By Sheldon

Abraham offers hospitality to three guests.

It is not much of an exaggeration to note that the current immigration crisis in which children, even infants, are being stripped away from their parents whose crime is only seeking asylum, is one of the darker chapters in our recent history.

One of the most reprehensible justifications for this abomination involved the abuse of the Bible to claim that as long as it’s technically legal, one has to abide by the law.  The Hebrew Bible does in fact have one or two things to say about unjust laws, such as Isaiah 10:1-2:

Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees,
and the writers who keep writing oppression,
to turn aside the needy from justice
and to rob the poor of my people of their right,
that widows may be their spoil,
and that they may make the fatherless their prey!

Isaiah, like most of the rest of the “classical” prophets, sought to grapple with the eventual destruction of Israel, the Kingdom of Judah, Jerusalem, the royal Davidic dynasty, and the reduction of the Jews to an exiled people. What happened? Why did it all go so wrong, even though God promised to show favor to his people?

Briefly put, the prophetic answer was that the nation was destroyed as the direct result of the abuse of the poor, the vulnerable, and the immigrant. Returning to Isaiah, he even goes so far (in Chapter 1) as to imply that it would be better to discard the entire religious superstructure–the feasts, the festivals, the sacrificial rites, the assemblies and rituals, all of it, rather than neglect the plight of the vulnerable.

Readers familiar with the book of Genesis will also recall that there are several instances in which certain characters show hospitality to the stranger or, in the case of the people of Sodom, they don’t. Make no mistake; those stories of hospitality are there for a reason.

A Question of Survival

Genesis is a prologue to the story of the Exodus and as such is itself an immigration story when Joseph and his twelve sons and their families immigrate to Egypt in order to avoid starving to death. But I’m getting ahead of myself. One of the major points of Genesis is to explain why the Patriarchs survived, and why they were singled out by God for special favor and a covenant. Abraham (who, incidentally calls himself “a stranger in a strange land,” i.e., an immigrant) shows hospitality to three strangers and is immediately told afterwards that he will gain an heir through Sarah his wife. Lot and his family protect those same three messengers and are spared the fate of Sodom, which abused the rules of hospitality by threatening Lot’s guests. The servant of Abraham recognizes that Rebecca will make the perfect spouse for Isaac when she offers to water his ten camels (given the amount of water camels drink, that’s roughly 250 gallons–over a ton of water). Her hospitality is lavish towards someone she’s never met. It’s a trait that ensures the survival of Abraham’s descendants.

This recurrence of hospitality stories at critical points in the overall narrative is not accidental. Hospitality to the stranger is the marker of a family or people who deserve to survive. Those who disdain the stranger and withold from them are about to become a smoking hole in the ground. Oh, and if you still think that Sodom was destroyed over homosexuality, please note that there are about 24 references to Sodom outside of Genesis. Nearly all of them deal with the city’s destruction and why it was destroyed. None of them mention homosexuality. Nearly all of them specifically mention their neglect and exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. It doesn’t take a theological genius to work this out: we neglect the vulnerable, both our own and the stranger from afar, at our peril.

Beyond the Biblical

In fact, one need not be a theist to see the wisdom in this. Moral authority is real. How we, as one of the richest nations on earth, employ that wealth is a powerful statement of who we are. Much of the strength of our alliances in Europe are (or were until recently) founded not only on our military ventures, but even moreso on our willingness to rebuild their cities, even those of our enemies. Call it cynical politics, or an counter-communist ploy or creating a new market for U.S. goods, which is probably was, but it was also completely counter to the way conquerors have treated their victims over the centuries. The architect of this remarkable act, George C. Marshall, also believed that as a Christian it was incumbent upon him to walk that talk about “doing good to those who hate you.”

We are at a crossroads, a kind of moral tipping point. There is a right and a wrong position to take on this, and taking no position falls under “wrong.” Trump’s using innocent children as bargaining chips and tools to whip up his psychotic base is not only cruel, but signals profound weakness. This is what he has been reduced to as a way to get what he wants.  It must end. Now.