A hallmark of the second Trump administration has been the hunt for the foreign born, from children to adults, criminal status apparently notwithstanding. Many of the administration officials who champion this project often invoke God in their speeches, asserting that their allegiance to the Constitution is rooted in their fealty to a far older text: the Bible. It is clear that many of our leaders lack the most fundamental understanding of the central biblical commandment to love and care for the immigrant.
The Bible explicitly commands three loves. The first and second many modern Christians and Jews cite easily — love of God and love of one’s neighbor. The third, and most often overlooked, is love of the ger. Several English translations interpret ger as “sojourner,” someone born elsewhere who has come to dwell among the people, most likely temporarily. Other translations render ger as “stranger,” “alien” or “foreigner.”
In recent decades, some biblical scholars have returned to an older idea: that ger should be translated as something close to “immigrant.” Writing about the book of Exodus, the 11th-century Jewish biblical commentator Rashi explains that “wherever ger occurs in Scriptures it signifies a person who has not been born in that land where he is living but has come from another country to sojourn there.” The word “immigrant” matters, in this context — it reminds us that in the ancient world, just as now, someone seeking a home among people foreign to him had likely endured significant upheaval in his life, like war, famine, political oppression or economic crisis.
The commandment to love immigrants is one of the Bible’s greatest moral revolutions. Other ancient Near Eastern cultures instructed people to care for widows and orphans. The Bible expands the category of those who deserve special protection to include those who live among our community but are not quite of it.
There is no one-to-one correspondence between the biblical mandate to love the immigrant and the question of how many immigrants the United States should take in over a given year. But this does not mean that the Bible has nothing to say to our present moment. On the contrary, the Bible offers an ethos, an approach we might take in confronting immigration policy. Those of us who follow the Bible as a moral guide can conclude that demonizing, mocking or dehumanizing immigrants — let alone violently pursuing them — is, religiously speaking, an abomination, a direct affront to a biblical vision of what a good and holy society ought to look like. Xenophobia is, then, spiritually speaking, an illness, a failure to see people as God does, to treat them as God demands they be treated.
The book of Exodus explicitly forbids the people from mistreating an immigrant. Contrary to popular assumptions, the prohibition on abusing the vulnerable does not derive only from the children of Israel’s past experience of slavery and oppression. It is a basic demand of morality: We must not take advantage of the weak. The people’s memory of having suffered in Egypt amplifies and intensifies a demand that is already in place: Don’t take advantage of the vulnerable.
The book of Leviticus repeats the injunction not to oppress — then adds a mandate to actively love the immigrant. These commands resurface in the book of Deuteronomy, which implies that loving immigrants is a way of emulating God’s love.
Readers of the Bible are thus invited to engage in a double act of moral imagination. First, they must imagine that they themselves, and not merely their ancestors, were redeemed from slavery in Egypt. And, second, they must ask themselves who in their midst is most vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
The biblical text also admonishes societies to offer immigrants legal protections, fair wages and social benefits like harvest gleanings and tithes for the poor. In a truly good society, the immigrant cannot be left dependent on other people’s generosity. The law must also ensure his well-being.
The immigrant was protected by the law but was also obligated to observe much of it. The Bible commands the people to love and protect the stranger, but it also expects at least some degree of assimilation on the immigrant’s part.
Those of us who treat the Bible as authoritative in our lives are aware — through the very text we cite most often — that unchecked, unbridled power is always abhorrent, let alone when it is deployed to attack precisely those who are most vulnerable.
Shai Held is the president and dean of the Hadar Institute, which he co-founded, and the author of “Judaism Is About Love.”
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