refugees welcome

This week, our godson came to stay. We’re used to being in the house just the two of us, but this half term we had people in and out of our house. Sometimes people came for lunch or dinner. Sometimes they stayed over and sometimes they just came for a cup of tea.

By the end of the week, the house was messier, we were smellier, the carpets had a couple of new stains, and we were so much happier. It was hard, it was exhausting, and it was worth it.

My husband and I love each other, but I get bored quite quickly, and I get lonely just going to the toilet. We love seeing people and we love hosting. One visitor said “you just want your house to be filled with children and music.” That’s it exactly. This week reinforced for me that home is made by people.

The prophets knew how important this was. Abraham and Sarah sat with their tent open on all sides so they could welcome strangers. When three travellers come to meet them in the desert, Sarah leaps to her feet.

She’s doing all she can to make her guests feel welcome, cooking up sweet cakes and getting them water. That’s a real Jewish balaboster right there. The kind of host I aspire to be.

Abraham immediately greets them: “welcome, my lords.”

The rabbis wanted to know: how was it that Abraham knew these strange men were angels? They said: Abraham saw the angel in everyone.

He didn’t know they were messengers from God, come to tell Sarah she would have a child. He just saw God’s light shining from every human being and welcomed it into his home. He didn’t know what he was getting himself in for, but he thought it would be worth it.

This is one of the most sacred Jewish values: haknasat orkhim; welcoming in guests. In the story of Elisha, we see the same thing from the experience of the one being hosted.

Elisha goes to the home of a widow who is absolutely destitute. She’s in so much debt she’s considering selling her children into slavery. Elisha connects her with neighbours, and by some miracle, she finds she now has plenty and can save her sons.

The widow didn’t know Elisha was a miracle-worker. She made herself vulnerable by letting a strange man in her home, then she put her faith in her neighbours, and somehow the experience of community brings about wonders.

But Elisha’s story isn’t done. As a true prophet of God, he doesn’t patronise the poor or show favour to the rich. He treats everyone as if they are part of God’s creation. He goes and stays with a wealthy lady, the Shunamit. She takes a risk. She gives him his own room and board. And then he performs miracles for her too.

Elisha and the people he met understood that home was made by people. It might be chaotic and messy, but it was worth the potential rewards.

As Jews, we often tell our stories of migration. We talk about what it was like for our ancestors, and even for us, to come to this country and take the risk on the people who would host us.

I wonder what it was like, actually, for the English, when they first let us back in. For nearly half a century, Jews hadn’t lived openly in their country. They didn’t know who we were or what we would be like.

But this was the English Revolution, a moment of great upheaval in society. Oliver Cromwell had killed the king, shared out the land, and announced freedom of religion for everyone. They were remaking society and decided it was time to let back in the Jews.

It was a risk, and it turned out to be one worth taking. Well, they liked us so much that, even when they reinstated the monarchy and brought back feudalism, they decided to let us stay. And we liked England so much we made it our home.

And they decided that this whole business of allowing immigration and multiple cultures was working quite well for them. Because only a few decades later they let in fifty thousand Huguenot refugees.

And then the Irish came fleeing famine, and the Germans came fleeing war, and then Russian Jews came fleeing pogroms, and then the British Empire came back to the motherland from India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, and Africa.

Recently, I joined other faith leaders in welcoming unaccompanied child refugees, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea, to Surrey. We got together, as Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu and Bahai to show the newcomers how we build a society here on friendliness and mutual respect. For these kids, who had fled from countries torn apart by war, the very concept of tolerance blew their minds!

Now, I take great pride in telling my godson that England is the place people come to be safe because we build our country on freedom. 500 years of tolerance. This country is our home, and we are the people who are making it. This is our home and we filled it with music and kids.

And we still take in strangers, and sometimes that does feel risky, but we know after centuries of experience that it’s a risk worth taking.

This week – would you believe it – Ephraim Mirvis was in the news bemoaning immigration. Can you imagine what a parody it is for a Jew born in South Africa to get on the Jewish News and say “our civilisation is under attack” because of “the influence of other cultures coming.”

This apparently religious Jew, in a beard, tzitzit, and kippah, complained “we’re seeing a definite move away from a Christian-based British identity towards a more general-based identity.”

Mirvis, like Farage and others, would like us to believe we have a choice between safety and immigration. The real choice is, and always has been, between diversity and conformity. It is between a shared society and homogeneity. It’s never been a choice between Jews and Muslims. It’s either all of us or none of us.

Who was to blame for this great divergence from ethnic and religious purity? Well, Mirvis says “some Jewish people who are letting us down.” He means us, of course. The Progressives who won’t tow his nationalist, parochial line for “Jewish unity,” but instead rejoice in our shared society.

Of course, it’s not just Progressive Jews. He also blames the Church. The established religion of state, the Church of England, has become to weak, he complains, and moved away from “Judeo-Christian” values. Well, yes, the Church has moved in a more inclusive direction. It’s chosen a woman as Archbishop and proudly taken up the banner of diversity.

But if the Jewish leaders and the Christian leaders are all betraying Judeo-Christian values, who knows what they even are? If we, who uphold the message of Elisha, and the hospitality of Sarah, don’t know what the “Judeo-Christian” message is, then what is our Scripture even for?

The truth is the traditional Britain Mirvis wants back is a fantasy. It doesn’t exist and it never did. And you can waste your life pining after a daydream, but you will miss out on living in the real world. You’ll miss out on this real Britain.

The real Britain sounds like Scottish bagpipes and Rasta steel pans and Punjabi bhangra and klezmer clarinet and Peckham grime and Vera Lynn and K-Pop and bluegrass and Cotswold Morris dancers beating together their claves.

The real Britain tastes like croissants and Turkish kebab and Birmingham Vindaloo and American cheese burgers and sweet gefilte fish from the deli and callaloo and Sunday roast and battered Mars bars and Irish stout and Swiss cheese.

The real Britain speaks Sylheti, Polish, Creole, Arabic, Urdu, Romanian, Welsh, Gujurati, and it speaks them all in a Geordie accent.

The real Britain wears kente cloth, Cornish tartan, a shalwar kameez, a sheitl, a kermaya, a crucifix necklace, a kirpan, dreadlocks, a flat cap, and an artist’s beret.

And it’s all together. We put them together to make something bigger and better because that’s how we like it. The people came together and made this our home. And we filled it up with kids and music.

And it’s messy and it’s busy and it’s tiring and it’s hard work and it is absolutely worth it.

This is our country and these are our people. This is our home and these are our neighbours. This is our community and we won’t have it any other way.

That’s my Britain, and I think that’s a way of life worth defending.

Shabbat shalom.

A colorful patchwork representation of the Union Jack, incorporating various textile patterns and small blue sailboat illustrations across vibrant sections. — *The New Union Flag, by Gil Mualem-Doron*

There is a verse in the Torah so radical that one of my teachers did not believe me it was even in there.

I was working on a project as a rabbinical student and I brought a text that cited this verse.

“That can’t be in the Torah,” my teacher said. She was a serious scholar, with not only rabbinic ordination but also a PhD in rabbinics and a host of published articles.

“No ancient society would allow a law like that. The entire economy would collapse.”

I thought, perhaps I had misread it. It was a bold claim. So I went back to look.

But there it was, nestled among a litany of miscellaneous commandments in Deuteronomy. On one side of this law was the instruction to make sure soldiers did not have nocturnal emissions, and on the other side was the requirement not to bring money gained from prostitution as a Temple offering.

There it was, a law completely at odds with ancient society, which threatened to collapse an entire economy if enforced:

Do not hand over a slave to his master who is taking refuge with you from his master. He will dwell with you in your neighbourhood in the place he chooses, in one of your gates that is good for him. Do not oppress him.

– Deuteronomy 23:16-17

Let us start by acknowledging why this law is so radical. Ancient agrarian states were built on slavery. Prisoners of war, pillaged people, indentured servants and trafficked humans did back-breaking work to make the farms run. Their unpaid labour was what made the brutal machinations of early states even possible.

Here we have a rule: do not hand over any slave to their master. The Torah is biased, and it’s not on the side of the owners!

More than this, if you get a runaway, your duty is to look after them. You have to give them accommodation. You have to give it in a place where the refugee himself feels is good for him, within the gates of one of your towns.

This is bold.

But still, it may be I had misunderstood. We already know from many other Torah sources that Israelites cannot be held as slaves. They might be debt labourers and bondsmen, but if somebody is part of the Israelite family, they can never be subjected to lifelong slavery.

So, perhaps, this law is just talking about what to do if an Israelite runs away. In such a case, they might have been the slave of another Israelite, in which case they were being held against the law. Of course you would then give the slave refuge.

Or they might have been an Israelite running away from another country, like an Edomite who had captured them in war. Well, then, they have come back to their people and need to be cared for.

So, have I mistranslated? Is this actually about Israelite slaves?

I’d have to look at earlier translations to check what it means.

The earliest translation of the Torah is Targum Onkelos, a 2nd Century rendition of Scripture into the vernacular Aramaic.

This translation gives details that clarify things. In this case, it adds an adjective to the Torah’s word for slave. עממין – from the foreign nations. A non-Israelite. The translation is unambiguous: we are talking specifically about foreigners.

This is even more radical. It’s saying we insist on looking after complete outsiders. They have no connection to us.

They may even, then, be running away from Israelite masters. The Torah is saying that, if a slave runs away from their master, even though the slave is definitely not one of us, and the master might actually be one of us, we are on the side of the slaves.

About a century after this translation, the rabbis in the school of Rabbi Akiva wrote a commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy to expound its meaning. The book is called Sifre Devarim, and it takes all the legal verses from these books and adds oral traditions about how to interpret the laws.

Sifre’s explanation of this verse gives details on how you are supposed to treat a runaway slave when they come to you. Not only do you have to welcome them into your towns, say the rabbis, you also have to make it possible for them to make a living. They have to live with you, and not on the borders of the town.

It adds that the commandment not to oppress the runaway extends even towards words. Even the language you use must be kind. And it insists: you have to make them feel like the place they have come to is better than the one they left.

This is even bolder than where we began. It’s an official open borders policy to every runaway, with the requirement that they not only get refuge but actually get a livelihood and integration in the place where they move to.

It is not only uneconomical, it goes against all the foundations of the ancient economy.

You cannot even appeal to other economic reasons. There’s no organised mass of runaway slaves that the law-givers need to accommodate. There’s no suggestion that there was great pressure from the peasantry to be kind to foreigners.

It is a law entirely based on compassion.

What makes this law so radical is that it seems to be motivated entirely by altruism. That is why my teacher was so incredulous about the law being in the Torah at all.

And yet, isn’t that why we turn to the Torah to begin with? Not for cold economics, but to know the right way to live. We want a moral guide for how we should treat people.

Rabbi Julia Neuberger, who serves as a crossbencher in the House of Lords, has been a consistent voice for refugees, as each successive government has threatened hostility and sanctions.

As a lawmaker and a rabbi, she has to balance the high moral demands of our religion with the practicalities of government.

In all her addresses, she emphasises the need for compassion. She treats refugees as a litmus test for the compassion of a society, because their marginal status tells us how our country is likely to treat everyone else.

Baroness Neuberger advocates firmly for the rights of refugees.

Perhaps that is why the Torah introduces this seemingly radical rule. It wants to set a culture where the most vulnerable people get the best possible treatment, so that the whole of society will be based on kindness.

The foundation of Torah law is about caring for the poor, the orphan, and the widow. This most intense case – a complete outsider running away from slavery – is the Torah’s own test for its moral system.

It is a test every society faces. How people treat refugees shows what they think of human beings.

For the past few weeks, protesters have been gathering outside hotels, demanding refugees be sent back. The main political parties have entered into a race to the bottom for how unwelcome they would make refugees.

Their rhetoric and laws may turn out to be a threat to us all. They may undermine the very basis of a compassionate society.

Let us consider what would happen if Britain implemented Torah laws in its approach to refugees.

What would happen if this country made an active decision to welcome refugees and refuse to send them back? To deliberately integrate them and make sure they were firmly part of our towns? To set them up so that they could make a livelihood and refuse any insult to them?

Would this collapse our economy, or would it make this place better for everyone?

And, if we had to choose, why would we not choose to follow the Torah?

Shabbat shalom.