Jewel: Love the stranger. Be the stranger.
You shall love the stranger, Abraham shows by example as he washes the sandy feet of his desert visitors and rushes to prepare them a meal.
You shall become the stranger, God warns him. Your descendants will be strangers in a strange land.
We shall love the stranger, Moses reveals as a core component of ethical monotheism as the Commandments are given at Sinai.
We shall become the stranger, R’ Yochanan Ben Zakkai tells the students at Yavneh as Jerusalem burns and Diaspora Judaism begins.
Love the stranger, my father urges, as he remembers how his childhood Shabbat table was incomplete without a guest.
I have become the stranger, my father says with his eyes, as what he has seen keeps a part of him back from the world of the living.
My father felt compelled to champion human rights and to treat people well in his everyday life. He lived what it meant to love the stranger.
And he insisted that being a Jew and living a Jewish life were at the root of who he was, and dreamed of the same for me. He taught me the joy and pride in being in the 0.2% of the population, the stranger among nations.
May I follow ever deeper in his footsteps on both of these paths.
Elisha Wiesel is the son of Marion and Elie Wiesel.
