Security Concerns and the Obligation to Welcome Strangers

by Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah

What would you do if three men you didn’t know arrived on your doorstep unannounced?  Perhaps, if you have a small magnifying spy-glass fitted in your front-door, you might simply peer through it and ignore them?  Maybe you’d put the door on the chain fitted for that purpose, open it the chain’s width, try to find out who they were, what they wanted – and ask to see their identification?  If you are sensible and safety-conscious you certainly wouldn’t simply open the door, invite them to sit down, and rush around preparing refreshments!   Who would be so crazy as to do something like that?  

Well, it’s what Abraham does at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Va-yeira:   One minute he’s sitting in the door of his tent at the hottest time of the day dozing, the next, as soon as he lifts up his eyes, looks, and sees three men stationed in front of him, he’s running to meet them and offering them hospitality – with a Capital ‘H’:   He offers them water to wash their feet, and asks them to rest under the tree, while he prepares a ‘morsel of bread’ to eat.  He then hastens into the tent and instructs Sarah to make cakes, and then runs to the herd to fetch ‘a calf, tender and good’, dresses it, takes curd and milk, and sets the meal before them under the tree (Genesis 18: 1-8).  And, yes, before you ask – the rabbinic law prohibiting the eating of milk with meat – derived from verses in Exodus and Deuteronomy, stating that ‘you shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk’ (Ex. 23:19; 34:26; Deut. 14:21) – was formulated at least twenty centuries after the days of Abraham and Sarah!

Of course, Abraham and Sarah lived about four thousand years ago.  So that was then; this is now.  And yet, anyone who has watched ‘Tribe’ or other similar programmes on the TV knows that, even today, in other places and other cultures, where householders do not run the risk of being burgled, assaulted, or otherwise mistreated by unknown callers, hospitality to strangers on the generous scale practised by our ancestors is still the norm.  

Indeed, while the days of Abraham and Sarah may be long past, significantly, the early rabbis identified hospitality as one of the most important Jewish obligations, and so ensured that it remained – and remains – central to Jewish observance.   Interestingly, in the first rabbinic code of Jewish law, the Mishnah, in a passage at the beginning of tractate, Pe’ah (1:1), we find hospitality mentioned fourth in a list of nine key mitzvot.   The list is worth noting – so, here it is in full – with a fairly literal translation.   If you want to look it up, you’ll find it quoted in Shabbat morning service 5, on p. 131 of the prayer book (Siddur Lev Chadash):   Honouring one’s father and mother; acts of loving kindness, coming early to the House of Study in the morning and evening; hospitality to guests; visiting the sick; enabling the bride to enter; accompanying the dead; praying with deliberation; bringing peace between one person and another.  The list concludes with the words:  And the study of Torah leads to them all – V’Talmud Torah k’neged kullam.

The list, though brief, is fairly comprehensive.  We don’t have time to examine it in detail today, but it is worth noting one of the juxtapositions:  eagerness to study; hospitality to guests; visiting the sick.  While the first and last of these three acts involves venturing out, offering hospitality involves welcoming people in.  Indeed, of the nine, hospitality alone explicitly centres on what we do at home – or rather, on the way in which our homes connect with the wider world.  ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’, but a Jewish person’s home, like the chuppah, the marriage canopy, open on all sides, is open to others, in particular, to wayfarers:  The Hebrew noun for ‘guest’, o’rei’ach – o’r’chim in the plural – is connected to the noun, o’ruch, meaning ‘road’ or ‘way’.   And the Hebrew expression for ‘welcoming’ is just as instructive:  Hachnasat o’r’chim, literally means, ‘the entering of guests’, or, ‘causing guests to enter’; the three Hebrew consonants, Kaf Nun Samech, which form the root, conveying the meaning, ‘enter’. So, at the heart of welcoming guests is the action of enabling people journeying along the way to enter our homes.

Of course, it is all well and good for me – the rabbi – to use my sermon to remind us that hospitality is an important Jewish obligation – that’s the sort of thing rabbis are expected to do.  But isn’t the mitzvah of hospitality just a little bit ‘theoretical’ to say the least?   After all, the fact is the real world we inhabit is a million miles away from the picture painted at the beginning of this week’s parashah.  Surely, anyone who behaved like Abraham when confronted with three complete strangers on their doorstep here in Britain would be, as the well-worn expression puts, ‘asking for trouble’.

Yes, indeed – and what is true for householders in Britain in general, is no doubt even more pertinent for members of minority communities, who are vulnerable, not only, like everyone else, to strangers intent on burglary and fraud, but to assault by racist thugs.  But even in the days of our ancestors, people were vulnerable to attack.   The heart-warming story of Abraham and Sarah’s hospitality in this week’s parashah is followed in the very next chapter by a sinister narrative that dramatises the dangers of a householder offering hospitality in a hostile environment – the tale of ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’.  Like many well-known ‘Bible stories’, most people brought up in Christian cultures like Britain think they know what this one is about – although most probably haven’t actually read it.  Consequently, it might surprise you to learn that, contrary to the dominant Christian reading of this text, from a Jewish point of view, the behaviour that incited God to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gemorrah, was not, homosexuality, but rather the flagrant abuse of the obligation of hospitality:  As we read in Genesis chapter 19, Lot offered hospitality to two men – described as m’lachim, ‘messengers’ in the text – who arrived at his home in the evening, and he brought them into his house for the night.  But then, the men of Sodom surrounded Lot’s house, insisting that the guests were brought out, and threatened to break the door down.  For the medieval commentator, Nachmanides, the men of Sodom were intent on keeping strangers away, being anxious to retain all the wealth of the place for themselves.  Although they were wicked in many other ways, the destruction of the city was their punishment for their selfishness and their refusal to help the poor.

So, even in the days of our ancestors, offering hospitality wasn’t simple – and could put the host in considerable danger – albeit, in Lot’s case, not from his guests, but from the other people who lived in the area, who were hostile to strangers.  For Jewish people today, many of whom are less visibly Jewish in their home setting than they once were – particularly, if they choose not to fix a m’zuzah to the doorposts of their front-doors in order not to attract unwanted attention – the locus of vulnerability has shifted to the synagogue – synagogue buildings usually being clearly identifiable as ‘Jewish’ places. 

While the rest of the Jewish community in Brighton & Hove has always been very security conscious, we were less so – until, at the height of the second Lebanon War last July, the front wall of the building was daubed with ugly anti-Semitic statements and images.  As it happens, it wasn’t the first attack – but, perhaps, the most explicit.  Since December 2000, when I began working here as your rabbi, there have been six separate attacks – interestingly, all of them since September 11th 2001:  first red paint on the front-doors; then someone scribbled a Star of David and a Swastika – with an ‘equals’ sign between them; then the front stain-glass windows were broken on three different occasions.  With the attack last July came the realisation that we must take security more seriously on a week by week basis – the security of the building, of course, but, even more important, the security of the people, when we gather together.   It was for this reason that one of our members took responsibility for liaising with the Community Security Trust, and organising a rota of people to stand on the doorstep as people come in, not only on Rosh Ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, but on Shabbat and the other festivals, and, also, whenever we hold special events – like the Judith Silver concert this evening.

Security on the synagogue doorstep means that people who are not known to those doing security will be stopped and asked questions, and may need to produce identification.  It means that that their bags may be searched.  More fundamentally, it means that strangers will be regarded as suspect.   And yet, this congregation, in particular, has always prided itself on making those who come here feel welcome – and continues to be committed to welcoming newcomers.   So, how do we square the need for security with our commitment to offering an open door to others?

As it happens, being so keen to welcome new people, is not just about being true to our particular values as a congregation.  The primary Hebrew name of a synagogue is Beit K’nesset.  The word K’nesset, like the word hachnasah, in the expression hachnasat o’r’chim – ‘welcoming wayfarers’ – is based on the same Hebrew root:  Kaf Nun Samech.   The more usual translation, ‘House of Meeting’, while connected in meaning to the Greek word, sunagoge, fails to convey the key idea that, like our homes, the synagogue is meant to be a place that welcomes people in.  Moreover, like our homes, the setting for that welcoming in, is the doorstep – the threshold between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.   It doesn’t matter how nice we are to newcomers once we have allowed them inside, if the way we treat them when they approach the threshold makes them feel unwelcome.

So, what can we do?   We do need to be vigilant.  At the same time, we also need to recognise the 99.99% of the time, the person who comes to us for the first time, or who has come before, but is not known to the people on the door, is completely harmless.  And not just that:  In my experience, many of the ‘strangers’ who come to us, come because they have not found a congregational home elsewhere, and may even have been sent packing by other synagogues, or they come to us because they are vulnerable in some other way – unwell, or bereaved, or simply, truly, wayfarers: travellers, in need of hospitality.   While maintaining security, we must also be welcoming at the same time.  Again:  How?   A pastoral visit to a family in Worthing on Thursday gave me an answer.  Two of the members of that family serve on the security rota.   Welcomed warmly into the congregation when they first arrived on the doorstep, they are very keen to welcome others.  They told me how they have found a way of doing this without compromising security:  by smiling – and one of them explained:   ‘When you smile at someone, they smile back; if someone didn’t smile or gave me a funny look in return, then I would know that there might be a problem.  And if you smile, people don’t seem to mind if you also ask them a few questions.’   And she added something else:  ‘You need to look into people’s eyes, when you smile at them’.  That’s right, if someone is smiling back genuinely, their eyes won’t say something else. Perhaps that’s what Abraham discovered when, as we read in the second verse of our parashah, ‘he lifted up his eyes and looked’ – Va-yissah eienav va-yar.   As soon as he looked into their faces, he knew that the three men at his door were friends not foes, and he hastened to make them welcome. So may it be with us. And let us say: Amen

Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue – Adat Shalom Verei’ut

27th October 2007 – 15th Cheshvan 5768