More Truly and More Strange
On the Stranger Without and the Shadow Within
You shall not oppress a stranger (ger), for you know the being (nefesh) of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 23:9)
The uncanny…can be traced back without exception to something familiar that has been repressed. (Freud, The Uncanny)
“And there I found myself more truly and more strange.” (Wallace Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”)
“People are strange, when you’re a stranger.” (The Doors)
If the Torah only wanted us to treat strangers with dignity, kindness, and justice, it could tell us as much. But, as commentators note, it tells us to be concerned for the stranger’s welfare 36 times. Emphasis, much?
Utilitarians argue that the Torah needs to remind us of the stranger’s dignity because we’re stiff-necked and thick-headed. We’re good at paying lip service to the idea that strangers matter, but not good at internalizing it. By the 36th time, hopefully we’ve moved from “virtue signaling” to genuine concern. Meanwhile, it’s so easy to rationalize putting the stranger second, in the name of piety, religious observance, or even ethics, that the Torah must continuously protest that we’re not reading it carefully. Like a meditation bell that goes off periodically to remind us that our minds have wandered, the repeated commandment serves as an intervention against our default egocentrism.
But the utilitarian argument doesn’t address the source of our indifference, or even hostility, to the stranger. An existential approach suggests that the Torah’s repetition serves not to highlight the stranger’s need, but rather our own. In this week’s parasha, Mishpatim (Ex. 21:1–24:18), we read, “You know the being of the stranger.” This language suggests that the target of the commandment is something that Carl Jung would call “shadow work.” We ourselves are the strangers.
The reason for our rejection of the stranger is not opportunistic. It’s not that the stranger is easy to oppress, having no advocate, defender, or protector (save God). Rather, we oppose the stranger because we ourselves are strangers—and we hate that. When we fear the stranger, we fear the stranger in ourselves. The stranger who stands out provokes our own fear of standing out. The stranger who is vulnerable provokes our own shame at being vulnerable. The stranger who is needy opens the trap door where we’ve concealed our own sense of neediness.
Imagine you’ve just gotten out of Egyptian bondage. You’ve survived. You’ve seen it all. Do you really want to go back to the place of pain from which you’ve come? Aren’t you liberated now? Why can’t the past just be the past? The presence of the stranger in your midst reminds you that you bring the past with you. To turn that stranger away is to turn away from your own past. Have you ever listened to a person share a painful story and tried to cheer that person up? While you were probably well intentioned, and even compassionate, there’s a chance you were motivated to cheer them up because their pain made you uncomfortable. But what if what the stranger wanted is simply to be witnessed, to be heard? To appear as the stranger they are?
One way that we respond to suffering in our past is to say, “I’m never going to let that happen again.” If we were oppressed because we were Other, then perhaps we’ll try to fit in, if given a second chance. If it’s a choice between being bullied and being the bully, next time we’ll pick being the bully. As a matter of survival, this makes sense. But as a matter of flourishing, it’s tragic. It also suggests that there’s no moral high ground to the Exodus story. It’s just another tale of what Thucydides and all the skeptics thereafter call, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” If the society the Israelites create is to be different from any other, it must transform its attitude to the outsider. If the Exodus is to improve the human condition, rather than simply replace one dominant group with another, we must welcome the outsider as outsider. To do this, we must begin by welcoming the outsider each of us already is.
Our outsider status did not begin with slavery in Egypt. Ezekiel tells a different tale, altogether, with Israelite identity (or Jerusalemite culture) being forged out of Canaanite and Hittite ancestry (16:3). Through an extended birth metaphor, Ezekiel imagines us as foundlings, left, by happenstance, as it were, on God’s stoop: “On the day you were born, you were left lying, rejected, in the open field” (Ezekiel 16:5).
As I argued in my commentary on Genesis 1-3, the fact that we are created in the divine image necessitates that we are all strangers. To welcome the stranger is, existentially speaking, none other than to welcome the part of ourselves that cannot be categorized, that doesn’t belong to a group or tribe. The stranger is the singular. “Love the stranger” means “Love what is singular. Love what is idiosyncratic.” “Do not oppress the stranger” means “Allow for more weirdness in oneself and others. Maximize diversity wherever possible.”
In Kabbalah, the sitra achra or “Other Side,” connotes metaphysical strangeness, an aspect of God that is demonic, terrifying (as in, “the dark side,” in Star Wars). Are we commanded to welcome that which mystics think is the ground of evil? That seems odd and possibly irresponsible?
In rabbinic Judaism, the word ger doesn’t simply mean any Other, any foreigner. Rather, a ger is a convert. In Biblical Hebrew, a ger is a resident alien—someone who abides by the law of the land, not an enemy or an idolater. The commandment to care for the stranger, therefore, is not a blanket command to care for everyone equally. It’s about opening up the circle of who counts as “us.” But it doesn’t negate the real sense of “us” and “them.” It’s not pure cosmopolitanism. It’s xenophilic nationalism. Or as Martha Nussbaum might argue, following the thought of Rabindranath Tagore, it’s nationalism as a means to cosmopolitanism.
Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav suggests that we relate to the sitra achra not as a site of evil to be opposed, but rather as something difficult and dangerous from which something positive and meaningful can be extracted. “Do not oppress the stranger.” This might mean—”Do not run away from difficulty; do not avoid pain and sadness, doubt and challenge.” “Remember that you were strangers in Egypt!” “You were there, and you got out. You were there, and you learned something. You were there, and you found your cry for freedom, your passion for the singular.”
The Torah does not command us to leave Egypt and cease being strangers. It doesn’t say, “You’ve come home, now you can relax.” The Torah commands us to realize that we are fundamentally strangers, that our freedom depends on recognizing and affirming that we cannot but be strange. Franz Rosenzweig captured this sentiment when he wrote, “It is only by keeping their ties to the Diaspora that the Zionists will be forced to keep their eyes on the goal, which [is] to remain nomads, even over there.” Whether or not you agree with Rosenzweig as a matter of politics, the paradoxical idea that we must be nomads even when we’re at home is captivating.
Of course, there should be—and are—constraints on how much strangeness a society can handle, how much nomadism a culture can tolerate. But the common good is meaningless if it cannot include the stranger’s perspective. Who qualifies as a stranger is a question of definition and judgment, of law and politics, of temperament and disposition. But as a matter of epistemology, it can never be settled. The stranger sits at the boundary between what we know and what we don’t.
On a theological level, I imagine that the repetition of the commandment to care for the stranger is also of particular import to God, for whom humanity itself is a stranger—not quite God, but not quite not God. Just as we welcome the stranger in our midst, God welcomes us, the strangers in God’s midst. We are not from heaven, nor are we permanent residents of heaven, but we are sojourners in that strange land.
Transcendence is not our first language, but our earthly accent may yet make it beautiful.
Shabbat Shalom, Chodesh Tov, and Welcome,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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