The line between “us” and “them” is where most human suffering begins. It is older than politics, older than philosophy, older than law. It is the temptation to divide the world into insiders and outsiders—and then to treat outsiders as if they don’t belong.
This is not an occasional moral failure. It is a human instinct. It begins in tribalism and ends in persecution. It turns difference into danger and neighbors into enemies. It is why history is so often a record of cruelty committed by the strong against the vulnerable.
And it is why one command in the Hebrew Bible is repeated with astonishing insistence.
These verses appear amid detailed laws of justice—laws about injury, property, loans, bribery, and the protection of widows and orphans. Yet the repeated focus falls on one figure in particular: the stranger, the outsider, the one without protection. The ancient rabbis were struck by this. They count at least thirty-six places where the Torah warns against wronging the stranger. The repetition is unmistakable.
Something fundamental is at stake.
The Torah is not naïve about human nature. It does not assume that people will be kind simply because kindness is rational. It does not assume that sympathy will reliably overcome fear. It recognizes something sobering: hatred of the foreigner is among the oldest of human passions.
The ancient world took it for granted. The Greeks called strangers “barbarians,” mocking their speech as meaningless noise. The Romans dismissed entire peoples as uncivilized. Even in the Bible’s narratives, the danger is constant: Abraham and Isaac fear for their lives when they enter foreign lands. Joseph’s brothers learn that Egyptians could not even eat with Hebrews, “for that is detestable to Egyptians” (Genesis 43:32). The outsider is always one step away from humiliation.
And modernity did not cure this instinct. The Enlightenment promised that reason would end prejudice. It did not. In 1789, in revolutionary France, as the Rights of Man were being proclaimed, riots broke out against Jews in Alsace. In the nineteenth century, immigrant workers were targets of resentment and violence. In 1881, in Marseilles, a crowd of ten thousand attacked Italians and their property.
The story repeats because the instinct repeats.
So the Torah does something radical: it builds a moral system around the protection of the outsider.
The medieval commentator Nachmanides explains why. The stranger is vulnerable in two ways. First, politically: the stranger is not surrounded by family, friends, neighbors, a community ready to defend them. They have no social power. They are easy to exploit precisely because no one will stand up for them.
And second, emotionally: the stranger lives outside the normal securities of home and belonging. “You know,” Nachmanides writes, “that every stranger feels depressed, and is always sighing and crying, and his eyes are always directed towards God.” The stranger is not merely a legal category. The stranger is a human being living in fear, uncertainty, and dependence.
The Torah, therefore, issues a warning that is both moral and theological: do not wrong the stranger thinking no one can deliver them from your hand. God will. God has made Himself the defender of those who have no one else.
But the Torah goes further. It not only prohibits oppression, but it commands inclusion.
This command appears in the same chapter as “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The outsider is not meant to remain an outsider. The stranger is meant to be brought within the circle of moral concern. A just society cannot create a permanent class of people who live at the mercy of others.
In Deuteronomy, Moses states the reason with absolute clarity: this is not only what God commands; it is what God does.
Here is the logic Rabbi Jonathan Sacks understood: reason is insufficient. Sympathy is inadequate. Only the force of history and memory is strong enough to form a counterweight to hate.
That is why the Torah does not merely give laws. It gives a story. It gives a people an identity rooted in exile, vulnerability, and dependence. Abraham is commanded to leave his land and become a stranger. Long before Joseph is even born, Abraham is told his descendants will be strangers in a land not their own. Moses experiences exile before he becomes a leader. The Israelites endure persecution before they inherit a home.
This is not accidental. It is moral education.
Rabbi Sacks calls the Torah “the world’s great protest against empires and imperialism.” It protests the attempt to justify hierarchy and absolute power in the name of religion. It protests the subordination of the masses to the state. It protests brutality in war. But above all, it protests the use of power against the powerless: the widow, the orphan, and, most insistently, the stranger.
And then the Torah asks the question that cuts through all moral theory:
Why should you not hate the stranger?
The answer is not simply that hatred is irrational, or that we should feel sorry for the outsider. The Torah knows that human instincts often go the other way — to fear, to exclude, to oppress. It isn’t enough to rely on reason or sympathy alone.
The reason, the Torah says, is that you once stood where the stranger stands now. You know what it is to be vulnerable, powerless, and at the mercy of others. This is the moral weight of memory, of a shared humanity that calls us to act.
Because the line between “us” and “them” is thinner than we think.
