[An address given at Congregation Emanuel, Providence R.I, August 8, 1994.]
"You shall not abhor an Edomite, because he is your brother. You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a stranger in his land."Deuteronomy, 23.7
Very nice sentiments. Very politically correct. But let us call a spade a spade. This parasha [weekly Pentateuchal reading] contains laws that are racist. An Ammonite or a Moabite may not come into the assembly of the Lord, namely assimilate himself to the Jewish people. Such a one is, by virtue of his ethnic background excluded for ever. This is racism, pure and simple. Edomites and Egyptians were subject to a less severe rule, but it is racist nevertheless. The third generation lost the stigma of belonging to a special excluded group. Till then, they too were excluded.
How can we explain and justify such rules? Let me tell you a story from the Talmud Berakhot, 28a. The date is around 100 of the current era, in other words, 1900 years ago. A long time. One day, two of the greatest sages of our people, Rabban Gamliel II and Rabbi Joshua, were sitting in the academy, when an Ammonite who had accepted the Jewish religion came in and said: "ma ani lavo bakahal." Can I join the community as a full Jew? Can I marry a Jewish woman, and do everything a Jew can do? The great Rabban Gamliel said to him: "asur ata lavo bakahal" You are forbidden to join the community as a full Jew. Rabbi Joshua disagreed. He said to him. You are permitted to join the community. Rabban Gamliel turned to Rabbi Joshua in astonishment and said: "Is it not written expressly in the Bible that an Ammonite cannot join the community?" Rabbi Joshua answered him as follows: "Do Ammon and Moab reside in their place? Long ago, Sennacherib the king of Assyria bilbel et kol haumot he mixed up all the nations, and we no longer know who is and who isn't an Ammonite, and we must assume that this man belongs to the generality of nations against whom there are no racist laws. In other words, the racist laws are spent. They no longer apply. Please bear in mind that if in 1950, during my own lifetime, a black man went to a marriage registrar in the great state of South Carolina and said: "I should like to wed this nice white lady standing next to me," the official would reply: "Well, brother, you had better board a bus to one of the Yankee states, because you cannot join the community here." This Jewish academy around 100 C.E. was ahead of them, because Rabban Gamliel acceded to Rabbi Joshua, and the man was admitted.
This decision was incorporated into standard Jewish Law. Maimonides in hilkhot issure biah, 12.25 writes in his customary wonderfully clear style as follows, and I will quote him in full because it is worth hearing his authoritative voice, speaking with his awesome command of the Hebrew language:
When Sennacherib, king of Assyria, came up, he mixed up all the nations and confused them with one another, and exiled them from their place. And these Egyptians who are in the land of Egypt now are different people, and so are the Edomites who are in the field of Edom. And since the four peoples who were discriminated against have become mixed with the others, there is now no discrimination against any of them, for we assume that any that chooses to convert belongs to the majority. Therefore when a proselyte takes on Judaism in this time in any place, whether Edomite or Egyptian, Ammonite or Moabite, negro or any other race, males and females alike are permitted to join the community immediately.
So we admit it. There are racist laws in the Torah, overtly racist laws. They are part of our history and our tradition. But they are spent. They no longer have any practical application. Compare please Rabbi Joshua in 100 C.E. and Maimonides in the Middle Ages with South Carolina in the mid-twentieth century and the Mormon Church, which, until a decade or two ago, excluded blacks from membership.
I always feel it is unfair that many people constantly hold up the "Old Testament" as the book of the jealous, unforgiving deity and the New Testament as the book of grace and favor and kindness. The "Old Testament" is part of the Christian heritage too, but Jews also, by the way they handled their book, moved forward in their understanding of the world of ethics and morality just as the Christian did. And sometimes they did it sooner.
Even though these racist rules are spent we can still learn something from the reasons given for their original enactment. The Ammonites and Moabites did two things, one negative, one positive. The negative one was that they failed to provide sustenance for the Israelites in their time of need. They were heartless in the face of human want and deprivation. The positive one was that they tried actively to destroy the Jewish people. They had a real interest in genocide. This is something to think about still in our own day, because both factors, positive and negative, are very much with us. As for the Edomites and Egyptians, they also were unkind to the Hebrews, but after all the Edomites were close relatives and the Egyptians were hosts, and so they deserved a more limited censure. We might think of this before accusing Poles of anti-semitism, true though this may be in some cases. The Hebrew name for Poland, Polin, was understood by our forefathers to mean po-lin "stay here" because at the time Poland was a pretty good place for Jews to live as compared with many places further west where they were massacred out of hand. As in Egypt, we were strangers in the land of Poland, and it deserves respect and gratitude for that.
We are, I think, progressing, albeit slowly and painfully. At the end of the last century a wealthy man of Jewish background was told when he tried to check in at a Hilton Hotel in the Catskills where he had stayed many times: "Sir, I am instructed by Mr. Hilton to inform you that persons of the Hebrew persuasion are no longer welcome at his hotels." A Vietnamese man with whom I once worked told me that a few years ago he travelled in the U.S. by car. An American woman friend was driving. When they entered Mississipi, a gas station attendant told him kindly: "Look, I advise you to crouch down in the back of your car. If you are seen, you may get shot, and they will never find the man who did it." Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall recorded that as a young man he once had to change trains at a small station. A man approached him and said: "We have a rule in this town that the sun does not set on a live black man." It's hard to imagine those things happening today. We are, apparently, catching up with Rabbi Joshua.