Oral Law- Jordan Spiegel

Leviticus, chapter 19, line 34: The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. 

This mitzvah is about loving and helping everyone in the world, regardless of any differences you might have. Race, religion, sexual orientation, nationality-none of it truly matters in the grand scheme of things. The most important thing we can do as human beings is look past these differences and find the love in our hearts to treat everyone as we treat ourselves. In modern day life, fulfilling this mitzvah could be anything, from respecting those with different opinions and treating them as an equal in your home, to accepting refugees into your land. Part of the reason this is such an important Jewish value is because we wandered the earth for thousands of years without a country to call home. Before the Jewish people had ‏ארץ ישראל we had to rely on being accepted into other cultures by other peoples. If Jews don’t accept  foreigners, we are forgetting our past, when we were foreigners in many lands.

I took this picture after our morning Shabbat service. There were some orthodox girls who were sitting and watching us pray. I waved and they waved back, and before we left I figured it would be a perfect picture opportunity (me being a reform Jew and completely forgetting that they might not want to take a picture on Shabbat. Lucky I asked, and they were fine with it, even if I got reprimanded for it by the madrichim.) Although it’s a somewhat goofy picture, I think it captures the essence of the mitzot of accepting the foreigner. We are both different sects of Jews with different customs, and I am living in their homeland. I barely speak Hebrew and they barely speak English, but we were able to connect with each other over morning prayer, and by making a silly hand heart. In this moment, we accepted each other despite all our differences. The mitzvot commands us to love the foreigner, and that’s what the Jewish people need to do, one connected hand heart at a time.