Remembering Egypt at the Border

I have learned that some of the hardest Torah to live is not the Torah we argue about in theory, but the Torah that stands beside us when we are tired, afraid, and overwhelmed by the noise of the world. Immigration is like that. It is loud and politicized and soaked in slogans. It is also painfully human. It is families, and fear, and the ache of displacement, and the ordinary desire to work, to eat, to sleep without dread. And it is also law, borders, courts, real social strain, and the responsibility of a society to govern itself. If we are honest, this is why the subject makes so many people either angry or numb: it refuses to fit neatly into a single moral sentence.

When I try to listen for Torah in the middle of all that noise, I hear a recurring voice that never stops speaking, even when I wish it would: “You know the soul of the stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” I grew up hearing those words as something almost poetic, a line for sermons, a moral flourish. But the older I get, the less poetic they feel. They feel like a hand placed on my chest. They feel like God refusing to let me build a comfortable life on selective empathy. They feel like a command that reaches into the places where I want to simplify the world into “good people” and “bad people,” “legal” and “illegal,” “deserving” and “undeserving,” so I don’t have to feel anything complicated.

That is where a Jewish response has to begin: not with a party platform, but with the image of God. Every person we are tempted to reduce to a category is, in Torah terms, a whole world. That does not mean every choice is righteous. It does not mean laws do not matter. It does not mean a nation has no right to enforce its borders. It means something quieter and more demanding: the moment we treat the outsider as less human, we are walking away from Sinai. The moment we begin to justify cruelty because we feel anxious, or because someone broke a rule, we are reenacting Egypt in a new costume and calling it “order.”

So yes, I believe it is not only permissible for Jews to oppose government policies; it is part of our spiritual inheritance. Our Scriptures are crowded with prophets who did not flatter kings. They spoke to power the way Torah speaks to power: with moral clarity, with grief, and with a fierce insistence that justice is not a luxury. The prophetic tradition is not rebellion for its own sake, and it is not a license for chaos. It is the conviction that government is not God, and that the authority of the state is never absolute when it crushes what God calls precious. If we cannot say that out loud, then we have turned “obedience” into an idol.

And still, I do not want to pretend there is no such thing as law. Torah itself cares about law, about courts, about honest procedure, about order that protects rather than preys. The question is not whether law matters. The question is what kind of law, and what kind of enforcement, and what kind of heart we cultivate while we talk about it. “The law of the land” is a real concept in Jewish thought, and it matters precisely because Jews have lived for centuries inside other peoples’ legal systems. But no serious Torah life can treat that idea as a blanket moral excuse. A law can exist and still be enforced unjustly. A policy can be “legal” and still be cruel. A detention system can be “authorized” and still degrade human dignity. When enforcement becomes humiliation, when it becomes indifference to suffering, when it becomes a machine that breaks families and then calls the breaking “deterrence,” we are not watching justice. We are watching power untethered from compassion.

This is where the conversation about enforcement abuses lands in my chest. I have heard the easy retort too many times: “If they didn’t break the law, none of this would happen.” But Torah does not let me hide behind that sentence. Torah does not let me pretend that wrongdoing, real or alleged, cancels a person’s humanity. Torah does not teach that the vulnerable may be abused because their paperwork is wrong. We do not get to outsource our conscience to bureaucracy. We do not get to wash our hands by saying, “It’s just policy.” There is a reason Jewish memory is full of people who suffered under policies that were perfectly legal at the time.

And then comes the question that people ask in a quieter voice, the one that reveals what is really at stake: is it okay to support immigrants who are in the country illegally?

I want to answer that like a rabbi and like a human being. The word “illegal” can cover many realities. Some people crossed a border knowingly. Some overstayed a visa. Some were brought as children. Some fled violence. Some were exploited by employers who wanted cheap labor and disposable bodies. Some were deceived by smugglers. Some made desperate choices under crushing pressure. None of that means there are no moral lines. It means the moral world is not as simple as the slogans. Torah is not naïve, but it is also not cold. Torah asks for discernment, and it also demands compassion.

Supporting an undocumented immigrant does not have to mean celebrating lawbreaking. It can mean something much more Jewish, much more ordinary, and much more holy: refusing to abandon a neighbor to hunger, exposure, or fear. It can mean helping someone find competent legal counsel. It can mean accompanying a family through a terrifying process so they are not alone. It can mean offering food, or a ride, or a warm coat, or a listening ear, or a connection to a community resource. It can mean speaking up when you see cruelty being normalized, especially when that cruelty is done “in our name.” It can mean insisting that due process is not optional, and that dignity is not a reward for good behavior but a baseline for human beings.

There is a kind of righteousness that is loud and self-congratulating, and there is a kind of righteousness that simply refuses to harden. I am not interested in the first kind. The second kind is the one Torah keeps asking of us. It is the righteousness that can say, without flinching, “I want a society with laws,” and also say, without flinching, “I will not accept cruelty.” It is the righteousness that can acknowledge practical concerns—resources, safety, civic trust—without turning those concerns into permission to dehumanize. It is the righteousness that can hold boundaries without losing the heart.

In pastoral terms, I think the real spiritual danger here is what immigration arguments can do to our inner life. If my politics trains me to enjoy another person’s suffering, something has gone wrong in me, no matter how sophisticated my talking points are. If my fear makes me indifferent to the pain of children, something has gone wrong in me. If my compassion turns into denial that laws exist or that communities bear real burdens, something has gone wrong in me too. Torah does not call us to blindness; it calls us to integrity. It calls us to truth with mercy, and mercy with truth.

So when I ask myself what faithfulness looks like here, I return again to the same Exodus-shaped sentence: we know the soul of the stranger. Not because we are naturally better people, but because Jewish memory is meant to be a moral anchor. We know what it is to be powerless. We know what it is to be at the mercy of officials. We know what it is to be spoken about as a problem instead of seen as a person. That memory is not given to us to produce guilt. It is given to us to produce compassion and restraint, to keep our hearts from becoming Egyptian.

If you are asking whether it is okay for Jews to oppose unjust policies, my answer is yes. If you are asking whether it is okay to support immigrants who are here without legal status, my answer is also yes—especially when that support is rooted in preserving human dignity and protecting life. And if you are asking how to do that without turning Torah into a political club, then I would say this: start small, start local, and start with the refusal to dehumanize. In the end, a Jewish response is not a slogan. It is a way of seeing. It is the discipline of remembering Egypt—and choosing, again and again, not to become it.