Refugees
I guess it’s the wrong kind of love I’m writing about on the eve of Valentine’s Day (though note: the equivalent Jewish date is Tu Be’Av, the 15th of the month of Menachem Av). I’m focussing with deep concern on the love most frequently mentioned in the Torah: love for the ger, the stranger, the outsider, the refugee. A better word than ‘love’ might be compassion, empathy, concern.
I will never forget being taken on Lesbos, at the peak of the small boat crossings from Turkey, to a half-hidden cemetery where a compassionate Muslim carer had, of his own initiative, laid to rest the bodies of the drowned. Many of the graves were of children, mostly nameless. Who was left to cradle them to their last resting place, who had known their names and loved them?
The injunction is this week’s Torah portion does not include the word ‘love’ though it is employed in this context numerous times elsewhere:
You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 22:20)
Don’t attribute to others the injuries from which you yourself suffer,’ insists Rashi. This may mean: Don’t maltreat outsiders, because not long ago you were an outsider yourself, and why draw attention to your own vulnerability? Alternatively, he may mean: You know how it hurts to be a refugee, so don’t go hurting others. That’s why Jewish communities have been deeply committed to the fate of those who, like our parents, had to flee for their lives.
We’ve hosted many people through the excellent NGO Refugees at Home. You hear it differently when it’s the person opposite you at your kitchen table who says: ‘They gave me one bottle of water to cross the Sahara; I saw many dead.’ ‘The tiny boat drifted to Greece; I walked until I couldn’t move.’ ‘I clung underneath the lorry.’ ‘Where would you sleep if we hadn’t had a room?’ ‘On the bus; I buy a ticket for the longest journey, then buy another back.’ When you hear such stories, you don’t use words like ‘swarms.’ You don’t build your true British identity on contempt for others, especially if you are a Jew, or, for that matter, a Muslim, Hindu or Sikh.
No country can, or should, accept everyone. Rashi’s fellow commentator, Abraham ibn Ezra, has a caution: before being accepted, refugees must reject idolatry. This is a fundamental rule applicable to all children of Noah: idol worship must be foresworn. The equivalent precondition today might be commitment to equality and democracy. But given that stipulation, ibn Ezra continues, not only is a society which oppresses refugees culpable, but any individual within it who witnesses such maltreatment and remains silent is held responsible for their community’s wrongdoing. There’s a duty to speak out against cruelty and contempt.
But no commentator could be more forthright than Samson Raphael Hirsch:
As strangers you were without rights in Egypt; out of that grew your slavery and suffering. Beware therefore, so runs the warning, lest in your state you make the rights of anyone dependent on anything other than the simple fact of their humanity, which every human being possesses by virtue of being human.
His words chime painfully with those of Ali Smith, president of the remarkable organisation Refugee Tales, in which, based on the precedent of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, people from all areas of life walk, eat and share their stories together. The group, she writes,
is a small bright spot in a decade of tortuous pressure – legally, politically and in terms of public rhetoric – on the people forced by war, environmental ruin, poverty and fear into exile and crossing the world with something like hope in humanity.
That ‘something like hope in humanity’ is what the Torah enjoins us to uphold.