The Hebrew Bible is truly the most revolutionary document read by humanity. This week’s biblical portion commands, “You shall not exploit or harass the stranger, because you were strangers in [a foreign] land” (Exodus 22:20), and, “You shall not harass the stranger; you know the soul of a stranger…because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9). The Bible knows of two types of strangers: the ger tzedek, righteous stranger, who may come from a foreign and even idolatrous nation but who has become a “Jew by choice,” linking his or her life and destiny to the people, religion, and nation of Israel; and the stranger who may live among us in the Land of Israel (if he or she so chooses), remaining unconverted but living by the basic laws of social morality (i.e., living within a legal structure of the courts and observing prohibitions against murdering, stealing, committing rape or adultery, blaspheming God, indulging in idolatry). In both cases the ger is a stranger — an “other” — and he or she must be loved and embraced.

Our Bible delineates two types of unseemly conduct toward the stranger: ona’ah, or exploitation in business, and lehitzah, or harassment with words, reminding the stranger of his or her foreign forbears and background. (BT, Bava Metzia 58b) While both are forbidden, verbal harassment is considered the more egregious of the two crimes since restitution can be made for financial exploitation but a hateful word can never be recalled.

Why does our Bible express such sensitivity about how we treat the different one, the stranger?

The Ramban (in his commentary to Exodus 22:20) explains that God, the loving and compassionate creator of life, is especially solicitous and protective of the “weaker vessels” — the widow, the orphan, the indigent, the stranger. From the point of view of the divine God of loving-kindness and compassion, the test of any society, and of every human being within a particular society, is how it treats its weaker vessels.

Perhaps this idea goes even deeper. The Mishna (Sanhedrin chapter 4) praises the Almighty precisely because of the differences, the otherness, within his creation of the human being: “Behold the uniqueness of God, the King of all kings, when He is compared to a mortal king of flesh and blood. The mortal king takes one mold and mints from it many coins, each precisely and exactly a replica of the original as well as of each other. The Almighty blessed be He, however, created the mold of Adam, the first human being, and derived from him numerous other human beings, not one of them looking like any other, not one of them thinking like any other….”

It is these very differences between individuals that express the true glory of the Creator; the grand unity that emerges from the sum total of all of these disparate elements that will ultimately express true wholeness, peace, and redemption. Unity that emerges from an honest synthesis of respected and diverse attitudes and perspectives ultimately produces a free and open pluralism in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It goes without saying that the stranger can serve as a most welcome addition, even as a necessary yeast-like ingredient, for any societal mixture, as Abraham apparently did for the Hittites, as Moses in Egypt did for the Hebrews, as Ruth did for First Commonwealth Judea.

The Bible itself, however, provides the most fundamental rationale for our sensitive consideration toward the stranger: “You shall not oppress [harass] the stranger, because you know the soul of the stranger — since you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9) We the Jewish people — a nation that twice suffered exile and lived for more than 2,000 years as strangers in alien host countries — know to the depths of our historic soul what it feels like to be suspected, envied, feared, persecuted, and delegitimized only because we were different. We must teach the world to love the stranger.

And indeed, are we not all strangers in an alien universe? Do we not require the close embrace of all of humanity to help protect us against a new ice age brought about by global warming, tsunamis, and earthquakes that wreak havoc upon our societies, a nuclear disaster that one madman threatens to unleash? And does not the Almighty God himself feel like a stranger, in his world of free choice in which so much evil is wrought? Does not our Bible have God command the Israelites to “make for him a sanctuary so that He may [finally] dwell in our midst” comfortably, and does not our mystical tradition teach that “the Divine Presence is in exile”? If Rav Nahman of Bratizlav can teach that in a world not yet redeemed, “Who is a whole individual? Only one with a broken heart,” may we not also teach that in a world not yet redeemed, “Who is at home? Only one who feels himself to be in exile”? To love the stranger means to love God; to love the stranger means to love yourself, because, after all, in the final analysis, each of us is the other, different, a stranger — vis a vis everyone else.