Shai Held, in his book Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life, observes that the Torah contains three explicit commandments to love God, love one’s neighbor, and love the stranger. The stranger, Held notes, is mentioned twice, while the other two are mentioned but once. The implication here is not that God is less important than the stranger, but rather, that God has placed the emphasis on loving the stranger as a mitzvah of paramount importance. I was thinking about this as I was watching a clip from the Republican National Convention during Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s speech, in which attendees are chanting, “send them back,” and waving placards that demand “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW.” Are these the same people who claim to be Christians? And, if so, doesn’t their faith refer to some of the same sacred texts they, in fact, partially share with Judaism? Without even getting into the humanitarian, logistical, or economic implications of such a monumental initiative of rounding up and expelling 2-3% of the United States population, it stands to reason that these people aren’t actually reading the same texts. Nor should they have much credibility in claiming Christian virtue. It’s an unusually overt display of how far off the deep end the Christian Right has gone in our current era of politics.
Parallel to how his first term was about fixing all of the things that were so horribly wrong with the United States, a country that it sounds like he actually hates and thinks is a terrible place (at least based on his rhetoric), Trump has made his prospective second term about punishment and revenge. This begins with declaring that he will be a dictator “on day one,” vowing to persecute people who have challenged him, and, of course, round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants– or, as the Right likes to call them, “illegals.”
This, of course, isn’t an article that, “now they’ve done it! They’ve crossed a line they can’t come back from!”
That line was crossed many moons ago– probably about eight years ago, in fact. Republicans haven’t looked back and Democrats have mostly just been stuck wringing their hands.
We know that Trump isn’t a Christian– I’m thinking about the telltale moment when he referred to “Two Corinthians” (Two Corinthians Too Furious, as opposed to Second Corinthians). But we know that a lot of Republicans do at least pretend to be Christian. And what’s wild to me is how people– like my in-laws, who, I think, desperately long for a king (or a King, one) and who just seem to bear a particular level of hideous contempt for democracy and its institutions- will lean on so-called Christian virtues to defend the Right. Why does this matter? Isn’t it all just bluster? Aren’t, as my in-laws say, all politicians and parties just all the same?
The Language And The Text
Returning to Shai Held’s book, the premise is that Judaism is foundationally a religion of love. While Held makes some key distinctions between Judaism and Christianity in terms of the mandates of the individual, it should be fairly clear to anyone who is ostensibly a person of faith that the texts commanding the individual to love the stranger are fundamental to either religion. Jesus, after all, spends more time castigating entrenched power structures and empathizing with the poor, the sick, and the needy than he does hating on them, certainly.
It’s worth unpacking Held’s interpretation and comparing it to other ones for the sake of context, especially given the way the Christian Right continues to twist Biblical context to suit their own objectives.
When we’re thinking about the stranger, as with 99.9% of the rest of Jewish discourse, there isn’t entirely clear consensus on the implication of the language involved here. The term for stranger is ger in Hebrew. Some– including Shai- broadly interpret this as “anyone who isn’t from around here,” while a more specific historical interpretation looks at what this might have meant in a completely different time.
Let’s recall that back in the day, there wasn’t really much in the way of a thing called the State, but there were people who might come to your house and collect taxes, especially if you were, say, not from around here and not of the royally approved religion (much later, the the jizya, for example, was a tax paid by non-Muslim subjects to Muslim rulers, and existed for many Jews living in Muslim lands for many centuries). In its heyday in the Middle East, Judaism eventually abandoned proselytizing for a complex range of reasons, but some interpret the ger of old to refer to “non-Israelites who have renounced idolatry and accepted the seven Noahide laws. Jews must be sensitive to the situation of the stranger, who is so easily marginalised.”
Nowadays, we have the State, capital-S, writ-large, Big Government That Does Things. This seems to render null and void Rabbi Sinclair’s interpretation about “non-Israelites who have renounced idolatry and accepted the seven Noahide laws.” Returning to Held’s idea, and in other words, the stranger’s ger-ness and deserving-ness of love by Jews shouldn’t be predicated on the person’s religious beliefs but rather whether they’re living in our land. The emphasis on “the stranger, who is so easily marginalised” in Sinclair’s interpretation also comes up in the Bible a number of times. Today, Jews, for their part, have a State, although I feel like a lot of Israelis missed that whole prohibition against idolatry in their worship of nationalism (a story for another day)– but there are damn near as many Jews in the United States as there are in Israel. So, once again, it stands to reason that we shouldn’t use this historical interpretation of the ger as a Jew-Adjacent Immigrant or a Jewish convert, but rather as a stranger who resides in our land, even though they might not be from here.
Be it resolved, therefore, that we should consider the text to refer to a mandate to love people who aren’t from your neighborhood, who aren’t from your country, who reside among you, whatever– regardless of whether they follow the same religious ideas as you. A major difference between Christianity and Judaism is that if you’re Jewish and reject the mitzvah of loving the stranger, you’re a bad Jew, while if you’re a Christian, you can, at least according to the Christian Right, get away with hating the stranger because you love Jesus more than you hate the stranger. I’m saying this facetiously, of course– because I suspect Jesus would have loved the stranger, too.
These folks certainly do not. Which is why they’re demanding the rounding up of Mexicans and other immigrants to be put into concentration camps.
I’m calling it what it is.
Conclusions
We’re going to need to keep talking about this, because we have allowed this level of hideousness to become normalized. I don’t usually talk about religion on here, but I’m mentioning it here because people continue to normalize this Handmaid’s Tale shit, putting it out in the open, and throwing their fists into the air as they demand that the State exact violence on millions and millions of hardworking people– to tear apart families and communities in the pursuit of some bizarre notion of vengeance masquerading as justice. Justice for whom? Well, white Republican Christians, of course. If they had bothered to read their own sacred texts, let alone actually think about what it meant, they might not be in this position. And yet.
Check out Shai Held’s book here, but please see if you can buy it from a local bookstore!