THE HOLY GUEST
GUEST, THE HOLY
THE HOLY GUEST ARNOLD JACOB WOLF About a hundred years ago, a European rabbi named Israel Lipkin Salanter believed that certain central commandments of Judaism were falling into disuse. In...
...The commandment is the key which unlocks the Castle...
...it asks us to be holy...
...it is a life-style...
...All men are poor when they are en route...
...I shall here discuss, in the spirit of Rabbi Salanter, one key mitzvah which is hardly popular today...
...We are all strangers and sojourners as were our fathers...
...Some homes even had a flagpole for raising a banner that signified an invitation, public and dramatic, to all who needed a meal...
...study without prac, tice and no practice without study...
...In some Eastern r e l i g i o n s , the human being is identified with nature...
...24:18...
...Not so many who celebrate every festival and observe every fast...
...The guest was always to be r e g a r d e d as b e s t o w i n g a sacred opportunity...
...another, that she noticed that her guest attracted no flies...
...All his life he was the victim of punishing self-doubt and of an inordinate sense THE HOLY GUEST of guilt...
...One is not permitted to go to the study house if he has no guest at home, but must remain at home till one comes...
...Unless we are Paulinians...
...Who s h o u l d care more, then, for the stranger in his midst...
...It is the direct presence of the host that is required, not merely what he or she can provide...
...his reward was sixty-two good children and grandchildren, a sign of the importance of welcorning even an inanimate object into o n e 's home...
...Rabbi Israel, of course, was a fanatic...
...But Judaism sees the world as not quite so hospitable to us and to our needs...
...we are like fish taken in an evil net...
...19:34...
...Abraham is the symbol par excellence of the Jewish host...
...that some central laws have become dead letters and must be revived...
...Students were fed and housed in private homes on a regular basis...
...A guest invited for ulterior motives say, one from whom the host expects a j o b or other favor is no guest at all...
...The principal obligation is to organize one's home to make visitors welcome...
...Rediscovery of the law unites traditional and non-traditional Jews in a common task...
...Judaism has a choreography of obedience which recommends itself to the neophyte as to the adept...
...it is what God requires every day...
...Tat T'vam Asi: You are the World...
...It includes repeated performance, graceful performance, attention to inner nuances and joy in the performance...
...The commandment of hospitality supercedes other very important laws...
...Hospitality partakes of God's holiness...
...On the other hand, Jewish tradition has always maintained what modern theoreticians of education are now beginning to formulate: that careful study of ethical texts and problems leads to sensitivity in performance of ethical obligation...
...As Leo Baeck said, out of the mystery of the Godhead there emerges for the Jew only and always the commandment...
...Overwhelmed by the moral power of the c o m m a n d m e n t and by what s e e m e d to me its w i d e - r a n g i ng theological implications, I was struck mostly by...
...For non-traditional Jews the task is to learn what the Law is...
...Jews are not to convert their houses into fortresses protecting the nuclear family from invasion, but to sensitize their children to other people by inviting visitors regularly into their homes...
...Conversely, no one is only a guest, since it is his f e l l o w - t r a v e l l e r ' s house he shares...
...The host must never watch the guest eat or keep account of how much the guest costs...
...For traditional Jews the task is to perceive, as did Salanter...
...Karaites or extreme humanistic Reformers, Judaism remains for us something we must do and not merely believe or pretend to believe...
...every truth must become a task...
...But might we not also say that her superior understanding of guests stems from the fact that she, as a woman, lives in someone else's world...
...In our time there are no longer so . many Jews whose kashrut and Sabbath observance are impeccable...
...And in no case was the host to regard a guest or the guest to regard himself as imposing himself...
...At the Seder on Passover eve we fling open our doors to extend the invitation: " A l l who are hungry, come and e a t" but the invitation is actually operative throughout the year...
...He not only welcomed the three anonymous visitors, but was prepared for them...
...On the one hand, Jewish tradition gives'substance to the principle first formulated for Western thought in a theoretical way by Aristotle that the good person is one habituated to good, who learns to do good precisely by doing it repeatedly...
...Jewish identity entails for many of us a process of rediscovering...
...The task of welcoming begins outside one's home...
...also Deut...
...She had a guest room on her roof with a bed, table, chair and lamp to which Elij ah would come regularly as a guest...
...None of this may depend upon the mood of the host family...
...He was a strange rnan, but, I believe, important to us for what we need...
...while scholars are especially fortunate guests, even the ignorant must be gratefully welcomed...
...I studied the article on hachnasat «rchim in the great Hebrew Talmudic Encyclopedia and the (largely rabbinic) sources to which it sent me...
...Judaism does not merely teach us to be good...
...One should not worry if one's food or lodging are modest, but on the other hand, the guest should have the best food and bed available...
...If he thinks he is, the host has " s t o l e n his m i n d ." The laws of hospitality signify a notion of human life that is profound and compassionate...
...And the poor person is the guest par excellence...
...A commandment must be performed carefully and not sloppily ( " G o d is in the d e t a i l s " ) , with intention not merely to check off an obligation but to check out the Source...
...All homes were to have four doors so that the visitor could enter from any direction...
...Hospitality is not merely a response to conscience...
...they were often inhospitable and they were often exploitative or dishonest in their business...
...this time is not yet the Holy Time...
...He wandered around Europe feeling at home nowhere and under the gun everywhere...
...One must become sensitized to the principle, or hierarchy of principles, operating behind the practice...
...we are all travellers on the way, and we need each other to make our journey tolerable...
...According to this doctrine, we are all part of the All...
...We are commanded to love the stranger, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Lev...
...the simple facts regarding what it means for a Jew to be hospitable...
...Jewish law and tradition offer us strategies of ethical sensitivity...
...We are taught to make a place for a Sabbath guest even if we must.violate the strict law of the Sabbath, for example by moving something to make his bed...
...In Vilna or in Kovno, in Paris where he wandered or in Koenigsberg where he died, there were many Jews who scrupulously attended to keeping Kashrut and the Sabbath, to holy days and t'fdlin, to family purity and to prayer...
...It was her best room, and she welcomed the prophet there long before she recognized that he was a holy mana fact which she finally did recognize before her husband, since, as the Talmudic explication puts it, "Women understand guests better than men d o . " Why is this...
...It is not merely something polite that nice people do occasionally as their hearts prompt them...
...one escorts guests inside, offers them good food and water immediately, since they are always assumed to be hungry and thirsty...
...There is no wrong mitzvah to begin to teach one the meaning of duty and joy...
...Unless we welcome all strangers, unaware, we shall miss the angelic guest who never comes announced...
...They cared a good deal about the purity of their kitchens, but, apparently, not much about the puricy of their hearts...
...So we can never really be alienated or alone...
...I came to study it by chance myself, when 1 was invited to help teach a seminar in hospitality at Yale Divinity School...
...A family that failed to garner a visitor experienced a sense of defeat...
...The host must himself cut the loaf of bread and offer his visitors portions...
...The host must welcome in person, even.if he has a thousand servants...
...No worldly place is, therefore, truly home...
...If, however, we teach them that privacy is more important than hospitality, that it is better to protect our homes and our possessions than to share them, then that lesson will have its impact, too...
...He, too, is a Stranger who needs a welcoming family...
...In the mitzvah of welcoming strangers, we see the beckoning hand of a God who wants us to try to be Jews...
...Performance of law that is mere habit or unquestioning obedience to authority is not truly ethical behavior...
...Who knows better than a Jew what it means to be an alien...
...But there are many who are trying to recover their Jewish heritage, many who want to become what they feel they are...
...For both V !l I kinds of Jew rediscovery of the Law involves perceiving the way in which the Law subtly combines the ethical and the ritual how it ritualizes the ethical and ethicizes the ritual, how the two domains mutually condition and facilitate one another...
...How we treat visitors determines what we ourselves become...
...One begins where one is...
...notables lined up at the synagogue door to virtually force visitors to the synagogue to become their guests for the Sabbath...
...Imagination must be employed in recruiting guests...
...He must give the departing guest provisions for the way, since "escorting is even more important than welcome...
...All this was possible because his guests were anticipated in advance...
...But in this sense, we are not so far from the traditional Jews...
...Once he was asked to preach a funeral oration and his eulogy consisted only of the citation: " F o r man knows not his time...
...He could not keep a j o b . He fell into long periods of deep depression...
...From the same Talmudic discussion we also learn that " i f a person entertains a scholar in his house and shares with him his possessions, Scripture equates that with sacrifice of the daily offering in the T e m p l e . " Elsewhere in the same tractate (63b) we find it stated: " I f Jethro, who befriended Moses only for his own benefit, was rewarded (for extending hospitality to Moses), how much more will be the reward for one who (expecting no reward) entertains a scholar in his house and gives him food and drink and the use of his possessions...
...A passage on page 10b of the Talmudic tractate Berakhot ("Bless i n g s " ) explicates the story in II Kings 4 about the woman of Shunam who, like Abraham our father, was a paradigm of hospitality...
...The house is to be not a refuge but a bridge if the analogy can be imagined, a kind of spiritually self-aware hotel...
...If our children are taught to welcome the other person when he happens by, they will be sensitive to the presence of the Other...
...There is no time when the guest should be unwelcome, except when illness or the like make the home dangerous...
...It is not a trivial courtesy, but, in the highest sense, an act of g'milut chasadim (bestowal of lovingkindness), an expression of loyalty to fellow human beings...
...Swiftly mobilizing his wife, servants and hangers-on, Abraham made sure the guests were fed, washed and refreshed within the shortest possible time...
...But these very same Jews, Rabbi Israel noted to his sorrow, were not very careful about the law against slander or usury...
...There is no discontinuity between the world of things and the world of man...
...like birds caught in a s n a r e . " Entranced, distracted, he kept repeating the verse and then prec i p i t o u s l y o r d e r e d the body removed...
...Receiving strangers is an emergency situation which suspends many ordinary obligations...
...Rediscovery of the Law means recovery of the absolute unity of study and practice...
...he has let us live a time in His world, so we can do no less to our own visitors and friends...
...Every task can be holy...
...THE HOLY GUEST ARNOLD JACOB WOLF About a hundred years ago, a European rabbi named Israel Lipkin Salanter believed that certain central commandments of Judaism were falling into disuse...
...Even God, according to the Kabbalists, is in exile...
...One rabbi offers the e x p l a n a t i o n that she inspected the prophet's sheets and found that they were never contaminated by nocturnal emission...
...The quality of the guest is not the point...
...Imitating the Divine Host, who is also a Guest, we learn to care for our neighbors as ourselves...
...We should live near the cross-roads or the center of town where guests can find us, and not in distant suburbs where no one can find us except those to whom we extend an i n v i t a t i on and d i r e c t i o n s . The synagogue can be used as a temporary hospice, but a sincere host will try to live near the communal buildings to make it easy for guests to find his home...
...If we think of ourselves as masters in our own homes, we shall never bow the head or bend the knee to anyone who might be Master of us all...
...No one is ever really at home, even at home...
...Not so many, whose families are pure in a ritual sense, or whose hearts are pure in an ethical sense...
...One should not tell his guests his own problems, but listen to their recountings of experiences patiently and sympathetically...
...We are exiled from the Holy Place...
...Thus, the ethical commandment is of the highest religious importance...
...Jews are commanded to open their homes to visitors, particularly the poor and the learned...
...There is no irv...
...Guests should be welcomed cheerfully no matter how downcast or beset with troubles the host may be...
...The reward for even the unsatisfactory kind of hospitality practiced by our Egyptian oppressors is great: " H o w much more for one who entertains a scholar in his house, giving him food and drink and allowing him to use his t h i n g s . " Obed-Edom was rewarded simply for taking care of the Ark of God "which could not eat or drink...
Vol. 1 • May 1975 • No. 1
