In every generation, the Jewish people are called to remember a fundamental truth of our history: “You were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20–21). The Torah returns again and again to the experience of the stranger, urging Israel never to allow security, prosperity, or power to erase the memory of vulnerability. In our own time, when questions of immigration, asylum, borders, and national sovereignty have become deeply contentious, the ancient voice of Torah still speaks. It does not provide a modern immigration policy, nor should Torah be reduced to a political slogan. Instead, it gives us the moral principles by which Jews should approach these difficult questions: justice, compassion, responsibility, and the inherent dignity of the human being.
The Sacred Memory of Sojourning
The Torah does not allow us to regard the stranger merely as an abstraction. It commands:
“The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
—Leviticus 19:34
To be Jewish is, in part, to carry the collective memory of displacement. From Egypt to Babylon, from medieval expulsions to the persecutions of Europe, Jewish history has repeatedly placed our people in the position of the outsider, the refugee, and the unwanted minority. Our survival has depended upon the providence of God, the strength of Jewish communities, and, at times, the willingness of others to show compassion.
The Torah therefore insists that our suffering must teach us something. We were strangers, and so we must understand the vulnerability of the stranger. We know what it means to live under the authority of others, to depend upon the justice of courts and rulers, and to hope that the society around us will see our humanity rather than simply our foreignness.
Balancing Civil Law and Human Dignity
Traditional Judaism recognizes the necessity of law, government, courts, and social order. Nations have legitimate responsibilities concerning borders, citizenship, public safety, immigration, and the administration of justice. A functioning society cannot exist without laws or without institutions capable of enforcing them.
The Torah itself commands the establishment of courts:
“You shall appoint magistrates and officials for your tribes, in all the settlements that the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice.”
—Deuteronomy 16:18
Yet Torah also teaches that the legitimacy of law is inseparable from justice:
“Cursed be anyone who subverts the rights of the stranger, the orphan, and the widow.”
—Deuteronomy 27:19
The Torah therefore does not present law and compassion as enemies. Law is necessary precisely because justice matters. At the same time, the administration of law must never become an excuse for cruelty, humiliation, or the denial of another person’s humanity.
The prophet Micah summarizes the moral demand beautifully:
“What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
—Micah 6:8
A society may enforce its laws while still remembering that every person stands before God as a human being created in the divine image, tzelem Elohim. Immigration status does not erase human dignity. Neither citizenship nor the lack of citizenship determines the worth of a human life.
Justice therefore requires both order and conscience. We should resist the temptation to turn immigration into a simplistic moral contest in which one side supposedly represents compassion and the other law. Torah demands something more difficult: lawful society joined to righteousness, justice joined to mercy, and public responsibility joined to recognition of the humanity of the stranger.
Torah, Conscience, and Compassion
A Torah-centered approach should avoid both lawlessness and cruelty. Jewish ethics cannot require us to pretend that borders and immigration laws have no purpose, but neither can we permit those laws to become an excuse for dehumanization.
We can affirm the right and responsibility of nations to regulate immigration while also insisting that people be treated humanely. Those accused of violating immigration laws should not cease to be treated as human beings. Families should not become rhetorical weapons. Refugees and asylum seekers deserve to have legitimate claims heard fairly. Those fleeing persecution, war, or genuine danger should not be dismissed merely because their suffering occurs beyond our own borders.
The proper Jewish response is therefore neither indiscriminate acceptance nor indiscriminate rejection. It is thoughtful justice. Policies should preserve social order, protect communities, respect legitimate national sovereignty, provide appropriate due process, and recognize the Torah’s repeated concern for the vulnerable.
We should be able to secure borders without building walls around our hearts.
From Sojourner to Neighbor
Jewish ethics do not end with private charity. Torah repeatedly demands that justice itself protect those who are vulnerable:
“You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless… Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and that the Lord your God redeemed you from there.”
—Deuteronomy 24:17–18
The stranger is therefore not simply someone toward whom we may choose to feel sympathy. The stranger possesses rights that must not be unjustly denied.
Jewish history makes this teaching painfully concrete. Our ancestors knew slavery in Egypt and exile in Babylon. Jewish communities were expelled from countries in which they had lived for centuries. Jews endured pogroms, discriminatory laws, forced migrations, and political persecution. During the Shoah, countless Jews desperately sought refuge while governments debated quotas, documents, borders, and admission requirements. For many, whether another country opened or closed its doors became literally a matter of life and death.
That history does not mean that every modern immigration dispute is equivalent to Jewish persecution, nor should the Shoah be invoked casually in contemporary political arguments. History rarely repeats itself in identical form. But history should deepen our moral awareness.
When we encounter migrants, refugees, or displaced people, we should remember that Jewish history contains many chapters in which we stood where they now stand: uncertain of our future, dependent upon the justice of strangers, hoping to find safety for our families.
That memory should make us slower to dehumanize and quicker to recognize suffering.
The Torah asks us to see the person before the category.
Beyond Political Tribalism
Immigration has become one of the most politicized subjects of modern life. Jews should be especially cautious about allowing partisan loyalties to determine our moral conclusions before we have even examined the teachings of Torah.
Our obligation is not to make Judaism conform to the platform of the political left or the political right. Torah predates both.
We should be capable of saying that borders matter and that compassion matters. We can recognize the legitimate authority of government while questioning unnecessary cruelty. We can believe immigration laws should be enforced while also believing that those laws should be just, reasonable, and humanely administered. We can distinguish between economic migration, asylum, refugee status, criminal conduct, and lawful immigration rather than collapsing millions of individual human beings into a single political category.
Most importantly, Jews should resist language that turns entire populations into enemies, invaders, parasites, criminals, or abstractions. Whatever policies we advocate, the people affected by them remain human beings.
Our disagreements about policy do not relieve us of the mitzvah to act with decency.
Remembering What It Means to Be a Stranger
To remember that we were strangers is not to abandon prudence. It is to ensure that prudence never becomes hardness of heart.
It means refusing to look away from suffering merely because the sufferer was born somewhere else. It means helping where we reasonably can, advocating for fair treatment, supporting legitimate refugees, assisting newcomers in adapting responsibly to their new communities, and remembering that the stranger standing before us may be experiencing the same fear, uncertainty, and longing for safety that marked so many chapters of Jewish history.
The Torah does not command us to surrender judgment. It commands us to exercise judgment righteously.
The Jewish vision is therefore not a world without nations, laws, or boundaries. It is a world in which power is restrained by justice, law is guided by righteousness, and the vulnerable are not forgotten.
Conclusion: Our Torah, Our Responsibility
The Torah’s teaching begins with memory but must eventually become action.
We remember Egypt so that Egypt does not become merely an ancient story. We remember what it meant to be powerless so that power does not make us indifferent. We remember what it meant to depend upon the mercy and justice of others so that we will recognize our responsibilities when others depend upon us.
As Jews committed to Torah, we should uphold the lawful societies in which we live while continually insisting that law be administered with justice and human dignity. Where laws are unjust, we may work peacefully to reform them. Where policies unnecessarily degrade or dehumanize people, we should speak against that degradation. Where people genuinely require refuge, we should remember the countless generations in which Jews prayed that someone, somewhere, would open a door.
None of this requires allegiance to a political party or ideology. It requires allegiance to the ethical demands of Torah.
This is ultimately larger than immigration policy. It concerns the kind of people Torah calls us to become.
We were strangers.
We remember what vulnerability feels like.
And because we remember, we are commanded not to become indifferent when another human being stands before us as the stranger once stood before Egypt.
Our task is to uphold justice without abandoning mercy, to preserve order without surrendering compassion, and to recognize the image of God even in those whose language, nationality, culture, or circumstances differ from our own.
In doing so, Jewish memory becomes more than remembrance of suffering. It becomes a source of righteousness—a means by which the experience of exile teaches us to bring greater justice, mercy, and dignity into the world.
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