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Some of our most joyful and meaningful moments are considered deficient if they do not include the stranger.
Please share with the group what aspect of this text resonates with you. Why did you decide to join the discussion group for this theme?
What kind of inclusion is being described in these verses?
Why do you think it is so important to include strangers in these kinds of moments?
וַאֲנִי יֵשׁ לִי אַרְבַּע בְּנֵי בַּיִת, הַלֵּוִי וְהַגֵּר וְהַיָּתוֹם וְהָאַלְמָנָה, שֶׁלִּי. וְכֻלָּן בְּפָסוּק אֶחָד. אִם אַתָּה מְשַׂמֵּחַ אֶת שֶׁלִּי וְאֶת שֶׁלְּךָ בַּבַּיִת בְּיָמִים טוֹבִים שֶׁנָּתַתִּי לְךָ, אַף אֲנִי מְשַׂמֵּחַ אֶת שֶׁלִּי וְאֶת שֶׁלְּךָ...
And as for Me, I have four children in the house: “the Levite and the sojourner, the orphan and the widow.” [These are] mine. So they all are in a single verse. If you give joy to Mine during the festival days that I have given you, I will give joy to yours!
This Midrash, or Rabbinic retelling of a Biblical verse, emphasizes how welcoming the vulnerable puts us into relationship with the Divine.
1) Why do you think that the four types of people on the list are the Levite, the sojourner, the orphan, and the widow? What makes these people vulnerable, and who else might you include?
2) How might we include these vulnerable populations in our celebrations?
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Parashat Vayera
Abraham, father of monotheism, knew the paradoxical truth that to live the life of faith is to see the trace of God in the face of the stranger. It is easy to receive the Divine Presence when God appears as God. What is difficult is to sense the Divine Presence when it comes disguised as three anonymous passers-by. That was Abraham’s greatness. He knew that serving God and offering hospitality to strangers were not two things but one.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, is commenting on the Biblical story in Genesis in which Abraham seems to leave a conversation with God in order to welcome a few strangers, who later turn out to be angels.
1) In what ways is offering hospitality to strangers the same as or different from welcoming friends or family to our homes?
2) What might our hospitality look like if we truly believe that we are connecting with the Divine by opening our homes to the stranger?
Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table, by Boris Fishman
pp. 75-76
The following day, we went to the synagogue: A Jewish organization was sponsoring us, after all, and it was September's march of Jewish holidays that had extended our magic stay in Vienna. (You couldn't work on these, it was explained.) The HIAS van dropped our group off on a canyon-like street concealed from the sun by tall residential buildings. We looked around but saw nothing. Admittedly, no one knew what to look for, never having seen a synagogue."
"'They call these streets the Bermuda Triangle,' the guide declared-they were winding and narrow; one was guaranteed to get lost. He pointed to a building indistinguishable from its neighbors except for the Hebrew script above its entry. When it was built, he said, the facades of non-Catholic houses of worship could not look out into the street, so the Stadttempel was made to look like the homes it was next to. This saved it during Kristallnacht - you couldn't burn it without burning the neighbors. No other Viennese synagogue survived the war."
"Services were in progress, so the guide called us away, but my grandfather hadn't been brought all this way to look at a door. He split off and went for the entrance, my hand in his. Carefully, he opened the door and we slid in our noses. It looked like an opera house. In the middle of the great hall, men shrouded with fringed, striped garments, their heads covered with skullcaps and their ears hung with sidelocks, pitched themselves forward and recoiled while chanting, the place humming like an apiary. My grandfather twisted his finger into the temple-the Soviet gesture for crazy. 'Fanatics,' he shrugged, and closed the door."
"My grandfather was young enough to have had a grandmother who spoke only Yiddish and observed most of the Jewish holidays and dietary restrictions. But we, like most Soviet people, genuinely regarded religion as mindless cultism. The activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain who fought so hard for our release were impelled by the injustice of the discrimination people like us endured no matter how much we tried to blend in. But we weren't emigrating for the freedom to worship. Ours was a 'salami immigration,' as people called it-all we wanted was the freedom to make money."
In this story, a group of Jews with no religious experience or background visit a synagogue. They do not encounter any particular welcome in this space which is so new to them.
1) What might it look like to welcome the Jewish stranger as well as the non-Jewish stranger? What do these different populations need in order to feel comfortable in our communities?
2) What actions might we take to enact this mandate of including the stranger in our joyous occasions? Who would be welcome, and how?
Ricky - With the rampant antisemitism how much more important it is to relate with the stranger.
Martha - Do not turn back to get it (the harvest reaping that falls) because turning back has funny biblical history.
Erin - Ger as convert and non tribal member.
Gerry - Expressed conflict with inviting the stranger into Jewish spaces and experiences as it felt as though he lost a piece of the experience.
Paul - Responded to that conflict with the idea that in order to teach well one must have mastery over the material.