In his introduction, he explains the anguish and fear that motivated these refugees to leave their homes. Get The Jewish Week in your inbox.īycel points out that these journeys were not undertaken lightly.

Their tales are both heart-rending and inspirational, as they describe the suffering and oppression that caused them to leave their homelands and the struggles they encountered as they adjusted to their new lives.ĭon't miss our top stories. Each refugee, whether from Eritrea or Poland, the South Sudan or Syria, El Salvador or Vietnam, Cambodia or Afghanistan, Guatemala, Iraq or the Congo, whether female or male, whether gentile or Jew, then recounts the story of his or her life. His concerns for the “stranger” leap from the pages of Exodus and speak with great power to us as American Jews as our community struggles to respond to the crisis of immigration and the plight of refugees who seek asylum within our borders.īycel prefaces the refugees’ remarks by explaining the plight they faced in their native lands prior to coming here. His book constitutes a needed explication of what it means to heed the cry of the stranger today. Rabbi Lee Bycel has heard these words in our parashah with a special urgency and has written a book, “ Refugees in America: Stories of Courage, Resilience, and Hope in Their Own Words” (Rutgers University Press, 2019), that takes the directive of Rashi to heart. Mishpatim calls upon us to heed the anguish of the downtrodden. These verses direct Jews to remember that we were “strangers in Egypt,” and that empathy and support for those who are weak and in distress are demanded of us as Jews. If you do mistreat them, I will heed their outcry as they cry out to Me.” God, the Torah states, heeds the pain of the stranger, the dispossessed and the weak among the nations, no less than God paid notice to the Jewish people when we groaned under the servitude of Egyptian bondage. You shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan.

In these verses, God calls out to the Israelites and tells them, “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were a stranger in the land of Egypt. The biblical commentator Rashi often observed that certain passages in the Torah scream out, “Darsheini - interpret me.” In Parashat Mishpatim, the words of Exodus 22:20-22 surely demand such exposition.

Cry of fear stranger