In this week’s Torah portion, we find some of the most persistently cited verses in all of Torah: “And a stranger shalt thou not wrong, neither shalt thou oppress him; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child. If thou afflict them in any wise — for if they cry unto Me I will surely hear their cry — My wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows and your children fatherless.” (Exodus 22:20-23)
This warning from God to Israel, issued only months removed from the exodus from Egypt, is the most oft-repeated in the Torah. It is arguably the ur-text which stands stubbornly, defiantly even, in the face of any cruelty that the Jew might show toward the weak. In short, God is saying: Don’t oppress because you were oppressed.
As one can tell from the formal, gendered language of the translation, taken from the Torah commentary authored by Dr. Joseph Herman Hertz, the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom from 1913 to 1946, this text, like the Torah itself, is a letter from the past. It’s an expression of a different world, far removed from the divisions and dislocations of our own. Every generation hears this call in the language of its day, while the Torah text and its moral lessons endure, unaltered. In humanity’s inexplicable propensity to do evil in every generation, the necessity for the warning to be kind to the stranger remains.
I remember holding the Hertz commentary in my lap at synagogue as a child. By the time I got to college, it was being shoved aside by newer commentaries that brought new insights and less gendered language reflecting the exigencies of a new era. I can still recall the excitement at the publication in 1981 of Rabbi Gunther Plaut’s modern Torah commentary, followed eventually by the five-volume JPS Torah commentary, followed by the Etz Hayim Torah commentary, followed by Everett Fox’s translation of the Buber-Rosenzweig commentary, followed by The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, followed by Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible.
Help us keep Jewish knowledge accessible to millions of people around the world.
Your donation to My Jewish Learning fuels endless journeys of Jewish discovery. With your help, My Jewish Learning can continue to provide nonstop opportunities for learning, connection and growth.
This is just a snapshot of my world of books, and I relish hearing these books talk to each other over these aspirational verses.
The JPS: “The numerous biblical prohibitions against the maltreatment of strangers are supplemented in the legislation by positive injunctions to love them, even as God does, which entails supplying their basic needs and extending to them the same social services and amenities to which disadvantaged Israelites were entitled.”
The women’s commentary reminds us of the “plight of a widow … often dire because she did not automatically inherit her husband’s land. She was left at the mercy of her children, who might have been too young to support their mother, or, in the event that she had no children, her deceased husband’s male relatives.”
Alter, a contemporary Hebrew scholar, dissects these verses like a surgeon: “Throughout Biblical literature, and particularly in the Prophets, these are the paradigmatic cases of powerless members of society who are vulnerable to exploitation.” He continues, “The terms used here pointedly echo the language used at the beginning of Exodus to describe the oppression of Israel in Egypt and God’s response to that suffering. This law, then, like the previous one that explicitly invokes the Hebrews’ condition of sojourners in Egypt, touches on the experience of slavery as an enduring prod to social conscience” (My emphasis.)
Yet the cruelties remain. Nations still commit unimaginable abominations to the weak and defenseless. Justice is still easily corrupted. And while we may understandably yearn for better days, a look back into the past demands both our attention and our humility: We were warned then, we are being warned now, and we will be warned again in the future. This is the fearsome fire of the revelation at Sinai.
This Shabbat, with so much of our world on fire, I turn to the Hasidic master Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787-1819). The Kotzker held himself to an impossibly high standard of behavior and spiritual thought. He left next to nothing of his own writings behind, having burned them in a severe bout of depression and madness. What does remain are stories preserved by his devoted followers, who bore upon their own shoulders his difficult truths.
Driven mad myself by the cruelties in our world and our politics today, I lean on the urgent wisdom of the Kotzker rebbe, especially now. The cries of pain of the afflicted remind us that “it is natural that injustice done to the orphan and the widow will arouse in their hearts their anguish at being an orphan or a widow.” In other words, the suffering of the widow and orphan is doubled because they are not only in anguish for the wrong being done to them, but for their awareness of how vulnerable and helpless they are. It is not only the injustice itself that is wrong, but the anguish and pain that is experienced as a result of that injustice.
It is a remarkable thing indeed that no matter the time and place of the various commentaries to this vital lesson, we still struggle to get it right. My wish for this Shabbat is that we not listen to the screaming screens which dominate too much of our lives, but rather attune ourselves to the screams of the oppressed. Let their words reach us, especially now. Let their anguish be felt by us. Let their own yearnings to breathe free embolden us to bring freedom and justice to all who seek and deserve it.
Studying Pirkei Avot one day in college, my dear late friend Andrew Patner cracked up a group of us by blurting out, “Hillel was so smart when he said, ‘That which is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.’ I mean, I don’t like it when someone comes up to me and rubs my back. So I don’t do it to others. What the hell is so hard to understand about that?”
We know what is wrong for us, and therefore we have a path to know what is right. The journey toward a better world starts here. If not now, when?
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on February 22, 2025. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
