The art of staying a stranger

There are two types of traveller. The one likes to feel at home even in temporary lodgings. He unpacks every item in his suitcase, filling the hangers and shelves of the hotel room, and stowing the bag out of sight within minutes of arriving. The other prefers to live out of cases for the entire trip, rummaging around to find items as needed. Inevitably, the two are married to one another.

The Book of Exodus, which we start reading this Shabbat, tells the story of the very first exile, and as its names indicates, how it came to an end. For several centuries, our nascent nation was a guest in a foreign country. They weren’t just immigrants from another land. Everything about the culture, the values, and the faith of the host country was alien to them. The pressure to assimilate and become part of Egyptian society was tremendous. Yet, somehow, they succeeded in maintaining their distinct identity.

In the millennia that followed, history would repeat itself. Our people were subject to exile after exile, living scattered, as guests among often hostile hosts, with the compulsion to assimilate ever present. It started with the Babylonians taking Jews away from Jerusalem in chains and continues to this very day.

A careful analysis of the Egyptian model helps us to understand how we withstood and continue to withstand those adverse conditions.

Here is how the arrival of the early Hebrews in Egypt is described in the very first verse of this Book of Exodus. “These are the names of the children of Israel who came to Egypt.” But this is not a literal translation of the phrase. In Hebrew, the word used for “came” is haba’im, which means “who are coming” – the present tense. “Who came” should more correctly be ba’u – the past tense.

Why this grammatical anomaly? Because therein lies the secret to survival in exile. Each day, they felt they had just arrived. They continued, figuratively, to live out of suitcases, never feeling that they were totally at home in what was after all a foreign country. They didn’t unpack all their stuff, mindful every day that this was indeed exile and not a real home.

This has been the winning formula for a people that hasn’t lived on its own land for the majority of its existence. We have survived by remembering that as comfortable as an exile may have been, we could never really call it our land. Our history has shown us that whenever we deluded ourselves into thinking that we were welcome and at home, the consequences were tragic. It was either mass assimilation or persecution by our hosts, sometimes both concurrently.

So each day, we remind ourselves – haba’im – that we have just arrived. That we are travellers through this world. The accommodation in our luxury suite may be five-star, the cupboards vast enough to contain our entire wardrobe, and the staff most welcoming. After all, it’s only a hotel, not our permanent home.

Soon enough, we will all be home.