Minority Rights
I argued in the two previous essays that Judaism found a way of embracing both sides of a contradiction, turning an either/or into a both/and. Nowhere is this more strikingly in evidence than in the concept, set out in Parashat Behar, of the ger toshav, the “resident alien,” the “stranger within your gates.”
Christianity borrowed two of Judaism’s great commands of love: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5) and “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). It gave far less emphasis to the third command, love of the stranger:
When a stranger lives with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who lives with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Lev. 19:33–34)
For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger residing among you, giving them food and clothing. You are to love those who are strangers, for you yourselves were strangers in Egypt. (Deut. 10:17–19)
The sages say that the Torah commands us in only one place to love our neighbour but in thirty-six places to love the stranger.1Bava Metzia 59b.
This was one of the fundamental lessons of history translated into law. “You yourselves know what it feels like to be a stranger,” says the Torah (Ex. 23:9), meaning that a sense of our people’s past should prompt our conscience when the “mystic chords of memory,” in Lincoln’s words, are touched by “the better angels of our nature.”
Why does this matter so much that the Torah should have to repeat it so often? The answer is simple. Two phenomena have gone hand in hand throughout history: ethnocentrism and xenophobia. They are the two sides of the coin called community. Every act that binds a group through a sense of shared identity, an “us,” differentiates the group from others, from “them,” the ones not like us. The more strongly we feel bound to the people like us, the more likely we are to fear and thus dislike the people who are different.
Nor is this unique to humans. It used to be thought that Homo sapiens was the only life form that deliberately killed members of its own species. We now know this is not so. Jane Goodall spent decades studying chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. A member of her team, Richard Wrangham, tells the story of what happened when a feud between two alpha males led to a split in the population into two subgroups. Within a few years they had marked out their respective territories. Borders were patrolled by hunting parties. If they came across an isolated individual, they would attack. Soon they were mounting raids into one another’s territory, and within three years one group had annihilated all the other group’s males. Wrangham estimated that around thirty per cent of adult male chimpanzees had died as the result of violence by another member of their own species.2Richard Wrangham, Demonic Males (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).
We are, it seems, genetically predisposed to mistreat the stranger.3For an impressive recent study, see Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us (New York: Prometheus, 2013).
A number of recent scholars have suggested that the answer lies in the abandonment of the ethics of identity altogether in favour of cosmopolitanism, a world without community.4See among others, Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence (London: Penguin, 2007); Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Allen Lane, 2006); Joshua Green, Moral Tribes.
But no cosmopolitan society is as tolerant as it seems. In antiquity, both the Greeks and Romans attempted at one time or another to eliminate the practice of Judaism. Europe of the Enlightenment did not end anti-Semitism: it gave rise to a new and violent strain of it. Nor has any cosmopolitan society lasted for long. As the great fourteenth-century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun pointed out, societies that lack asabiyah, social solidarity, soon decline and fall.
So the Torah’s project of an ethic that combines love of neighbour (ethnocentrism) with love of the stranger (xenophilia) is almost unique in moral history. Its theological basis is already set out in the first chapter of Genesis in the proposition that every human being, regardless of colour, class, or culture, is created in the image and likeness of God: the single most revolutionary statement of human dignity. What, though, does the Torah mean by ger, “the stranger”?
Clearly the reference is to one who is not Jewish by birth. It could mean one of the original inhabitants of the land of Canaan. It could mean one of the “mixed multitude” who left Egypt with the Israelites. It might mean a foreigner who has entered the land seeking safety or a livelihood.
Whatever the case, immense significance is attached to the way the Israelites treat the stranger. This was what they were meant to have learned from their own experience of exile and suffering in Egypt. They were strangers. They were oppressed. Therefore they knew what it feels like to be a member of a minority, an alien, an outsider, and they were to learn from this experience not to inflict on others what was once inflicted on them.
The sages hold that the word ger might mean one of two things. One was a ger tzedek, a convert to Judaism who had accepted all its commands and obligations. The other was the ger toshav, the “resident alien,” who had not adopted the religion of Israel but who lived in the land of Israel. Parashat Behar spells out the rights of such a person. Specifically:
If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a resident alien, so they can continue to live among you. (Lev. 25:35)
There is, in other words, an obligation to support and sustain a resident alien. Not only does he have the right to live in the holy land, but he has the right to share in its welfare provisions. Recall that this is a very ancient law indeed, long before the sages formulated such principles as darkhei shalom, “the ways of peace,”5Gittin 59a–61a. obligating Jews to extend charity and care to non-Jews as well as Jews.
What then is a ger toshav? There are three views in the Talmud. According to R. Meir, it is anyone who takes it upon himself not to worship idols. According to the sages, it is anyone who commits himself to keep the seven Noahide commands. A third view, more stringent, holds that it is someone who undertakes to keep all the commands of the Torah except one, the prohibition of meat not ritually slaughtered.6Avoda Zara 64b.
The law follows the sages. A ger toshav is thus a non-Jew living in Israel who accepts the Noahide laws binding on everyone.
Ger toshav legislation is thus one of the earliest extant forms of minority rights. According to Maimonides, there is an obligation on Jews in Israel to establish courts of law for resident aliens to allow them to settle their own disputes – or disputes they have with Jews – according to the provisions of Noahide law. Maimonides adds: “One should act towards resident aliens with the same respect and loving-kindness as one would to a fellow Jew.”7Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 10:12.
The difference between this and later “ways of peace” legislation is that the ways of peace apply to non-Jews without regard to their beliefs or religious practice. They date from a time when Jews were a minority in a predominantly non-Jewish, non-monotheistic environment. “Ways of peace” are essentially pragmatic rules of what today we would call good community relations and active citizenship in a multi-ethnic and multicultural society. Ger toshav legislation cuts deeper. It is based not on pragmatism but religious principle. According to the Torah, you do not have to be Jewish in a Jewish society and land to have many of the rights of citizenship. You simply have to be moral.
One biblical vignette portrays this with enormous power. King David has fallen in love and has an adulterous relationship with Batsheva, wife of a ger toshav, Uriah the Hittite. She becomes pregnant. Uriah meanwhile has been away from home as a soldier in Israel’s army. David, afraid that Uriah will come home, see that his wife is pregnant, realise that she has committed adultery, and come to discover that the king is the guilty party, has Uriah brought home. His pretext is that he wants to know how the battle is going. He then tells Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife before returning, so that he will later assume that he himself is the father of the child. The plan fails. This is what happens:
So David sent this word to Joab: “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” And Joab sent him to David. When Uriah came to him, David asked him how Joab was, how the soldiers were, and how the war was going. Then David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house and wash your feet.” So Uriah left the palace, and a gift from the king was sent after him. But Uriah slept at the entrance to the palace with all his master’s servants and did not go down to his house.
David was told, “Uriah did not go home.” So he asked Uriah, “Haven’t you just come from a military campaign? Why didn’t you go home?”
Uriah said to David, “The Ark and Israel and Judah are staying in tents, and my commander Joab and my lord’s men are camped in the open country. How could I go to my house to eat and drink and make love to my wife? As surely as you live, I will not do such a thing!” (II Sam. 11:6–11)
Uriah’s utter loyalty to the Jewish people, despite the fact that he is not himself Jewish, is contrasted with King David, who has stayed in Jerusalem, not been with the army, and instead had a relationship with another man’s wife. The fact that Tanakh can tell such a story in which a resident alien is the moral hero, and David, Israel’s greatest king, the wrongdoer, tells us much about the morality of Judaism.
It takes more than democracy to create a free society. As Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill pointed out in the nineteenth century, democracy can lead to the “tyranny of the majority” and the loss of minority rights. Lord Acton was therefore surely right when he wrote, “The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.”8Lord Acton, Essays in the History of Liberty, 7.
Since the days of Moses, minority rights have been central to the vision of the kind of society God wants us to create in the land of Israel. A strong sense of group identity can co-exist with love of, and care for, the people who belong to other groups or to none. That is part of Torat Kohanim, ethics in the priestly mode. Our common humanity precedes our religious differences. This remains one of the towering insights of Judaic ethics.