Where is Ukraine in the Haggadah?

The Russian assault on Ukraine casts an undeniable shadow on this year’s sedarim. Since the seder tells the story of the Jewish revolt against tyrants in the distant as well as the more recent past, I was curious: What are the opportunities, using the traditional seder symbols and texts, to bring in Ukraine to the Seder conversation? Where is Ukraine in the Haggadah?

I. THE REFUGEES

As I write, less than a week before Pesach arrives, the BBC reports that more than 10.5 million people have fled their homes, including more than half of the country’s children. 4.3 million have fled the country and another 6.5 million have been been displaced from their homes and fled elsewhere within Ukraine.  Where are these refugees recalled in the Seder?

1.     In the taste of the Matzah. Matzah is the food of people who have to flee their homes; of those who have to leave so quickly that there isn’t even time for the bread to rise: And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had taken out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, since they had been driven out of Egypt and could not delay; nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves (Exodus 12:39).

Many of the Ukrainian refugees were forced to leave their homes for safer environs like Poland, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, and, for the lucky ones, the State of Israel. Many left with the clothes on their backs and barely time to grab their most precious possessions.

That is the essence of Matzah. It can be the bread of deliverance that arrives in the blink of an eye (as in Egypt), but it can also be the food of those who are forced out of their homes just as quickly (לַחְמָא עַנְיָא / “the bread of affliction” indeed).

2.     In the Yachatz. We take the middle matzah and break it in half. As we do so, consider the following meditation:

We break this middle matzah and are reminded of so many divisions in our unfolding story.

Some separations are blessings: “God separated the light from the darkness” (Gen. 1:4); “God made the expanse to separate between the waters above and the waters below” (Gen. 1:7); “The waters split and Israel went into the Sea on dry ground” (Ex 14:21-22).

But other separations are tragic: Children torn from their parents in war-torn Ukraine, families displaced from their homes.

As the Matzah is broken into two pieces, we recall those refugees who have fled for their lives in just these recent weeks, and we remember that as long as tyrants commit atrocities, our world and each of us cannot be considered whole.

II. PUTIN, THE TYRANT

It’s not hard to see in Putin the same sorts of megalomaniacal tyrants that stain human history, all the way back to the Pharaoh of the Exodus. Jewish history is littered with these sorts of thugs, as the Haggadah says:

שֶׁלֹּא אֶחָד בִּלְבָד עָמַד עָלֵינוּ לְכַלּוֹתֵנוּ, אֶלָּא שֶׁבְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר עוֹמְדִים עָלֵינוּ לְכַלוֹתֵנוּ
For it hasn’t been only one enemy who has risen up to annihilate us…

Us?

Yes, us. Certainly, many thousands of the Ukrainian refugees are Jews—at least before this war, Ukraine had the 10th largest Jewish community in the world. While Ukraine has a bloody and ugly history in its treatments of its Jews, there has been a Jewish presence there for over 1,000 years.

But that is only part of bigger picture.

Because the seder is also about freedom on a global scale. To celebrate Pesach is to declare: By virtue of our celebration, may others, too, be inspired towards liberation. Surely in our time, as much as ever, we must say: when some are enslaved, none of us are free.

And so, indeed, today another enemy is standing over us, threatening us all…

III. VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, JEWISH HERO

It is with pride tonight that we point towards President Zelenskyy, the Jewish leader of Ukraine who has made the case for freedom and justice for his country to the nations of the world.

Yet the Haggadah is famously reticent about naming human heroes. Moses’s name only appears once in the entire traditional Haggadah, emphasizing that deliverance comes only from God:

לֹא עַל־יְדֵי מַלְאָךְ, וְלֹא עַל־יְדֵי שָׂרָף, וְלֹא עַל־יְדֵי שָׁלִיחַ,
אֶלָּא הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא בִּכְבוֹדוֹ וּבְעַצְמוֹ.
Not through an angel, and not through a seraph, and not through an intermediary:
The Holy One alone, in all God’s divine glory.

So maybe we shouldn’t dwell too much on Zelenskyy?

But the inspiration of seeing this Jewish man—who carries the moral weight of family members murdered in the Holocaust—is an important part of tonight’s telling, too. For many of us, God acts in the world through human helping hands and voices of truth, like the voice of Zelenskyy.

The famous A Different Night Haggadah (eds. Noam Zion and David Dishon, ©1997) suggests a tradition attributed to Rabbi Al Axelrad at Brandeis in the 1970s: Having the family seder award an annual Shiphrah and Puah Prize to someone in the world who stood up to modern-day Pharaohs this year.

Shiphrah and Puah, you’ll recall, were the Hebrew midwives of Exodus 1, who refused to follow Pharaoh’s genocidal decree to kill Jewish baby boys. Their civil disobedience is the first act of rebellion that leads to Israel’s redemption. Today, we should consider at our seder those individuals who have stood up in the face of tyranny and oppression to be voices of hope and freedom.

Surely, President Zelenskyy carries the legacy of Shiphrah and Puah this Pesach!

IV. OUR ROLE IN THE STORY OF HOPE

There is a lot of “reminding”, “recalling”, and “commemorating” in the Seder. But our seder is incomplete if it remains in the realm of memory and storytelling. The Seder is a call, upon completing our celebration, to work and act to make the world whole again.

This is incorporated in Elijah’s Cup, symbol of the messianic hope for a future free of war and fear.

Long ago, my family adopted a well-known custom: we no longer leave Elijah’s Cup passively on our table, waiting for God to redeem us. Now we pass Elijah’s cup around the table, inviting each participant to pour in a few drops from her own glass—representing that unique responsibility of each of us to be God’s partner in the work of freedom. And so, too, should we leave this seder committed to the task:

·      Giving Tzedakah to help the refugees; for instance, through the JDC, the World Union for Progressive Judaism, Beit Polska/Jewish Renewal in Poland’s Refugee Relief, HIAS, the Kavod Tzedakah Fund, or other trustworthy organizations.

·      Celebrate and share the stories of those who are doing good, such as the Dream Doctors Project, an Israeli organization that has sent Mitzvah-clowns to the Ukrainian border to welcome the refugees with gentleness instead of fear.  Or Tel Aviv University, who has offered full scholarships to Ukrainian students and academics displaced by the war. Or the Survivor Mitzvah Project, who have been caring for Jewish elders in the FSU for years—and remain on the ground with those Ukrainian elders who have been unable to leave.

·      Urge the Israeli government to reject the far-right voices of isolationism and to accept even more refugees than they already have; insist that this is the sort of crisis for which the Zionist message rings loud and clear. (This might best be achieved with an email to your local Israeli consulate.)

·      Get ready—they’re coming. The Biden Administration has called for America to open its borders to 100,000 refugees in the weeks and months ahead. Will we be ready to welcome them into our homes and communities in the spirit of safety and security?

This is what it means to bring Elijah. And that call to freedom is incumbent upon each of us this Passover. In the words of the Hasidic master Rebbe Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787-1859, Poland):

We err if we believe that Elijah the Prophet comes in through the door.
Rather, he must enter through our hearts and our souls.

Don’t Kill Tsarnaev

I wrote this piece in 2015, on the two-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon terror attacks, which, as you’ll see in the essay, struck very close to home. With Friday’s Supreme Court announcement reinstating Tsarnaev’s death sentence, I returned to it and I’m re-posting here. I think it still holds up, and I’d be glad to hear your responses.

April 19, 2015

As we approach the anniversary of the Boston Marathon terrorist attacks, I’m thinking back to where I was at that fateful time.

After watching the early runners go past our home earlier in the morning, we set about our errands for the day. Most important was buying a suit for my son, who was becoming Bar Mitzvah in two months’ time. That’s where we were—in the suit store—when word started to spread: “There was a bomb at the finish line.”  Suddenly, the all the strangers in the store—customers and employees, adults and kids—were weirdly bound together as a community, straining to get details as they came through in real time, as happens once in a thankfully rare while when the world’s news are so powerful or so local that it makes everyone stop in their tracks.

The recent guilty verdict and the impending sentencing of Tsarnaev, as well as tomorrow’s Marathon, spark these memories and also prompt the question of whether this terrorist deserves the death penalty.

Opposition to capital punishment is one issue where consistent liberals sometimes waver. Despite the well-known facts that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent, and despite the fact that it costs the state exorbitant amounts of money, many people find they cannot harbor any  mercy for perpetrators of the most vicious crimes.  And anti-death penalty advocates simply must understand that and take those feelings into account.

I remember being a freshman in college during the Dukakis-Bush presidential debates in the fall of 1988, when the Bush camp was effectively painting Gov. Dukakis as a wimp. At one of the debates, Dukakis, an opponent of state executions, was asked how he would feel if it his wife had been raped and murdered. (Nice question.) Dukakis hemmed and hawed, and many pundits agreed that he lost the debate and showed he was out of touch with the American mainstream.

I remember even then, in my dorm room, jumping up and down and saying “Let me answer that question!”  The answer should have been:  Of course I’d want him dead! Of course, of course—a thousand times over! But: There’s a reason why in our judicial system, and any fair judicial system, the victims of crimes don’t get to determine the sentences of the convicted. That’s because victims naturally (and humanly) want more than justice; they want vengeance. And vengeance often runs counter to a society that strives to be marked by justice.

So where is Judaism on the death penalty? At first blush, the Torah seems to endorse capital punishment. There are many crimes—not just murder—in which the plain reading of the Torah calls for the criminal to be put to death.  (The Shabbat violator is put to death. So are witches. And incorrigible children!) The Talmud, in tractate Sanhedrin, describes the four different methods of execution that the Torah endorses:  stoning, burning, being slain by a sword, and strangling. (Never, it is important to point out, did ancient Israel employ crucifixion.)

However, if you really want to know what’s Jewish about a certain idea, you can’t just quote verses from the Torah. You have to look at the history of how that concept got interpreted and filtered in Jewish sources throughout the ages. The Torah, for instance, says that an incorrigible son must be put to death (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). The Talmud, however, wrings this notion dry. The law of the incorrigible son (ben sorer u’moreh) remains on the books; the Torah, after all, is G-d’s law, but its interpretation is given to human beings. And the Sages proceed to define the set of circumstances in which a person might fit the punishable category of “incorrigible” so tightly, so narrowly, that they can triumphantly declare that no such verdict “ever happened or ever will happen;” it is one of the laws that was simply given to us for the Mitzvah of studying it and learning from it (Sanhedrin 71a). They read the law out of existence!

In my understanding, they do the same thing with the death penalty. First, we must acknowledge that Talmudic law is religious, not civil, law—and thus, no Jewish religious court has executed anybody for anything in 2,000 years, since the days of sacrifices when the Temple stood (Sanhedrin 41a).  Furthermore, there are many crimes, such as violating Shabbat, for which the Torah may ostensibly permit the death penalty, but the Rabbis forbid it—saying, if G-d wants to execute, let G-d be the one who sheds the blood! (There’s a great midrash in Pesikta d’Rav Kahana 11:19 where Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korcha tells his colleague, a would-be executioner, that rather than kill a killer, “You should flee to the end of the world and let the Owner of the garden come and weed out His Own thorns!”)

Most telling of all is a conversation that is recorded in the Mishna (Makkot 1:10):

A court that puts one person to death in 7 years is called a murderous one.

Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah says:  Even once in 70 years!

Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva say:  If we had been in the Sanhedrin, no death sentence ever would have been passed! To which Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel objected, saying: If so, you would have multiplied the number of murderers in Israel.

A serious passage – it shows that even in the days of these sages (about 1900 years ago), the death penalty was controversial. These aren’t incidental; each of them, especially Rabbi Akiva, is a dominant figure in Jewish history.  And Rabbi Akiva himself, that great sage and political revolutionary, found that a human court could never raise itself to the threshold that justifies putting a defendant to death.

There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty. I agree with those who say that eliminating state executions puts us on the side of civilization. The death penalty cheapens and coarsens our entire society, and puts us on the wrong side of history, in the company with the likes of Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and Syria. It is demonstrably racist and classist. And The Innocence Project has shown us, time and time again, that we get it wrong—and I concur that it is better to let 99 guilty men to go free than to kill one innocent man.

I suppose the most Jewishly authentic policy (Rabbi Akiva’s policy) might be: have the death penalty on the books, but never use it.  But that ideal might be too subtle and nuanced for our times; instead, let’s do away with its archaic barbarism completely.  Let Tsarnaev live—with all his infamy and disgrace. 

Remembering Al Vorspan, My Teacher and Hero

My teacher, friend, and hero Al Vorspan has died. I suppose I knew this day would come—it was 10 years ago when I first heard him say, “I’m so old that I don’t even buy green bananas anymore”—but it’s hard to believe we live in a world that Al no longer inhabits.

By the way, if that seems irreverent, I feel okay using that line about the bananas, because Al was one of the funniest people on the planet. He was also one of the most righteous, and humor + righteousness is a powerful combination. (Consider the alternatives. Humor without righteousness can be terribly cruel. Righteousness without humor can be stultifyingly pretentious.)

Others will eulogize him more fully than I, but the arc of his career includes essentially being the preeminent voice of Judaism and social justice throughout the second half of the 20th century. He was a committed Zionist and a passionate fighter against antisemitism. He was director of the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, a builder of the Religious Action Center in DC, a leader in the civil rights and nuclear freeze movements, and zealous fighter for human rights. He sat in a jail cell in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964 with sixteen rabbis, brought south to protest segregation at the behest of Martin Luther King. He taught rabbinical students at HUC the history of the Jewish involvement in the Great Causes of the century, in a class that basically consisted of Al and Rabbi Jerry Davidson telling their stories from the trenches. (I fear I still owe them a paper.) He authored textbooks, sourcebooks on Jewish social justice, and at least four collections of humor. He also was a hysterically failed candidate for Congress, the wellspring of some of his best stories.  

His name should be thundered from the mountaintops as one of the Great Jews of Our Time.

In 2007, I was at the Consultation on Conscience, the Reform movement’s bi-annual political action conference in Washington, and grabbing 30 minutes alone with Al was always one of the reasons I attended. We decided to sit together for the next session, to be addressed by a certain ex-Governor who was running as a Republican candidate for President. (I remember exactly who it was, but that weasel doesn’t deserve to have his name in the same essay where I’m remembering a tzaddik like Al.)

This guy—a not terribly sophisticated conservative, unprepared by his aides, addressing a progressive Jewish organization—gave a speech that was a comedy of errors. I remember when he told us his qualifications to be President:  I served many years as Governor, before going into business and making some money… which is something I understand you people know a little something about. (Paging Ilhan Omar!!!)  Al turned to me, and his jaw was on the floor.

Al’s face was getting redder and redder as this guy lumbered through his policy initiatives, including clearing his state’s welfare rolls, shackling labor unions, etc. But then he got to Jewish issues, and he wanted this group to know that he was a supporter in the fight against antisemitism. He was a longtime friend of the ADL. Except that he didn’t say “ADL.” He kept saying, over and over, “…JDL… JDL…JDL.”  The first time might be excused as a slip; the third showed this guy didn’t have a clue about Jewish organizations. (The JDL was the radical, violent organization run by the late and unlamented Meir Kahane. The ADL, of course, is quite different; it’s one of the premier civil rights and interfaith bridge-building organizations in our system.)

Well, Al Vorspan, the voice of Jewish social justice, just about had steam blowing out of his earholes. After the speech, one of the governor’s flacks came to the podium and informed us that the governor didn’t mean any of the things that he had just spent twenty minutes telling us. It was a comedy—and I was so glad to share this moment with Al. We laughed and groaned about it for years afterwards.

A few years back, I invited Al to speak in my community on the 40th yartzeit of Martin Luther King. He agreed readily, and said, “What do you want me to accomplish?” I told him: “Al, I think that too many people simply don’t know the stories from the era. Tell them the stories.” Which he did, brilliantly.

The other thing that I think people forget is why we’re supposed to do the work of social justice. Al would send us back to the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible, and he wrote at least two textbooks on their messages. At a time when the “prophetic voice” has been emptied of all but its hoariest clichés, it would be a good idea to launch a study of the Prophets in Al’s honor. (I was distressed to hear that some Reform synagogues are getting rid of the Shabbat Haftarah reading, because their bar mitzvah kids just couldn’t “connect” to the words. What a relinquishing of one of the most crucial Jewish literary gifts to the world!)

Around three thousand years ago, a religious phenomenon—prophecy—arose in the Ancient Near East. Prophets had a direct line to G-d, and delivered the divine message to an audience that often didn’t want to receive it. The prophets gave equilibrium to a religious world of priestly worship and legal adherence. Together, the interaction of law, ritual, and prophecy shaped ancient Israel.

My teachers warned us that there wasn’t one singular prophetic message—they had a lot of truths to speak to lots of powerful figureheads. But one common feature was: the prophets insisted that a religious life of legal conformity emptied of human and divine concerns was worse than hollow; it was hypocrisy.  So a crucial part of the message of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Amos, etc., is to behave according to the spirit as well as the letter of G-d’s law. If you believe that G-d has one Divine Image in the world—namely, other human beings—you had better act accordingly, by protecting the rights and integrity and inherent dignity of other people.

In our tradition, prophecy came to an end around 2300 years ago. And understandably so: it was a messy institution. But since then, we have wrestled to bring the message of these figures—who would hold our feet to the fire and make sure we lived according to the values we purported to hold—to fruition.  Al Vorspan was the great exemplar of this voice for our time. His name should be remembered, and told to the next generation. In that way, it will remain a blessing.

Reflections on a Winter Nor'easter

As I write, my family is stuck in our home, as the most recent nor’easter has brought down trees and power lines on our street. We spent last night by candlelight, cooking dinner in our fireplace.  Shabbat is arriving imminently, so a cousin will come and pick us up around the corner and bring us to her house, and we’ll get a reprieve from the cold and dark.

Much more important is the elderly couple on our block, who are being evacuated by the fire department and will be taken to stay in a local hotel until the street is cleared and the power returns, which seems to still be a few days away.

And you know what? It doesn’t matter. It’s a hassle, for sure.  But if nothing else, it should be a reminder—a reminder of just how darn easy and comfortable we have it here in these affluent suburbs. Not everyone, of course. We have neighbors in our town who struggle to make ends meet, people who have grave financial worries about their future. My wife and I know people well who have lived without a roof over their heads, who are not able to provide three meals a day for themselves and their families.

But most of us live fairly comfortable lives here—not just the wealthiest nation in the world, but the wealthiest nation that the world has ever known. 

And a little inconvenience from Mother Nature should be a reminder of just how good we have it, and how there are people near and far who know real desperation. If times like this don’t help us grow into people with deeper stores of empathy and compassion, then we are truly hopeless.

If you happen to live in an affluent place, and if you know that your electrical power, automobile, food supply, and security in your housing will regain their equilibrium pretty quickly, you should be profoundly grateful. Because that means you don’t have to count yourself among:

·      The ¼ of all human beings in the world who live without electricity, approximately           1.6 billion people[1]

·      805 million people in the world who do not have enough food to eat.[2]

·      769 million people who live (or not) on less than $1.90 per day.[3]

It means that your children, whom you would do anything to protect, need not be counted among the 1 billion children of other people who are living in poverty. According to UNICEF, 22,000 die due to their poverty every day.[4]

And if we needed reminders, America is not immune to extreme poverty either. There are 40.6 million Americans living poverty; 12.7% of the population.[5] According to the point-in-time count of America’s homeless community in 2017, there are 553,742 people without housing on a given night.[6] (Noting that there are different kinds of homelessness—chronic, transitional, episodic; plus the many thousands in America who live on the brink of homelessness, just a paycheck or two away.)

If I sound crabby, it’s not because I haven’t showered in two days. It’s simply a profound frustration of our human nature—my own absolutely included—that forgets that what we consider to be inconveniences are so ludicrous in the grand scheme of need that really exists in the world.

It’s a frustration born of living in general proximity to some of the wealthiest Zip Codes in America—and knowing that materialism, greed, and complacency co-exist (and often prevail) over empathy, generosity, and living gratefully.

A destructive winter storm like this one really stinks. Some neighbors will experience lots of property damage (and insurance claims), work hours will be lost, appointments will be missed, food in the freezer will probably go bad.

But in a few short weeks, equilibrium for most of us will return. Spring will arrive. At that time, Jewish people will sit down at their seder tables. We’ll raise a piece of matzah and say, “This is the bread of affliction… Let all who are hungry come and eat.”

In order for those words not to reek of irony and hypocrisy, we have to recognize that in our inconvenience is the tiniest taste of what real suffering is like; a flavor that a staggering number of human beings around the world know intimately.

If we can emerge from our inconveniences with a deeper sense of empathy, generosity, and an awareness of how unbelievably, undeservedly blessed we really are—then maybe this Passover will bring a bit of real liberation after all.

[1] United Nations, “The Millennium Development Goals Report 2007.”

[2] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2014, “The State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2014.”

[3] “The U.S. Can No Longer Hide from Its Deep Poverty Problem,” Angus Deaton, New York Times, January 24, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/opinion/poverty-united-states.html

[4] “UNICEF: Committing to Child Survival: A Promise Renewed,” United Nations Interagency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), 2014.

[5] https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty.html

[6] National Coalition for the Homeless, http://nationalhomeless.org/about-homelessness/

The Stranger Who Resides with Us

I wrote this in 2016 for ARZA's commentary on the weekly Torah portion. Given the Netanyahu government's efforts to expel African refugees--and the massive demonstrations to protect them--it seems timely. I think it still holds up:

A walk through South Tel Aviv is not generally on the itinerary of a regular trip to Israel. It may as well be another planet from the all-night clubs, fancy restaurants, soaring hotels, and refined art galleries of what was once known as the White City. Most tourists have no idea that the place exists—and they certainly do not know about Holot.

South Tel Aviv in the flesh can break the heart of any thinking Zionist. It houses the largest concentration of Israel’s oft-hidden underclass: Africans from Eritrea and Sudan who have fled some of the world’s most vicious regimes. Any Jew who experiences the reality of South Tel Aviv—its appalling living conditions, overcrowded housing, and air of desperation—must ask, is this the best the Jewish state can muster?

Over 45,000 Eritreans and Sudanese currently reside in Israel, but the government’s treatment of them is nowhere near what we might consider the “Torah standard.”

“Refugee” and “asylum seeker” are legal terms; if these labels were applied to Israel’s African residents, a host of legal protections would kick in. Therefore, the government employs different language: a policy of “temporary protection” or “delay of removal” is in effect. In other words, desperate people who have fled to Israel find themselves in limbo: they cannot legally work or apply for citizenship; they cannot be deported back to where they came from; they have nowhere else to go. The vast majority want “asylum seeker” status, but Israel has granted that status to fewer than 1% of them; it is the lowest rate of recognition in the western world. Some activists accuse government officials of waging a racist campaign of incitement against the Africans, calling them insidious “infiltrators.”

And then there’s Holot. Located in the remote Negev near the Egyptian border, Holot is a detention facility—it’s hard to differentiate it from a prison—where Africans streaming into the country are held without trial. Over the past few years, the Knesset has tried to detain migrants for years on end; the High Court of Justice called the government’s policy “a grave and disproportionate abuse of the right to personal freedom.” As of December 2015, there were 3,300 people in Holot where they may remain up to twelve months. Its capacity is “full” according to the Israeli Immigration Authority.

While Europe dominates headlines with the refugee disaster pouring out of Syria, this subversive crisis to Israel’s soul shamefully has been absent from the American Jewish agenda.

It is difficult to read Parashat Kedoshim and not think of South Tel Aviv or Holot:

וְכִֽי־יָג֧וּר אִתְּךָ֛ גֵּ֖ר בְּאַרְצְכֶ֑ם לֹ֥א תוֹנ֖וּ אֹתֽוֹ׃ כְּאֶזְרָ֣ח מִכֶּם֩ יִהְיֶ֨ה לָכֶ֜ם הַגֵּ֣ר ׀ הַגָּ֣ר אִתְּכֶ֗ם וְאָהַבְתָּ֥ לוֹ֙ כָּמ֔וֹךָ 
כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם בְּאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרָ֑יִם אֲנִ֖י ה' אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃

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, Adonai, am your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

These verses are directed towards a Jewish community that is a majority culture, self-assured and established in its own land. The Torah warns that the Jews, when they have become that majority, will have a minority community of non-Jews living among them—and they must assiduously protect the rights of that minority.

To understand this passage requires a better grasp of three familiar concepts: the “stranger,” “do not wrong,” and “you shall love.” Each of these ideas is more nuanced than may appear at first glance.

Who is the ger?

In the Tanakh, the meaning of the word ger is very specific: a minority group dwelling among a native majority. The ger is someone who has been transplanted from his native home. In contrast, the word for “native citizen” (“the ger… shall be to you as one of your citizens”) is ezrach. Biblical scholar Baruch Levine suggests that the term ezrach is connected to the linguistic root of a tree firmly rooted in its soil: “…well-rooted, like a robust native tree” (Psalm 37:35). He writes, “If this derivation is correct, an ezrach/citizen is one whose lineage has ‘roots’ in the land, one who belongs to the group that possesses the land.” The ger is the outsider, the stranger in the midst.

Thus the Torah frequently reminds Israel that we know the feelings of the ger, because we’ve had that status before. This is precisely the situation the Jewish people knew in Egypt; a displaced minority among an indigenous majority culture.

What does the Torah mean what it says “you shall not wrong” the ger?

In context, the verb lo tonu / “you shall not wrong” comes from the noun ona’ah, which refers specifically to economic deprivation, manipulation, and taking advantage of another who is in a weaker position. For instance, Leviticus 25:14-17 opens and closes with an injunction not to “wrong” one another, and in between it illustrates this “wronging” as a matter of economic injustice:

When you sell property to your neighbor, or buy anything from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another.
In buying from your neighbor, you shall deduct only for the number of years since the jubilee; and in selling to you, he shall charge you only for the remaining crop years:
the more such years, the higher the price you pay; the fewer such years, the lower the price; for what he is selling you is a number of harvests. Do not wrong one another, but fear your God; for I Adonai am your God.

We can conclude that from a p’shat point of view, ona’ah in Leviticus 19 means unfairly leveraging an economic situation where the other person—namely, the ger—is relatively defenseless.

The Mishnah takes this idea one step further: “Just as there is ona’ah in buying and selling, so too is there ona’ah in words.” For the Rabbis, ona’ah—the very acts which are prohibited against the ger and others—is expanded to mean “oppression, wrongdoing, or causing shame.”

Finally, we need to ask: What does it mean “to love the ger as yourself”?

Many have asked how the Torah can command love, the deepest of human emotions. Earlier in Kedoshim we were commanded to “love your neighbor as yourself”; elsewhere the Torah command us to love God (who reciprocally loves us) and, here, to love the stranger.

It is a conundrum if the Hebrew word for love, ahava, simply means deep emotion. However, biblical scholar Jacob Milgrom explains that “love” in the Torah is much more than sentiment; love necessarily entails action:

How can love be commanded? The answer simply is that the verb ahav signifies not only an emotion or attitude, but also deeds. This is especially true in Deuteronomy, which speaks of covenantal love. The ger is “loved” by providing him with food and shelter (Deut. 10:18-19). God is “loved” by observing his commandments (Deut. 11:1), and God in turn “loves” Israel by subduing its enemies (Deut. 7:8).[1]

Thus, to “love” the ger and to “not wrong him” are inverses of one another. The fulfillment of this Mitzvah means not only not to exploit a person who is politically weaker, but also to support him, to include him in festival celebrations, to allow him to rest on Shabbat, and to provide him with appropriate safety.[2]

It is hard to read these words at the culmination of our Torah portion and, again, not to reflect on our reality. Certainly, “real life” occasionally intrudes on idealism and mitigates our ability to behave according to our highest standards. But still, we have to ask: are we fulfilling what the Torah demands of us?

The words of a modern commentator are jarring:

Rabbi Zalman Sorotzkin (1881-1966) was a major figure in 20th Century Orthodoxy. Rabbi Sorotzkin was born in Belarus, served as the Rabbi of Lutsk in Ukraine, and ultimately fled to Palestine during World War II. There he became the vice chairman of Agudat Yisrael (the main Ashkenazi Orthodox party in Israel at the time); he was certainly not a “liberal” figure by any means. Which makes his comment on this verse particularly compelling:

“In your land” (Leviticus 19:33):  You should not say [to the ger] that Eretz Yisrael is just for Jews, as extremists [!!] everywhere claim that their land is just for their own people and minorities have no part in it. For the Land was given to Abraham, who was called “the father of a multitude of nations,” and each nation that believes in the God of Abraham and who clings to his descendants should not be considered a “foreigner” in the land that was promised to him. And this is the lesson of the verse, you shall not wrong him (Lev.19:33): with your ona’at devarim [wronging someone with words, above], as if to deceive him into thinking that he dwells in your land, in a land that is not his.[3]

What would Rabbi Sorotzkin say if he were to observe the plight of the Eritreans and Sudanese in Israel today?

The Torah commands us to protect the rights and dignity of the stranger no less than 36 times (and some authorities say 46 times)—it is repeated more than any other Mitzvah in the Torah. When you go home, the text implies, you have an enormous responsibility to care for those who are vulnerable. This injunction is, in fact, the moral barometer of any society. This is one of the resounding lessons of Jewish history: we know the heart of the stranger, because we’ve been that stranger many times: in Egypt, but also in Babylonia, Morocco, Ukraine, Yemen, Ethiopia, Ellis Island, and Poland. Woe to those of us who are so estranged from our past that we can’t look into the eyes of the African refugees and see the reflection of our own living history.

For more information about supporting African migrants in Israel: 
The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, http://hotline.org.il/en/main/

[1] Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22, The Anchor Bible, 2000, p.1653.

[2] Milgrom, p.1706.

[3]R. Zalman Sorotzkin, Oznaim LaTorah, in Itturei Torah on Leviticus 19:33.

A Thought for MLK Day - King & The Jews

Thinking about Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy today. How willing would much of the Jewish community be to embrace his message? This day always reminds me of this passage from Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg (z"l)'s memoir. King asked Hertzberg, at the height of the struggle, why he cared so much. Hertzberg didn't respond with pious passages from the prophets, or the Declaration of Independence, or anything like that.

Instead, he spoke about his father. Herzberg's father was a Hasidic rabbi, a descendent of Elimelech of Lizhensk, and the leader of a shul in Nashville, Tennessee.

Here's what he wrote:

One Friday we came to synagogue for the evening service to find that an imposing black man wearing a very high yarmulke was there. He introduced himself as Rabbi Matthews and added that he was also a cantor. To prove his self-description, the visitor produced documents from a very respected rabbi in Toronto who attested to the fact that he had officiated at the conversion of Rabbi Matthews, in order to remove any doubt of his Jewishness… and that further training as cantor had been imparted to Matthews in Toronto. What all this meant was that the visitor had the right, in well-established Jewish practice, to claim the reading desk so that he might lead in the chanting of the service—and, ultimately, claim a donation for his sustenance.

My father looked at the certificate and said very quietly (when he was quiet, I knew he was at his angriest) that he was the rabbi of this synagogue and it was his duty and prerogative to decide questions of religious practice. The congregants refused. They pretended that they did not believe that the visitor was indeed a Jew, and they barred the way of this Black cantor to the reading desk.

My father put his arm around this man, whom he had met just ten minutes before, and headed for the door. He stopped and said, very quietly, that he would never come through that door again, because they had insulted a human being made in the image of God. We said prayers at home that Shabbat. My father had thrown his job away over a principle, and he did not find another for many months. I expected my mother to berate him, but she did not say one word, that day or later.

(Arthur Hertzberg, A Jew in America, 2002)

I should probably just let it sit on the page, but it triggers some other questions in me. What would happen in an Orthodox shul if the same scenario unfolded today? And as for liberal synagogues - what lines in the sand are left that would make a rabbi say, "I can never step foot in here again"? And why, fifty years on from MLK's death, do we still have to march for such obvious matters of civil rights?