Kedoshem - "Love the Stranger"

Lew Mermelstein

Hello. I'm Lew Mermelstein. I just retired at the end of June. I've been working as an electrical engineer for the past forty years. My specialty has always been fixing things, especially complex things. For the past 28 years I worked at NASA's Ames Research Center, across Highway 101 from Mt. View, fixing 100-megawatt wind tunnels and multi-axis flight simulators. After other engineers tried the most obvious solutions and didn't fix the problem, they'd call me. I loved the thrill of hunting down every clue and eventually finding a failure mode that incorporated every piece of evidence. But to find the root-cause of the failure was the real goal. Because when you know the root-cause of a failure, then you can stop that failure from happening again.

But what does this have to do with Rosh Hashanah? Rabbi Margaret asked me to give a short talk about something that the congregants could carry with them into the coming year. It was to be a topic of my own choice. I decided to talk about Leviticus chapter 19 verse 34, the commandment to love the stranger. If you had asked me ten years ago to define 'love' I would have blushed and said, "I haven't the foggiest." Then September 11th happened. Ten years ago on 9/11, I watched the TV images in disbelief with my wife and 15-year-old daughter in our family room. The towers, fed with jet fuel, burned like updraft chimneys. I remember realizing that the intense heat might soften the steel beams and, maybe, the towers might collapse. And as I stared at the TV the first tower collapsed. We all got sent home from work for the rest of the week until NASA and the rest of the government figured out what to do. I spent a lot of time watching TV shows about the attacks, searching for clues and not finding much. Then I dug through the world-wide-web trying to find out why our system broke. What had changed? Why did 19 men decide to commit suicide and murder thousands of others? What was the root-cause of the failure?

While the world searched for Osama Ben Ladin, a Pakistani journalist, Hamid Mir, was granted the first interview with Osama on November 7th, almost two months after the attacks. Hamid was blindfolded at night and driven to a distant location for the interview. Among the many things Osama said in the interview was "The Sept 11th attacks were not targeted at women and children. The real targets were America's icons of military and economic power." They slaughtered thousands for icons? What are American icons of military and economic power? The Pentagon is the worldwide icon of US military power. And The World Trade Center - world trade. Well it was obvious that the Twin Towers were the icons of US economic power. I eventually put up a website detailing my search for the root-causes of the attacks with the hope that those ideas could prevent future attacks.

So how does any of this fit-in with 'love the stranger'? While searching for the root cause of the attacks, I discovered the profound importance of the Golden Rule. "Do unto others what you would want others to do unto you." It has been around for thousands of years and has been the founding ideal of every civilization. There are many cultural variations of the basic concept but the core concept has always been the same. In its simplest form it is the ethic of reciprocity, a predictive philosophy, which predicts that if we do good things for others then the others might do good things for us. Some psychologists believe that reciprocal altruism is hardwired into the human brain as well as other social animals. While the Golden Rule might sound like the commandment to love the stranger, it's not. The Golden Rule predicts that if you do good things for the other, the other might do good things for you. The commandment to 'love the stranger' is just that, a commandment with no expectation of any personal gain. Leviticus chapter 19, Parshat Kedoshem, the Holiness Code, commands us to both " ... love your neighbor as yourself." and "... love the stranger in your midst for you were once strangers..."

First of all, what is Love? We're not talking about an up-close physical relationship. 'Ahavah', Hebrew for love, is used to describe our relationship with God, with our neighbors and with the stranger. Ahavah has two components, empathy and behavior, with emphasis on behavior. Empathy, to share the emotions of an other, together with actions that sustain both you and the other - are the basis of 'Ahavah' or love. As anyone who lives in a close relationship with another knows, love is that condition where your own happiness depends upon the happiness of another. Jewish tradition says the entire Torah, including Leviticus, is God's words, spoken through Moses. However, historically Leviticus appears to have been written around 550BCE, during the Babylonian exile, a few decades after the destruction of the first Temple in the kingdom of Judah, In 583BCE Nebuchadnezzar's forces destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple then forced the survivors, about 10,000 people, east into exile in Babylon, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what we now call Iraq. As Psalm 137 says, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, we also wept, when we remembered Zion. The remnant of Judah lived for decades as "strangers" in Babylon, a weak minority in the shadow of a superior power. As a captive minority the Jews were treated fairly well. Scribes, who used to just copy the words of sages and priests, now helped to codify ancient texts and oral laws. A Jewish merchant class arose whose wealth supported the scribal effort and the work of the priests that kept the faith alive. It is interesting to note that the next two verses after the commandment to love the stranger, command us to have honest weights and measures in our business dealings. The sages knew that you cannot command a person's emotions but you can mandate their behavior. The 613 commandments often tell us to behave in ways contrary to our natural inclination of self-interest, because it is in the best interest of the tribe to do so. They knew what it was like to be "the stranger." And, they knew that their own happiness depended on the empathy and actions of both themselves and the multitude of strangers that surrounded them. These were the people who wrote, "...you shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were once strangers...." They probably prayed a lot for deliverance.

Their prayers were answered when, in 538 BCE, an army of Persians and Medes led by Cyrus the Great, a monotheist, conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to their homeland. Many Jews stayed in Babylon. A group of 42,000 eventually returned to Judah to Jerusalem to build a new temple, with new rulers and a written law for all to read. As we all know things didn't turn out too well for them. With the destruction of the second temple by the Romans those Jews began a diaspora that eventually spread small groups of Jews all across the world. In all those places, we have been “strangers in any number of strange lands”, including Mendocino. Perhaps it’s the lesson we learned in Babylon about loving the stranger that has been the foundation of our persistence.

Paul Johnson, in his conclusion to "A History of the Jews," commented on the tenacity of the Jews. He said that he's not sure whether Judaism is a religion or a culture, but that Judaism appears to be a system of sustainability. There's a story of two rabbis arguing which line in the Torah is the most important. The first, Rabbi Akiva, pointed to Lev. 19:18, "Love your neighbor as yourself," the foundation of the Golden Rule. The second, Rabbi Ben Azzai, acknowledged the importance of the Golden Rule but said the most important line was Gen. 5:1 "These are the generations of Adam." for it shows that we are all children of Adam and Eve and therefore all part of God's oneness. God never made strangers, humans did. When we recognize that every person, neighbor or stranger, can be either a contributor or a burden to the collective life of Earth, then it becomes clear that we are all connected in the same struggle for life.

This is as close as I came to finding a root cause for the 9/11 attacks. Most people just don't see the benefits of loving the stranger. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools." Another King, Rodney King, an African-American man who was brutally beaten by the Los Angeles police in 1992, may have said it best. An amateur video of his beating, seen across the nation, led to a highly publicized trial of the police officers. They were eventually acquitted. The ensuing riots, which started in LA, eventually spread to several major cities, killed 53 people, wounded thousands and caused nearly a billion dollars in damages. Finally, on the end of the third day of rioting, Rodney King called a press conference to plead for calm and asked, "Can we all get along?" That's what it's all about. Can we all get along? It's not clear to me that we can. But what I suspect is, without love for the stranger, through both empathy and action, we might all die together as fools. Loving the stranger is perhaps the hardest commandment to follow but it's what I think we need to sustain us all. Keep love in your hearts, in your minds and, most importantly, in your actions as we enter the new year. May 5772 be a good year. L'Shana Tova.

I want to thank Rabbi Janet Marder for her insightful comments and thoughtful suggestions on my first draft and my wife, Jane Marcus, who skillfully edited later versions. A special thanks to Rabbi Margaret Holub for giving me the great honor of presenting this drash on Rosh Hashanah 5772, September 29, 2011 at the Mendocino Coast Jewish Community Center, Caspar, California.