by Elie Wiesel
Meursault, the stranger in the classic novel by Camus, kills so as to prove that he is alive. Better to be punished than to be ignored. Thus suicide has become a romantic temptation—a protest against an indifferent society.
Gradually, knowledge has replaced love, machines have killed imagination. No wonder that in his rare moments of lucidity, man is seized by fear and anguish: Who am I? And where am I?
For the Jew, the problem is particularly pertinent and poignant. No elaborations are necessary. Since our beginnings, with rare exceptions, we have been considered strangers. We have come to exemplify—by our very existence—other peoples’ prejudices toward their strangers. We know their attitude toward us—what is our attitude toward them? And how are the two linked? Are we to remain strangers forever?
WHO IS A STRANGER? What is a stranger? Scripture offers three terms which could serve as definitions: ger, nochri, and zar. The same three notions have undergone dramatic change in Talmudic literature.
In the Bible, ger and nochri indicate legal and geographical factors, while zar is related mainly to spiritual and religious ones.
A ger is the stranger who lives among Jews, meaning, on Jewish land, in Jewish surroundings, in a Jewish atmosphere; but he has not adopted the Jewish faith although he has acquired Jewish customs, values, and friends.
A nochri is a ger who, for reasons of his own, wishes to remain aloof or separated. The ger adjusts and even assimilates, while the nochri wants to remain different, an outsider—though a friendly one.
As for the zar, he is even further removed. He is not only different but hostile.
Hence, in our ancient tradition, we were extremely hospitable toward the ger and even the nochri—and extremely severe with the zar, who, by the way, was not really a stranger, for while the terms ger and nochri refer to Gentiles, zar applies to Jews.
The ger seems to have been a special person, endowed with all kinds of gifts. He was frequently found in the good company of the Levi—the Levite—who ranks just below the priest. Both enjoy exceptional privileges. One must be as charitable to the ger as to the Levite. One must not reject the ger or cause him harm or loss or distress; one must extend more assistance to him—or her—than to the average person; one must make an effort to understand the ger and make him feel welcome, at home; one must love him—or her. The term veahavta—and you shall love—is used three times in Scripture: And you shall love your God with all your heart; you shall love your fellow man; and you shall love the ger, the stranger.
In Scripture, it develops into almost an obsession. It is stressed again and again—persistently, endlessly—that we must love the ger. And we are told why: we have all been strangers in Egypt. That is precisely what Abraham heard in his vision of the covenant. In other words: we must not treat others the way we have been treated. We must show them compassion, charity, and love. Above all, we must not make them feel like strangers. All the Jewish laws, with very few exceptions, apply to the ger. Those of Shabbat, of holidays, of Yom Kippur—yes, he must fast on the Day of Atonement. He must not feel left out. He is protected, perhaps overprotected, by the law. He must be given special treatment, special attention, special consideration; he is someone special. So much so that in time the term ger came to mean convert or proselyte, a gertzedek: a just convert, or perhaps a convert to justice; someone who joins our people not lightheartedly, for superficial reasons, but out of conviction, out of belief that despite the suffering and persecutions, or because of them, Judaism is inspired by truth and embodies the supreme quest for justice.
Thus, in Talmudic literature, which discourages conversion, the ger is generally praised and even exalted, honored, and rewarded. He is made into a superior person to whom nothing is denied. We offer him not only a past—our own—but eternity as well. We assure him that on Passover eve, at the Seder, he may declare—for all to hear—that his fathers and forefathers were slaves in Egypt; and that, like all of us, he was freed by Moses; like all of us, he stood at Sinai and received God’s word and His law. We go so far as to declare that our God favors him over us. And Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish explains why. We Jews accepted the Law under duress; we had no choice—while the convert comes to God on his own.
The ger’s position was so privileged in the Talmud that Moses objected: Why compare him to the Levite? Why does he deserve such honor? And again, God used the argument of the ger’s purity of heart: What didn’t I have to do to persuade the people of Israel to accept my Law? I had to free them from bondage, feed them in the desert, protect them from their enemies, impress them with continuous miracles, one greater than the other, one more astonishing than the other—while the ger, the convert, didn’t need all these signals—I didn’t even call him, and yet he came.
And so he occupies a higher position than the born Jew. There are things we may not do to him—or even say to him. We may not remind him of his past—so as not to embarrass him. Anyway, his past is now the same as ours. The ger can achieve whatever God chooses not to do: he—and he alone—can change his past.
Furthermore, every ger may claim direct kinship with Abraham—the first convert, the father of all converts—whose greatest virtue was to expose other people to his faith. The ger is even linked to the Messiah, who, as the son of David, will be a descendant of a convert—Ruth.
Abraham’s mission was to attract gerim—that’s why he traveled so far and wandered so often. The Midrash compares him and his wanderings to a bottle of perfume: it must be shaken to spread its fragrance. Later, the Talmud says, Jewish exile had a similar motivation: while wandering through the world, driven from city to city, from village to village, the people of Israel disseminated God’s words, God’s truth.
But Abraham was not only a ger in the religious sense; he was also a stranger in the geographical sense—the first Jewish stranger—one who, because of his Jewishness, had to endure the hardships of alienation and expatriation. No wonder, then, that in his vision of the covenant he anxiously saw his people become a people of refugees to whom others would not be charitable.
Quite the contrary.
For there exists a fundamental difference between the Jewish attitude toward strangers, and that of other peoples.
THE STRANGER, on the sociological and human level, is someone who suggests the unknown, the prohibited, the beyond; he seduces, he attracts, he wounds—and leaves; he is someone who comes from places you have never visited—and never will—sent by dark powers who know more about you than you know about them, and who resent you for being what you are, where you are, or simply—for being. The stranger represents what you are not, what you cannot be, simply because you are not he. Between you and him no contact seems possible, except through suspicion, terror, or repulsion. The stranger is the other. He is not bound by your laws, by your memories; his language is not yours, nor his silence. He is an emissary of evil and violence. Or of death. Surely he is from the other side.
Thus in many traditions he was, in fact, rejected, isolated, condemned. He was the nomad looking for water and wine; the Gypsy asking for a place to sing; the beggar searching for a roof; the fugitive seeking shelter; the madman haunted by shadows. Whether seeking consolation or forgetfulness, the stranger was sent away or somehow disposed of. The tribe wished to stay closed—unified. Pure. The stranger, bearer of an evil omen, could only undermine the established order. He had to be expelled. Or exorcised. Or even killed.
Or, in more enlightened civilizations, he had to be absorbed, meaning—assimilated. Disarmed, undressed, transformed. He would be welcome to stay, but only after giving up his name, his past, his memories, his bonds with his own people; a Jew, for example, had to become Christian, or Moslem, or Communist—or whatever. He would be offered the possibility of living, and living happily, provided he paid the inevitable rite de passage, which was a kind of metamorphosis or transsubstantiation. You wish to be with us? Be one of us.
There was yet another, more radical, method, one practiced and perfected by the Nazis.
With them, the fear of the stranger, the hate for the stranger reached climactic proportions. His very presence evoked ancient suspicions and ancestral frustrations. In the Third Reich, cultural or religious transformation ceased to be an option. The stranger had to be disfigured. Shamed. Diminished. Erased. More cruel than pagans or cannibals had ever been, the Nazi executioners wanted to dehumanize their victims before killing them: the stranger had to become an object.
Only Islam—because of its link with Abraham—sometimes showed more compassion and hospitality toward strangers. Islam is, after all, a religion of people who for centuries wandered from tribe to tribe, from oasis to oasis, in search of water and shade. But even though Islam is an exception, its hospitality toward its guests extended only over short periods of time: how long can you be a guest? Ultimately the guests became strangers once more and had to choose exile, death, or conversion—for Islam means submission. The stranger had to submit—or die. The stranger as a sovereign individual seems to have been incompatible with the inner sovereignty of all traditions—except the Jewish one.
To us, too, the stranger represents the unknown; but the attraction he holds over us is one of curiosity and fascination—not hate. Rather than absorb the stranger, we encourage him to remain independent and true to his genuine self; we want him to maintain his identity and enrich it. Except for one or two periods in our history, we discouraged conversion. Under Yannai there were forced conversions—and we lived to regret it under Herod, whose reign was the bloodiest in Judea.
Judaism teaches us that man must be authentic, and that he can find his authenticity only within his own culture and tradition. We don’t want to make Jews out of Christians; we want to make Jews out of Jews, and to help Christians to be better Christians. We want the stranger to offer us not what we already have—or whatever we may have given him—but that which he has and we don’t. We don’t want him to resemble us any more than we wish to resemble him. We look at him hoping to find his uniqueness, to understand that which makes him different—that which makes him a stranger.
For man, aware of both his limitations and his desire to transcend them, recognizes that the stranger forces him to call into question not only his own judgments of himself but also his relations with others. Faced with the unknown, we realize that every consciousness represents the unknown to everyone else. God, and God alone, remains Himself in all His relationships—never becoming someone else, never becoming the other.
And yet, just as man can attain his ultimate truth only through other human beings, God can be united to His creation only through man. Man needs the other to be human—just as God needs man to be God.
For the Jew, the stranger suggests a world to be lived in, to be enhanced, or saved. One awaits the stranger, one welcomes him, one is grateful to him for his presence. What was Abraham’s greatness? He invited into his home all strangers, be they angels or fugitives, and made them feel welcome. Rabbi Eliezer, the father of the Besht, became a father because of his hospitality toward unknown wanderers. In the Jewish tradition, the stranger may very well be someone important: a prophet in disguise, one of the hidden just men. Or even the Messiah. He is to be accepted for what he is, the way he is. Thus we hope to receive a fragment of his secret knowledge, a spark of his flame—a key to his secret.
The question therefore is, How should the contact, the exchange, occur? What should its nature be? Am I to approach the stranger in his language or mine? On his level or mine? In other words: Must I make an effort to resemble him so as to better discover him? The answer, naturally, is, no. For that would mean accepting his terms; that would mean submission and defeat, leading—finally—to dissolution rather than to affirmation of our identity.
Now, we realize that there is in man precisely such a desire, calling for this kind of end, this kind of death. A desire to break with his surroundings, burn his bridges, deny his past and his experiences, plunge into the mass of humanity and go under … thus solving the problem of existence by putting an end to that existence. It is a desire to become another, to live the life of another, the destiny of another, assume the death of another—to die as a stranger in order to forget pain, shame, guilt, in order to disappear—to commit either physical or spiritual suicide.
That urge may or may not be rooted in weakness. Man may feel helpless to adjust to the image he has of himself and so wish to adopt the image the stranger has of him; ultimately he may try to resemble the stranger—or even the enemy.
But then it may also be related to a more positive passion—his need to renew himself, to replenish himself. He may leave his land, his home, his habits, in the hope that as an expatriate he may have greater opportunities to rethink, reevaluate, and redefine his place and role under the sun.
And so the stranger gets up one morning and without saying goodbye to anyone, disappears. He goes underground, joins a counterculture; he seeks out places and societies whose languages he does not understand, whose laws are alien—but those things don’t frighten him. On the contrary: he wants not to understand, not to know. For what he knows, he does not like; and what he understands, he does not accept. He has chosen exile so as to be someone else—a stranger—and thus to discover a new expression of truth, a new way of living out the human condition in its ever-changing forms.
That is why he is always on the run. Everywhere he leaves one more mask, one more memory. In order to become a total stranger, he must reject the last vestiges of his former self. Sometimes it ends well: Abraham did break with his parents to become Abraham, Moses did leave the royal palace to become the leader of leaders. Later, much later, mystics chose exile to achieve anonymity; Hasidic masters became vagabonds; poets sought poverty and adventure. Sometimes it ends badly: Philo of Alexandria, Josephus Flavius, Spinoza, Otto Weininger, and even Heine and Bergson—all were attracted by the other side and, to different degrees, went too far and became estranged from their people. They were not prudent enough. So taken were they by the stranger that they became strangers themselves … to themselves.
What went wrong? They could not resist the stranger’s temptations. They forgot that we are supposed—and indeed commanded—to love the stranger as long as he fulfills his role, meaning, as long as his mystery challenges our certainties and forces us to reexamine our own values, our own sincerity—as long as the stranger represents the question; but if and when he attempts to force his answers upon us, he must be opposed. He can be of help only as a stranger—lest you are ready to become his caricature. And your own. The virtue of the ger is that he remains a ger. Though he may have become Jewish in all aspects, he retains his superior quality of ger-tzedek, a just convert, for ten generations: we would not deprive him of that which made the stranger in him become our brother.
NOW—WHAT ABOUT the second category: the nochri? He clearly ranks below the ger. He remains actively on the outside—and there is something negative about his remaining there. We are told to love the ger—but no mention is made about love for the nochri On the contrary: we underline their differences so as to distinguish between them. We are allowed to lend money with interest to the nochri, but not to the ger. Ritually impure meat may be given to the ger, but must be sold to the nochri.
Why this distinction? Both terms mean “stranger.” But while ger indicates a movement, an impulse toward the Jew, nochri indicates the opposite: a movement away from the Jew.
Nochri stems from the word nechar—abroad, elsewhere. Variants of that word mean to deny, to remove oneself from the community, to alienate oneself from the family or group—while a variant of ger means the opposite: to come closer, to join, to convert.
There is something in the term nochri which implies a will, a deliberate plan, to be estranged: a nochri is one who could ultimately use his status as stranger to oppose you, to rule you.
While a ger, at least in Scripture, is merely an alien resident—one who came from far away to share your joys and sorrows—the nochri has come on a temporary basis. Tomorrow he may leave
with something of us, his prey; he has always been, and will continue to be, attached to another home, another system. Even when he is with you, he is elsewhere.
Hence Abraham’s pronouncement that among strangers he was a ger but never a nochri. Even with people very different from himself, he was really there, with them—as was Joseph in Egypt, who claims that even among nochrim, the Jew remains a ger. A Jew may not be a nochri to anyone, meaning, he may not use his Jewishness to attack, to humiliate, to negate anyone else.
But a Jew can belong to the third category—the worst of all: a Jew, only a Jew, can be a zar.
Zar, too, means stranger—and his lot in Scripture is worse than that of the other two. We are told to love the ger and be kind and generous to him. The nochri, God shields. God offers him protection. Not so the zar.
Who is a zar? Originally the term applied to those Jews who were kept outside the Temple. Then the Prophets used it to describe the profane, the alien, the destructive elements in our midst.
Zar is the Jew who remains a stranger to other Jews—and to the Jew in himself. The term implies a religious and metaphysical opposition to his own identity; a Jew who loathes his Jewishness is a zar—the worst of enemies. That is why most injunctions against the zar are extremely severe. He may not eat from priestly sacrificial offerings; they are so sacred that he may not even come close—too dangerous. A zar—the destructive stranger—uses his faith as a weapon, a faith that is not really his own: he has usurped it from others.
The term zar is therefore totally derogatory. Thoughts that are zarot, unholy, must be discarded. Aaron’s two sons perished because they introduced esh zarah—an unholy fire—into the sanctuary. When God expresses his dissatisfaction, his disgust with certain human actions, he says they are lezarah li, they are all alien to me, meaning, they repel me, they anger me.