Parashat Mishpatim: My Father's Torah on the Ger

My father spoke beautiful English with a heavy Polish/Yiddish/Russian/Israeli accent. He loved this country. He liked to say that this was the only country in the world where a poor immigrant-refugee like him could come and have his children educated in the highest institutions in the country.

In 2007, almost exactly 10 years ago, he gave a dvar torah about the Torah’s attitude to the ger, the “stranger.” At the end of his talk he said: “In Yiddish there is an expression: Yeder darshen darshen zich far zich. Every preacher preaches for himself. Once I asked the question of what attracted me to the Ibn Ezra’s analysis of ger shaar, the answer was obvious. I have lived in 6 countries and in 11 localities, not all of them voluntarily, and have been the recipient of good and bad treatment.”

In this week’s parsha, we hear about the ger twice. The first time, we are told not to oppress the ger because gerim heyitem be’eretz mitzrayim, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt (Ex. 22:20). Rashi comments:“every use of the word ger refers to someone who is not born in that country, but rather comes from another country to live there,” i.e. an immigrant.

[Note: My father was a Rashi maven and in his dvar torah, he suggested that people talk to him at kiddush about the question of why Rashi defines ger here rather than several parshiyyot earlier, in Parashat Bo, where the term first appears. I have an idea of what he was thinking and I wish I could talk to him about it now.]

So ger refers to a person who comes to live here from another place. We know such people. And the Torah says not to hurt them because we, too, were once such people. We were immigrants; we were strangers; we were wanderers. Not just in Egypt, but throughout history. Our history is a history of foreignness. My father embodied this history in his own life. He called himself “a marginal man”; he felt that wherever he went, he was a little bit on the outside. This is a Jewish feeling and a feeling we are enjoined to remember, that sense of slight misfit, of insecurity.

And so, not once, but twice in this parsha, as well as multiple times in other parshiyyot, the Torah tells us: do not mistreat the immigrant in your midst. It is as if each commandment refers us back to another one of our own many wanderings. In the second instance in our parsha, the Torah goes even further in explaining the rationale: atem yidatem et nefesh hager, “you know the soul of the ger (23:9)”. In my father’s words:”Yadoa (to know) in biblical Hebrew has a connotation of intimacy. The Torah tells us: you know intimately how it feels to be oppressed, you should therefore empathize with the ger and not oppress him.”

We know intimately, from the inside, what it feels like to be an outsider. Such feelings are the definition of who we are as Jews. They lie deep within us; they are our very soul.

Later in the Torah, we are called on not just to “not oppress,” but to actively love the ger: veahavta lo kamokha. In the same language as the more famous “Love your neighbor as yourself,” the Torah tells us: “Love the ger as you love yourself.” Why? Because you are the ger. You have the same soul of suffering. Exchange yourself for the other. Use your memory of the suffering of being an outsider to teach you not hate, but love.