A friend of a friend was just released after three weeks of detention at Delaney Hall, the immigration pen in Newark. He was taken there when he went to renew his work visa. Everyone who knows him is outraged for this quiet, law-abiding, gentle family man, who’d shown up for work every day for years and was making a life for himself and his children here in the USA.

You have not hired me to tell you how I think you should vote or what flavor of politics you prefer to consume. Despite what the IRS ruling this week tells me or any synagogue we can or can’t do, I have zero intention of letting something as temporal and spiritually unhelpful as contemporary politics affect how we build community together.

What you have asked me to do, however, is teach Jewish values and wisdom. It is in that role that I now write. If it affects how you vote, or what you send to which elected officials or which peaceful demonstrations you choose to participate in, that’s on you – which is to say, each of us chooses how we put Jewish values and wisdom into action. This is as true of how we keep kosher and shabbat as it is of immigration and due process in our national life.

Which brings us to our trivia question of the day: what is the most-repeated mitzvah in the Torah?  

“When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them. The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am YHVH your God.” (Leviticus 19:33-34).

According to the Talmud, this mitzvah is taught 36 times (actually they are arguing, is it taught 36 or 46? Either way, it’s a lot.). For comparison’s sake: Honoring your parent? Twice. Matzah on Passover? Twice. Love your neighbor? Once.

Why does this one get repeated so many times? In my mind, it’s repeated because it’s hard. It’s so easy to dissociate, to care more about what’s going on in our own communities. I’m thinking of the line “then they came for us” – but I hesitate, because (more trivia) that line was not written by a Jew. It was written by a Lutheran pastor named Martin Niemöller who was a Hitler fan and an avowed anti-semite. Except he wasn’t a fan of the way the Nazi politics interfered with the church, and so he was sent to Dachau in 1938, where he stayed until 1945. After the war, he wrote the famous poem:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

The story of someone doing teshuvah after they experienced the tortured oppression their political leanings caused others – I think that’s what the Torah is getting at. Love the stranger. Do not oppress them. It’s super important, so learn it over and over and over again, 36 times, double chai. It is a key to life itself. 

Immigration is foundational to the Jewish experience and story. We barely last in the Garden of Eden. Noah packs it all up into a boat and lands someplace new to start over. Abraham leaves the country of his birth to the land God would show him. Jacob and his sons negotiate over and over with those among whom they live. Joseph is sold into slavery, to emerge a powerful leader in Egypt. He brings the rest of his family to join him – that’s how the Israelites end up in Egypt in the first place. Moses is born into an oppressed minority people – and is then raised by the oppressors, only to flee to Midian as a young man to be received with kindness there. All that before the Exodus story becomes our foundation myth par excellence, the one we sit around a table and tell our children every year lest we forget our roots.

Because we did not govern a land of our own for millennia, and because we have lived in Diaspora since the year 70 AD if not 586 BCE, the immigrant experience is baked into the Jewish psyche. Intuitively, we recoil at the idea that the country in which we reside now could be inhospitable to law-abiding people seeking a life here. It is a reflex mechanism born of our own intergenerational experience as well as the values that have since the beginning shaped us.

Jewish law does not give specific advice on how to solve the immigration challenges this country is facing. It makes no claim about the status of people who come to a place unlawfully. When the new king arises at the beginning of Exodus, “who knew not Joseph,” he fears the growing minority population, the descendants of those immigrants who’d come generations before. Out of that fear, he treats them harshly. The harshness in turn begets plagues and more suffering, on all sides. The story is not about policy decisions, although the Israelites are expelled from Egypt. The story is a tale of ethics. That oppression is never the way to solve social problems.

That friend of a friend has been released and is in his NJ home with his family. The law may determine he stays, or he goes. All I know is that Jewish teachings hold that whatever happens to him and to all immigrants must happen without oppression, with the sense of dignity and respect given to all humanity, with care bordering on love.

Rabbi Treu’s essays may also be found on Medium.