An oxymoron is a two word phrase that is made up of two opposite words like “civil war” “sweet sorrow” “plastic silverware” “old news” and “deafening silence.” These words manage to associate with one another despite the inherent dissonance of two opposites in close proximity; oxymorons somehow convey meaning that is different from either of the component words. I googled “Jewish oxymoron” and found a list of essays and op-eds each claiming that the author’s own hybrid Jewish identity was *not* an oxymoron!
But there is an oxymoron at the beginning of Parashat Hayei Sarah and understanding it can shed light on some dilemmas facing us today as American Jews and as Modern Orthodox Jews as well.
When Avraham approaches B’nei Chet, his Hittie neighbors, and requests the right to purchase a burial spot for Sarah he introduces his request with curious language:
גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב אָנֹכִ֖י עִמָּכֶ֑ם תְּנ֨וּ לִ֤י אֲחֻזַּת־קֶ֙בֶר֙ עִמָּכֶ֔ם וְאֶקְבְּרָ֥ה מֵתִ֖י מִלְּפָנָֽי׃
“I am a resident alien amongst you; sell me a burial site among you, that I may remove my dead for burial.”
Avraham’s self identification as a גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב a resident alien attracted attention from many of the classic commentaries but I want to focus on the two interpretations that Rashi shares:
He first shares a plain sense translation of the phrase:
גֵּר מֵאֶרֶץ אַחֶרֶת וְנִתְיַשַּׁבְתִּי עִמָּכֶם
I immigrated from a foreign country and I then settled among you. Ger v’toshav means that I was a ger, I was an immigrant, and then I became a toshav, someone who lives here. But then Rashi shares a midrashic interpretation which understands the phrase in a different way:
אִם תִּרְצוּ הֲרֵינִי גֵּר, וְאִם לָאו אֶהְיֶה תּוֹשָׁב וְאֶטְּלֶנָּה מִן הַדִּין
If you want, consider me to be an immigrant who is asking you for a favor. But if you won’t respond favorably to that request, then I will act as a resident and take a burial plot through force of law for God has promised this land to me.
This midrashic interpretation has Avraham presenting the Hitites with an oxymoron: I am a resident alien. I am both a ger and a toshav at the same time and my request is made out of that confusing mixture of being a foreign immigrant asking for favors and someone who lives among you as a resident with full rights to claim what is his. The oxymoron is developed one additional step when Efron offers to bury Sarah among his own Hittie ancestors for free and Avraham demurs, insisting on purchasing a distinct and separate spot. Efron then charges an exorbitant sum as he responds to Avraham’s confusing oxymoron. Avraham asks for the intimate favor of a final resting spot for his beloved wife, but wishes to maintain a distance from his erstwhile neighbors.
This oxymoron, resident alien, both ger and toshav together, appears again in Sefer Vayikra and again, multiple times, in Sefer Tehilim. The strange paradox of being both a resident and a stranger seems to be at the heart of Jewish experience.
I thought about Avraham telling his neighbors גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב אָנֹכִ֖י עִמָּכֶ֑ם earlier this week when I read about the antisemitic vandalism at a Jewish cemetery in Waukeegen. The article about the vandalism in the Chicago Sun Times quoted Larry Yellen, the son of a man whose tombstone was defaced:
“My father was a bombardier in World War II in a B-17,” Yellen said, “He fought for the United States in World War II, lost numerous relatives in the Holocaust, and now that he’s passed away he finds a swastika painted on his headstone; nothing could be more disturbing than that.”
This is the ethos of גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב אָנֹכִ֖י עִמָּכֶ֑ם.
Who is buried in the Am Echod Cemetery in Waukegan? Veterans of the United States armed forces. Beloved neighbors. Respected citizens. Pillars of their communities. And honored men and women just like these fill Jewish cemeteries across this country. Our cemeteries on American soil are the resting places for honored and integrated American citizens. But whose cemeteries, time and again, in country after country, are targeted for vandalism?
גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב אָנֹכִ֖י עִמָּכֶ֑ם
We are embedded within America and we are vulnerable. We are immigrants and we are residents. We are outsiders and we are insiders.
This dynamic of גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב אָנֹכִ֖י עִמָּכֶ֑ם has made it so confusing and so disorienting to respond in a coherent way to the seemingly constant chatter in recent weeks about this antisemitic statement made by that celebrity or another antisemitic statement made by that athlete, and this response which is good and that response which is bad, and who responds and how do they respond…. We have power and we are vulnerable. Our confused response to contemporary antisemitism comes from that oxymoron. We both belong and don’t belong at the same time. We have the influence and the respect of our neighbors necessary to protect our community, but the constant need to protect our community is a sign of real vulnerability.
And closer to home, within our home, the Modern Orthodox community has been working through our own version of that גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב oxymoron, not so much as pertains to the broader Orthodox community, and not so much as relates to the Jewish people as a whole, but in the way that the factions or wings of American Modern Orthodoxy have struggled against one another and alienated one another and marginalized one another as we have fought over the future of Modern Orthodoxy.
In the past, I’ve attributed the ferocity of the internal Modern Orthodox debates and polemics to what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.” We so often struggle most fiercely with those who are most like us. In that way our identities are strengthened by the way we are not like those others who seem to be so similar to us. But I think there is also a dynamic of that old ger v’toshav oxymoron that is percolating through the sliver of the Jewish world where I find myself which, for lack of a better term, I will call “the modern wing of Modern Orthodoxy.”
The “modern wing of Modern Orthodoxy” distinguishes itself through a serious and thoughtful engagement with the positive contributions of modernity such as humanism, feminism, pluralism, and Zionism. We try to carefully evaluate those ideas and integrate them into our life of Torah and mitzvot. But we do so while tethered to a broader Modern Orthodox community that is slower to assimilate those values or even hostile to them. Where does that leave us? גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב אָנֹכִ֖י עִמָּכֶ֑ם
We are resident aliens within the Orthodox community. We share core beliefs and we share a common lifestyle, but we also champion ideas that others do not agree with or that others embrace with greater skepticism. And because of that oxymoron we often adopt confused approaches to these differences within the different wings of Modern Orthodoxy. Sometimes we stifle our own core beliefs because we imagine that others are more authentic and we don’t want to make waves. Sometimes we elevate the significance of the distinct elements of our communities and fail to see them in a broader perspective. גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב are we just like them or do we represent something new and unique?
In truth, the more liberal and more traditional wings of Modern Orthodoxy agree on far more than we disagree. We may disagree about the advisability, or even permissibility, of ordaining women as Orthodox rabbis, but all Modern Orthodox Jews can agree that the opening of the doors of the beit midrash to women as students and as teachers of Torah has been an unmitigated blessing. We may disagree on how fully and for how long and at what ages to immerse ourselves into non-Jewish social and academic environments, but all Modern Orthodox Jews can agree that each and every human being is created in God’s own image with something Divine to share with the world. We may disagree about the ways that academic disciplines and the tools of the academy can contribute to Torah scholarship, but all Modern Orthodox Jews can agree that our primary relationship with Torah is as Devar Hashem, the commanding word of God.
Getting this right matters a lot. Avraham arguably mishandled his own relationships with the non-Jewish men and women with whom he lived (as Ramban and others have noted). When Avraham’s servant tells the story of his mission to Rivka’s family there is a subtle and silent difference in the retelling. The word אולי meaning “perhaps” in the phrase “perhaps the young woman won’t want to come with me” is spelled without the vav in the “defective” spelling. The word is pronounced the same and Rivka’s family, listening to the story, would have no way of knowing how the words they are hearing would be spelled in the Torah scroll one day. But Rashi explains that in the defective spelling the word “perhaps” can also be read as “to me” and Avraham’s servant was, unconsciously, sharing his hope that his mission to find a wife for Yitchak would fail and Yitzhak could marry his own daughter.
For various reasons, Avraham insisted that none of the people with whom he lived, not the faithful believers of his new religion whom he and Sarah converted to monotheism הנפש אשר עשו בחרן, not his comrades in arms who joined him in battle, not any of the members of his household who submitted themselves to circumcision and whom Avraham trusted to oversee his property were worthy of their family joining into our family. And when the curtain falls as Sefer Bereishit ends, there are none who accompany us as we descend to Egypt other than the seventy children and grandchildren of Yaakov. The end result of Avraham’s oxymoron in Parashat Haye Sarah, for better or for worse, was a family that dwelled alone.
Someone recently told me that she appreciated that my drashot are often sufficiently open-ended that she could connect the dots herself and apply a message to her life without me being explicit. But she’s not here today. And I have only a short time left here at ASBI, and so, with apologies, I want to conclude with a few simple and clear applications of the ideas I have been sharing with you for how to navigate a ger v’toshav dynamic, both externally and within our Modern Orthodox family. I hope that these thoughts open up an honest conversation between us, and between all of you, about these issues.
If the first time you reach out to your local Presbyterian minister, or local mosque or to a leader in a Black church is to complain about antisemitism emerging from their community or from a community adjacent to their own, it will not be successful and it will not deserve to be successful. The only way to protect ourselves from antisemitism is through solidarity and cooperation between our community and our neighbors. Ger v’toshav, we are both powerful and vulnerable and we can leverage our power to protect others and then enjoy their solidarity in moments of our own vulnerability.
I will never forget, because the words are seared in my mind, the rabbi of a major Modern Orthodox congregation in New Jersey who told the governor, in my presence, that the Orthodox community receives “no benefit whatsoever” from public school education in his state since our children attend Jewish private schools. What a reckless and false understanding of what it means to be a ger v’toshav which entails paying attention to the ways we are distinct as Jews and also investing in the common bonds of neighbors and shared citizenship.
Within the Modern Orthodox community, once we remind ourselves that what we share is greater than what divides us, we can commit to treating those on the other side of any internal communal debate as though they are honorable people sincerely arguing for their positions in good faith. We can seek out opportunities to study Torah together and to study the Torah that is being produced in the other wings of our community.
And we can commit to not stifling our own voices, but instead share our worldview and the unique insights of our communities with other Modern Orthodox Jews without being afraid that only they are authentic and without being overly deferential as though we did not stand alongside them at Sinai. If what we share is more important than what divides us, then every position of communal influence, whether it is a second grade Hummash teacher or a congregational rabbi or a head of school, should be open to qualified candidates who hail from either wing of the community.
The final linkage of ger and toshav in Scripture occurs in Divrei HaYamim, the final book of Tanakh, which records the words of David as he appoints Shlomo to be his successor:
כִּֽי־גֵרִ֨ים אֲנַ֧חְנוּ לְפָנֶ֛יךָ וְתוֹשָׁבִ֖ים כְּכׇל־אֲבֹתֵ֑ינוּ כַּצֵּ֧ל ׀ יָמֵ֛ינוּ עַל־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְאֵ֥ין מִקְוֶֽה׃
For we are gerim with You, God, toshavim like our fathers; our days on earth are like a shadow, with nothing in prospect.
Ultimately, I do think Avraham’s behavior is a model for us. He has earned the respect and admiration of his Hittite neighbors and consistently treats them with courtesy and decency. And, he knows how he is different. He knows that the family that he and Sarah built together and the values that they uniquely championed, need to be cultivated and protected in order to contribute something truly special and unique to the world.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 