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The stranger's heart is a superpower
Hebrew means crossing over
The word Hebrew literally means to cross over, to be a boundary crosser, because being a Hebrew means knowing what it feels like to be a stranger. That runs through 400 years of slavery in Egypt and through 2,000 years of diaspora, in countries where Jews were more or less at home but never fully of the place.
Everyone feels like a stranger
The feeling is universal. Asian Americans have felt misunderstood and hated since the pandemic in ways many people never realized, immigrants feel it right now, and every minority group feels it in its own way. White Christian men also feel like strangers, misunderstood and marginalized in this country at this moment.
A blueprint from Judaism
People who carry the heart of a stranger often respond by building higher walls, pushing others out, and demonizing the other side even more. Judaism offers a blueprint for the opposite: taking that experience and making it a superpower of empathy, creativity, resilience, and grit. It begins with a single sentence to anyone who feels like an outsider: you feel like a stranger, so do I, and let that be the first point of human connection.
Why does the Torah keep repeating the stranger rule?
The Talmud, in tractate Bava Metzia, counts the warnings against mistreating a stranger at 36, with another opinion putting the count at 46. That makes it among the most repeated commands in the Torah. Exodus attaches a reason to the rule: the Israelites themselves were strangers in the land of Egypt. Leviticus goes further and commands loving the stranger as oneself.
How does living abroad boost creativity?
In a 2009 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, William Maddux and Adam Galinsky found that people who had lived abroad solved creative problems better than people who had not. The effect tracked how much they had adapted to the foreign culture. The researchers proposed that living inside unfamiliar norms shows a person that one thing can carry several meanings, which loosens fixed ways of thinking. Participants who had lived abroad also did better on the Duncker candle problem, a classic test of creative insight.
Why does exclusion make people lash out?
In a 2001 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Jean Twenge, Roy Baumeister, and colleagues reported that people told they would end up alone later in life behaved more aggressively in laboratory tasks. A 2007 follow-up paper in the same journal found that socially excluded participants also donated less money and helped less. The researchers called the pattern a drop in prosocial behavior after exclusion.
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