From the Kingdom of Memory (6 page)

There was yet another, more radical, method, one practiced and perfected by the Nazis. With them, the
fear of the stranger, the hate for the stranger reached climactic proportions. His very presence evoked ancient suspicions and ancestral frustrations. In the Third Reich, cultural or religious transformation ceased to be an option. The stranger had to be disfigured. Shamed. Diminished. Erased. More cruel than pagans or cannibals had ever been, the Nazi executioners wanted to dehumanize their victims before killing them: the stranger had to become an object.

Only Islam—because of its link with Abraham—sometimes showed more compassion and hospitality toward strangers. Islam is, after all, a religion of people who for centuries wandered from tribe to tribe, from oasis to oasis, in search of water and shade. But even though Islam is an exception, its hospitality toward its guests extended only over short periods of time: how long can you be a guest? Ultimately the guests became strangers once more and had to choose exile, death, or conversion—for Islam means submission. The stranger had to submit—or die. The stranger as a sovereign individual seems to have been incompatible with the inner sovereignty of all traditions—except the Jewish one.

To us, too, the stranger represents the unknown; but the attraction he holds over us is one of curiosity and fascination—not hate. Rather than absorb the stranger, we encourage him to remain independent and true to his genuine self; we want him to maintain his identity and enrich it. Except for one or two periods
in our history, we discouraged conversion. Under Yannai there were forced conversions—and we lived to regret it under Herod, whose reign was the bloodiest in Judea.

Judaism teaches us that man must be authentic, and that he can find his authenticity only within his own culture and tradition. We don’t want to make Jews out of Christians; we want to make Jews out of Jews, and to help Christians to be better Christians. We want the stranger to offer us not what we already have—or whatever we may have given him—but that which
he
has and
we
don’t. We don’t want him to resemble us any more than we wish to resemble him. We look at him hoping to find his uniqueness, to understand that which makes him different—that which makes him a stranger.

For man, aware of both his limitations and his desire to transcend them, recognizes that the stranger forces him to call into question not only his own judgments of himself but also his relations with others. Faced with the unknown, we realize that every consciousness represents the unknown to everyone else. God, and God alone, remains Himself in all His relationships—never becoming someone else, never becoming
the other
.

And yet, just as man can attain his ultimate truth only through other human beings, God can be united to His creation only through man. Man needs the other to be human—just as God needs man to be God.

For the Jew, the stranger suggests a world to be lived in, to be enhanced, or saved. One awaits the stranger, one welcomes him, one is grateful to him for his presence. What was Abraham’s greatness? He invited into his home all strangers, be they angels or fugitives, and made them feel welcome. Rabbi Eliezer, the father of the Besht, became a father because of his hospitality toward unknown wanderers. In the Jewish tradition, the stranger may very well be someone important: a prophet in disguise, one of the hidden just men. Or even the Messiah. He is to be accepted for what he is, the way he is. Thus we hope to receive a fragment of his secret knowledge, a spark of his flame—a key to his secret.

The question therefore is, How should the contact, the exchange, occur? What should its nature be? Am I to approach the stranger in his language or mine? On his level or mine? In other words: Must I make an effort to resemble him so as to better discover him? The answer, naturally, is, no. For that would mean accepting his terms; that would mean submission and defeat, leading—finally—to dissolution rather than to affirmation of our identity.

Now, we realize that there is in man precisely such a desire, calling for this kind of end, this kind of death. A desire to break with his surroundings, burn his bridges, deny his past and his experiences, plunge into the mass of humanity and go under … thus solving the problem of existence by putting an end to
that existence. It is a desire to become another, to live the life of another, the destiny of another, assume the death of another—to die as a stranger in order to forget pain, shame, guilt, in order to disappear—to commit either physical or spiritual suicide.

That urge may or may not be rooted in weakness. Man may feel helpless to adjust to the image he has of himself and so wish to adopt the image the stranger has of him; ultimately he may try to resemble the stranger—or even the enemy.

But then it may also be related to a more positive passion—his need to renew himself, to replenish himself. He may leave his land, his home, his habits, in the hope that as an expatriate he may have greater opportunities to rethink, reevaluate, and redefine his place and role under the sun.

And so the stranger gets up one morning and without saying goodbye to anyone, disappears. He goes underground, joins a counterculture; he seeks out places and societies whose languages he does not understand, whose laws are alien—but those things don’t frighten him. On the contrary: he wants
not
to understand,
not
to know. For what he knows, he does not like; and what he understands, he does not accept. He has chosen exile so as to be someone else—a stranger—and thus to discover a new expression of truth, a new way of living out the human condition in its ever-changing forms.

That is why he is always on the run. Everywhere he leaves one more mask, one more memory. In order to become a total stranger, he must reject the last vestiges of his former self. Sometimes it ends well: Abraham did break with his parents to become Abraham, Moses did leave the royal palace to become the leader of leaders. Later, much later, mystics chose exile to achieve anonymity; Hasidic masters became vagabonds; poets sought poverty and adventure. Sometimes it ends badly: Philo of Alexandria, Josephus Flavius, Spinoza, Otto Weininger, and even Heine and Bergson—all were attracted by the other side and, to different degrees, went too far and became estranged from their people. They were not prudent enough. So taken were they by the stranger that they became strangers themselves … to themselves.

What went wrong? They could not resist the stranger’s temptations. They forgot that we are supposed—and indeed commanded—to love the stranger as long as he fulfills his role, meaning, as long as his mystery challenges our certainties and forces us to reexamine our own values, our own sincerity—as long as the stranger represents the question; but if and when he attempts to force his answers upon us, he must be opposed. He can be of help only as a stranger—lest you are ready to become his caricature. And your own. The virtue of the
ger
is that he remains a
ger
. Though he may have become Jewish in all aspects, he retains his
superior quality of
ger-tzedek
, a just convert, for ten generations: we would not deprive him of that which made the stranger in him become our brother.

N
OW—WHAT ABOUT
the second category: the
nochri?
He clearly ranks below the
ger
. He remains actively on the outside—and there is something negative about his remaining there. We are told to love the
ger
—but no mention is made about love for the
nochri
On the contrary: we underline their differences so as to distinguish between them. We are allowed to lend money with interest to the
nochri
, but not to the
ger
. Ritually impure meat may be given to the
ger
, but must be sold to the
nochri
.

Why this distinction? Both terms mean “stranger.” But while
ger
indicates a movement, an impulse
toward
the Jew,
nochri
indicates the opposite: a movement
away
from the Jew.

Nochri
stems from the word
nechar
—abroad, elsewhere. Variants of that word mean to deny, to remove oneself from the community, to alienate oneself from the family or group—while a variant of
ger
means the opposite: to come closer, to join, to convert.

There is something in the term
nochri
which implies a will, a deliberate plan, to be estranged: a
nochri
is one who could ultimately use his status as stranger to oppose you, to rule you.

While a
ger
, at least in Scripture, is merely an alien resident—one who came from far away to share
your joys and sorrows—the
nochri
has come on a temporary basis. Tomorrow he may leave with something of us, his prey; he has always been, and will continue to be, attached to another home, another system. Even when he is with you, he is elsewhere.

Hence Abraham’s pronouncement that among strangers he was a
ger
but never a
nochri
. Even with people very different from himself, he was really there, with them—as was Joseph in Egypt, who claims that even among
nochrim
, the Jew remains a
ger
. A Jew may not be a
nochri
to anyone, meaning, he may not use his Jewishness to attack, to humiliate, to negate anyone else.

But a Jew can belong to the third category—the worst of all: a Jew, only a Jew, can be a
zar
.

Zar
, too, means stranger—and his lot in Scripture is worse than that of the other two. We are told to love the
ger
and be kind and generous to him. The
nochri
, God shields. God offers him protection. Not so the
zar
.

Who is a
zar?
Originally the term applied to those Jews who were kept outside the Temple. Then the Prophets used it to describe the profane, the alien, the destructive elements in our midst.

Zar
is the Jew who remains a stranger to other Jews—and to the Jew in himself. The term implies a religious and metaphysical opposition to his own identity; a Jew who loathes his Jewishness is a
zar
—the worst of enemies. That is why most injunctions against the
zar
are extremely severe. He may not eat from priestly sacrificial offerings; they are so sacred that he may not even come close—too dangerous. A
zar
—the destructive stranger—uses his faith as a weapon, a faith that is not really his own: he has usurped it from others.

The term
zar
is therefore totally derogatory. Thoughts that are
zarot
, unholy, must be discarded. Aaron’s two sons perished because they introduced
esh zarah
—an unholy fire—into the sanctuary. When God expresses his dissatisfaction, his disgust with certain human actions, he says they are
lezarah li
, they are all alien to me, meaning, they repel me, they anger me.

Why such hostility toward this kind of stranger? The answer is obvious: he represents danger.

For there are many ways to live as strangers—and they are not all alike.

To act as a stranger toward strangers is natural. It may be unpleasant, painful and absurd to find oneself face to face with someone one has never seen and
know
that the relationship is one of individuals whom fate has brought together for one moment, one encounter. A word, a gesture—and the moment is forgotten.

But then again: I could conceivably be a stranger to a friend—a colleague, a fellow writer—even a brother. Cain and Abel were not enemies; they were strangers, which is worse. To reject or be rejected by a friend is painful. Here I am, there he is; and I thought we belonged to the same intimate circle; that we were allies,
bound by the same dreams and discoveries—and suddenly I am confronted with a stranger. I thought I could count on him. I thought I counted for him. Wrong. When I see the stranger
in
him, it also means that I am a stranger
to
him.

This is serious, but there is something even more serious—to realize that I am a stranger to myself, which means that there is a stranger in me who wants to live my life or my death—or even to die by pushing me to my death through self-hate. This stranger forces me to look at things, events, and myself with
his
eyes, urging me to give up because of him.

One must never allow oneself to become this kind of stranger. To anybody. During the era of night and flame, the executioner wanted not only to kill us as strangers—anonymously—but as numbers, as objects, not as human beings. He wanted to kill us twice—to kill the humanity in us before killing us.

And yes—there were times when nocturnal processions of tired, frightened people would march to the mass graves and then lie down quietly, obediently, almost respectfully. Those men and women were dead before they were killed. But even worse: the killers tried to drive the victims to self-hate, pushing them to see themselves through the killers’ eyes—thus to become strangers to themselves, strangers to be despised, discarded. In this the killers did not succeed. Few Jews became
zar
in ghettos and death camps.

Do not believe what some scholars and writers
tell you: the Jews did not collaborate in their own death; they were not overcome by a collective passion for self-destruction.

Who is the enemy? He has a name: Amalek—the eternal stranger.

Remember: in our Biblical tradition, real strangers are treated with some measure of fairness. Esau? We feel compassion for him. Pharaoh? In spite of his cruel edicts, we somehow are unable to hate him, or even be angry with him: after all, it was God who hardened his heart. Poor Pharaoh: God’s instrument and Israel’s victim. Or take Balaam: he cannot even curse us. He starts to form words, rhymes, sentences, he thinks he can blacklist all the Jews and involuntarily ends up singing their praise: poor prophet, poor poet. The only enemy to inspire unqualified apprehension and anger is … Amalek. Always. We are unmistakably ordered to strike him, to defeat him, to kill him.