(RNS) — No one knows who wrote the Jewish rabbinic text known as Sefer Hachinuch, or “A Book of Guidance.” The author, a 13th-century rabbi, modestly signed his work “A Levite of Barcelona.”
But the tome has enjoyed great popularity in the Jewish world for the ensuing centuries — for good reason. The author goes through the Torah and, with impressive erudition and scholarship, defines and elaborates on each of the Jewish Bible’s commandments and prohibitions.
The Torah portion Eikev will be read in synagogues worldwide on Saturday (Aug. 16). It gives the commandment to “love your fellow,” as well as “to love the convert.” While Judaism doesn’t seek converts, it allows anyone willing to shoulder the obligations of Jewish law to become part of the Jewish people, with a special order to show favor to a convert. Anyone who shows any degree of disrespect for a convert or causes him any pain, the Sefer Hachinuch explains, violates this commandment.
But the author expands upon the idea:
“We are to learn from this precious commandment to have mercy on any person who finds himself in a foreign place [and] not ignore him when we find him alone and far from those who can help him.
“And with these sentiments, we will merit to be treated with mercy by God … the verse hints to this idea when it adds ‘because you were strangers in the land of Egypt,’ reminding us that we were once burned with the deep pain felt by any person finding himself among foreign people in a foreign land. … And God in his mercy took us out of there. Our own mercy should likewise be felt for any person in a similar situation.”
That expansion of the commandment is striking and most pertinent today. While immigration is something that rightly has rules, and borders cannot be totally open to all, too many are so willingly jumping on the anti-immigrant bandwagon. But the Jewish attitude toward those foreign-born people, who often have risked their lives to come here, legally or otherwise, is one of mercy and concern.
The “love the convert” verse’s reminder of the Jewish people’s sojourn in Egypt is meaningful here, too. Many, if not most, American Jews are no more than a generation or two removed from their own immigrant forebears. Our parents or grandparents found themselves here, far from their birthplaces, as strangers in a strange land.
My parents were among those who arrived on American shores from a faraway place, Eastern Europe. My mother, fortunately, immigrated as a child before World War II; my father immigrated after fleeing Nazis and spending the war years in a Soviet-Siberian labor camp. The kindness of those who welcomed and aided them from the start allowed them to marry, come to lead a Jewish congregation in Baltimore for many decades and raise a family. I knew countless others like them.
They came to love this country, which gave them new lives. And, although I was born here, I inherited that same feeling. I can easily imagine the pain and fear born of uncertainty that they all must have felt when disembarking from the ships that brought them here. I remind myself that similar feelings are felt by more recent arrivals from other places.
Immigrants these days are often immediately and unfairly judged to be freeloaders or worse. To be sure, there are immigrants who, by their choices to commit serious criminal acts, have earned the verdict of deportation. But the vast majority of the newcomers have not made any such choices, and are not invaders but guests. We are obligated to treat them as such.
That means not only helping them acclimate and offering them practical assistance, but also caring for their feelings. The Talmud teaches that our sensitivity to others extends even to the words we use. In Jewish law, verbal mistreatment, or ona’at devarim, is a thing. A big thing.
One may not remind a convert, the Talmud teaches, of his behavior before his conversion — or remind the child of a convert of his parents’ origins. The implications for how we are to speak to immigrants are obvious.
Whatever immigration policy one might favor — and there are legitimate differences of opinion about the larger issue — the Jewish attitude toward the “stranger” in our midst is, as the Sefer Hachinuch put it, to have mercy on him and “not ignore him when we find him alone and far from those who can help him.”
It is an admonition that all of us, whatever our faiths, do well to internalize.
(Rabbi Avi Shafran writes widely in Jewish and general media and blogs at rabbiavishafran.com. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)