“And all the congregation of Israel are forgiven, along with the strangers living in their midst…” (Inspired by Numbers 15:26, used in liturgy for Kol Nidrei Service on Yom Kippur)
On Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, we encounter “the strangers living in our midst,” those who only show up to synagogue for the holidays and disappear for the rest of the year. The stranger is one who stands on the outside, an “other,” not one of us.
The Hebrew allows for a playful interpretation of the phrase quoted above. We can also read it as, “…and the stranger who resides within ourselves.” The stranger within ourselves – what can that mean? As the years pass, we become estranged from different parts of ourselves. Some parts go underground, like a dream or an aspiration that we once held. Some aspect of our personality changes so that we surrender to dishonorable instincts instead of rechanneling them in a positive direction. Welcoming the stranger within means learning to embrace ourselves in our totality. As a friend once said, “We cannot be someone else. We can only be more of ourselves.”
Here is the magic that happens when we embrace our full selves: by working on and with all aspects that comprise who we are, we can more readily embrace the stranger in our community. We open new potential pathways of connection with those who seem distant from us. We just might find that we have a lot more in common with the “strangers” who come to pray with us on the holidays than we thought and actively invite them in throughout the year.
