Did you know that the Talmud says it’s fully permitted to rob and exploit non-Jews? What can we do with that, as Reform Jews, never mind as decent people who are presumably against robbing and exploiting?
Well, to start with: never listen to people who tell you ‘The Talmud says’ X. The Talmud doesn’t “say” anything, it records discussions and it presents a whole range of different views. And if someone is seriously engaging with the Talmud, they can at least give you a proper reference, not just ‘The Talmud says’. In this case, there’s a discussion about whether it’s permitted to rob and exploit non-Jews. The debate is covered in Bava Metiza 111b which is based partly on a verse in this week’s Parshe – more on that later. It’s also in Bava Kamma 113a-b, and Sanhedrin 57a. So you can see that this is an important discussion which the Rabbis keep returning to.
We’ve all heard the story about the heavenly voice that intervenes in the debate between Hillel and Shammai to say “both these and these are the words of the Living God”. That’s all very well when it’s a debate about how much of your body needs to be in the Succah to count as being in the Succah, or which direction to light the Chanukah candles, but it’s a bit hard to swallow when it’s a debate about whether it’s ok to exploit non-Jews. Still, the Talmud records all sides of the debate and often doesn’t tell us who is ‘correct’.
The reason I’m talking about this is that the debate in Bava Metzia is partly based on a verse in the Parshe, namely Deuteronomy 24:14 . As most of you know, I’m studying to be a rabbi and I just spent a whole year working on this one verse. Actually I included the following verse, v 15 as well, because they’re usually read as a pair:
You must not exploit a poor and needy hired worker from among your kin, or from your ‘ger’ who is in your land, your cities.
On the same day you must give him his wage, and the sun must not set on him, for he is poor, and he sets his life on it, so that he does not call out to God about you, and it would become a sin for you.
So our big question is, what is a ‘ger’? It’s often translated as ‘stranger’, but there’s more nuance than can be captured in a single word. Who is included and excluded in this law? At first it seems like the Torah verse should cover everybody, your kin, that is fellow Israelites, and your ‘stranger’, that is everybody else. In fact there are different words for stranger. ‘Ger’ is a kind of positive stranger, perhaps an immigrant, someone who is in need of protection, often listed with other vulnerable groups like orphans and widows. There are 36 commandments in the Torah about good behaviour towards anyone who is a ‘ger’ type of stranger. (I didn’t count them, but Maimonides did and I trust his numbers).
However other parts of Deuteronomy, including Ki Teitzei, have very harsh laws about treatment of strangers. Not just that we don’t have to be nice to them, but we should actively seek them out and destroy them with all their stuff. Now, this could be seen as a different type of stranger, sometimes the word ‘nochri’, which might be translated as ‘foreigner’ rather than just ‘stranger’, is used in place of ‘ger’. The absolute worst examples are not in the carefully selected portion we read today, but within the parshe of Ki Teitzei we have:
· At the start of the parshe, Ch 21:10-13, laws about capturing women during war, and I won’t go into too much detail about their treatment with young people present, but it’s pretty unpleasant
· In Ch 23 we have a prohibition against any peaceful behaviour or any good intentions towards Ammonites and Moabites in verses 4-7, and a ruling that it’s ok to charge interest on loans to ‘nochri’ foreigners in verses 20-21.
· And at the end of the parshe in Ch 25 we have the section we read around Purim telling us to blot out the memory of Amalek, to be forever their enemy.
There are even more dramatic examples of violent rejection of strangers in other parts of Deuteronomy. So the question is, are there two kinds of strangers, the bad ‘nochri’ foreigners and the good ‘ger’ immigrants or residents? This is partly what is happening when the sages discuss who we are allowed to rob and exploit. In some Rabbinic thought, they start redefining ‘ger’ as ‘ger tzedek’, a righteous convert. We should certainly treat converts equally with born Jews, that’s a very core principle of Torah law. But if it’s just that, why do we need 36 special mentions, often alongside other needy and vulnerable groups? There are times when reading ‘ger’ as convert just can’t make sense; for example, in several places, including Deuteronomy 10:19, the Torah tells us: “You must love the ger, for you were gerim in the land of Egypt.” We can’t understand ‘ger’ to mean ‘convert’ here, because when we were ‘gerim’ in Egypt, most of us weren’t converts. Converting from what to what? It’s not a reasonable reading.
The debate in the Talmud is grappling with this issue, that some outsiders are bad, they are our oppressors, whether that’s the Moabites and Amalekites in the Bible, or the Roman occupiers in the land of Israel, or the Babylonians who kept trying to steal our chanukiahs to sacrifice to their fire god, or European Christians during the Middle Ages and even into modernity, with Crusades, pogroms and all the rest. These groups of non-Jews have power over us, they don’t need special laws protecting them, we just have to do our best to avoid the worst forms of persecution. But equally some outsiders are more like ‘gerim’, they are part of our community even if they’re not Jewish. they are our neighbours, our employees or colleagues, even our family members. That’s not a new concept from the contempoary world, Jews have always had non-Jewish family and close connections. And they may be vulnerable; even if in general Christians have political and military power over Jews, a specific Christian maid or farm labourer working for a Jewish master does need protection from exploitation.
Sometimes the sources try to deal with this by proposing a new category, somewhere in between a foreigner and an Israelite or Jew: the ‘ger toshav’, the settled resident. These are people who are part of the same society as Jews, they’re not enemies to Jews, but they’re also not Jewish. This category keeps being reinvented and then argued out of existence though, because some strands of Rabbinic thought really don’t like the idea of people in a blurred category, a grey area that is neither definitely Jewish nor definitely outside. Some authorities say that anyone who agrees to follow the Noachide laws, so no serious sexual crimes, murder, idolatry or torturing animals, counts as a ‘ger toshav’ or settled resident. But some say that this group can only exist in the time when the Jubilee rules apply, that is a time when every single Israelite lives on their ancestral land as assigned by Moses to the Tribes, a situation that has never happened historically and almost certainly never will. Others propose a completely unlikely scenario where a ‘ger toshav’ is defined as someone who keeps 612 commandments, but for some reason doesn’t mind eating meat that hasn’t been slaughtered in the proper kosher way. Surely there’s no such person who keeps 612 commandments but not that one!
So this is the context in which we find the Talmud in those three places debating whether we can exploit non-Jewish workers. It’s really about the much bigger question of whether an in-between category can exist, or whether the world can be divided neatly into Jewish neighbours who we have to treat ethically, and idol-worshipping oppressors whom we have limited ethical obligation towards.
Maimonides who created the first codification of Torah law, the Mishneh Torah, comes down firmly against robbing and exploiting non-Jews. He clearly states that we must not rob even idol-worshippers, not even one single toothpick. And we must not exploit people who are working for us, they have to be paid on time. You can’t mess around with saying that the cheque’s in the post or there’s a computer problem with payroll. You have to pay fairly and on time, and even just being too tough and scary, so that the employee is afraid to ask for the wage they’re entitled to, counts as exploiting and it’s forbidden in the verse in Deuteronomy 24. And Maimonides ruling has become accepted Jewish law ever since, later legal codes like the Tur and the Shulhan Aruch which became the foundation of modern Jewish law completely reiterate what Maimonides said. However Maimonides doesn’t really believe in the ‘ger toshav’, the category of people who are part of our community but not fully Jewish, he’s one of the people who say that this only applies in the Jubilee scenario.
This tension around our relationship to non-Jews never really goes away. Both sides have support in Deuteronomy. It has laws telling us to destroy every trace of some categories of strangers, to burn and smash and pillage and so on. And it also has all these laws about kindness to the ‘ger’, including the commandment also found elsewhere in the Torah to love them. Anyone can quote phrases from the Torah out of context; antisemites may quote selectively to show that Jews are mean and horrible to non-Jews. The more superficially knowledgeable haters may even attempt to quote the ‘Talmud’ where some sage says it’s allowed to exploit non-Jews, and miss out the bit where another immediately replies, no it isn’t! Let alone the fact that this opinion never became applied in actual Jewish law.
But also, Jewish extremists use verses from Deuteronomy to justify any amount of cruelty towards people they don’t like, simply by defining everybody except us as ‘Amalekites’. The debate about whether it’s allowed to exploit non-Jewish workers is still live in contemporary Israel, and important for the treatment of non-Jewish citizens and residents of the State. Some liberal religious authorities in the 20th century and today are trying to revive the concept of ‘ger toshav’ to apply clear rights to everybody. Whereas some far-right spokespeople justify not only exploitation but even violence and war against so-called ‘Amalek’.
You can see this in the Bible itself, even. The book of Ezra misquotes Deuteronomy, it makes up laws that kind of sound like the language of Deuteronomy, claiming that it’s forbidden for Jewish men to marry any non-Jewish women at all. And if they are already married, they should kick out their wives and children in the middle of the rainy season. Which is not what Deuteronomy says, but it’s close enough in sentiment that it sounds convincing if you don’t look too closely. At the same time the book of Ruth talks about a Moabite woman, from one of the specifically mentioned bad enemy nations in Deuteronomy, who marries Jewish men Mahlon and then Boaz, and forms some kind of covenant of Chesed with Jewish Naomi, and of course becomes the ancestor of King David. Ruth too alludes to Deuteronomy, talking about the laws of levirate marriage which you can also find in this week’s parshe.
So how do we in fact deal with this? It would be unhelpful to pretend the bad stuff isn’t there. It is absolutely true that Deuteronomy and the rest of Torah and Jewish scripture has some examples of horrible attitudes towards non-Jews. But also we have to go beyond just quote-slinging. It’s not enough to say, but Torah says to love the stranger! We have to look at things in context. There isn’t one Jewish view of non-Jews. It depends whether we are talking about a situation where Jews are oppressed and fantasizing about revenge. Or more like our situation in the UK today, where most Jews are comfortable and part of multi-cultural communities. Saying we don’t need to behave ethically towards non-Jewish people in our surroundings, our communities and our families doesn’t make sense in this reality.
In a couple of weeks, and again over the High Holy Days, we will be reading Nitzavim, which tells us: I set before you today life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life! Then you and your descendants will live.
When we decide whether to regard non-Jews as enemies and foreigners, nochri or Amalek, or as part of our communities, covered by 36 commandments to treat them well, the choice for life is to include as many people as possible into the ‘ger’ category. Choose life.
