GEN895 The stranger in our midst. Allied to the kindliness we must show to the weak and the dying, the poor and the orphan, is the sympathetic treatment we must accord to the stranger in our midst.   The command “to love the stranger” occurs at least thirty-six times in the Torah, for “were ye not strangers in the land of Egypt?”   So kind has the Jew been to all in need or who have been alone in a strange environment, that it is no exaggeration to say that the word “stranger” has almost disappeared from his vocabulary. Each was made welcome to enjoy hospitality; each was asked to “feel at home” in our midst. Abraham gladly welcomed the wayfarers, little suspecting that they were angels in disguise [this verse].   The rigorous measures introduced against strangers of another faith in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah Ezra 9:2, 10:3; Nehemiah 9:2, 13:3, 23 were born of the desperate conditions of the times. Judaism had to be saved, a drastic step had to be made; with the result that those homes which were founded on mixed marriages had to be set up anew, divorced of the non-Jewish partner. This cannot be regarded as a measure of exclusiveness and chauvinism with which the Jewish people are credited by their maligners and detractors. The early chapters of the Torah and Books of Ruth and Jonah, with their accounts of men and women of other faiths who embraced the Jewish God, are proof that the racialism of Ezra was the exception rather than the rule. LEHRMAN 214