Who Is the Biblical Stranger, and What Should the Bible’s Teaching Mean Today?

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On the night of Shavuot—in Israel, it’s a one-day holiday—I took part in a secular tikkun leyl shavuot, an adaptation of the traditional religious custom of staying up past midnight in Torah study to commemorate the revelation at Sinai. My role was to be on a panel that had as its subject the biblical verse (I am using the King James translation), “Thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of the stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). The verse was chosen because, on Shavuot, the book of Ruth is read with its story of just such a “stranger,” a Moabite woman who joined the people of Israel, married one of its sons, and gave birth to the future grandfather of David.

What the tikkun’s organizers especially wanted the panel to address, however, was not so much the book of Ruth as the roughly 40,000 illegal Eritrean and Sudanese immigrants who are now “strangers” in Israel, where they live in difficult, crowded conditions and with an undefined legal status that leaves them with no clear right to work, to receive social services, or to remain in the country without the threat of jail or deportation. (Thousands actually have been jailed or deported to African countries willing to take them.)