought were the privilege of the citizen and native-born only.
Why? Because we remember what it was like to have those protections ripped from us. Because we ought to treat strangers in our country the way we would want to be treated were we strangers in their countries. But most of all because I am the ETERNAL your God. God created us and God created them. And that should be enough.
Rabbi Amelia Wolf is the rabbi of Congregation Etz Hayim in Arlington, Virginia.
