The Humanity of the Stranger Should Not Become a Team Sport

Super Bowl Sunday, Bad Bunny, and Parashat Mishpatim

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I’ve always felt like a bit of an immigrant during the Super Bowl. I didn’t grow up with American football and never developed a taste for it.

This year felt different because my son is old enough to care. He roped me into a few afternoons of creating art about the Seahawks and the New England Patriots. I found myself learning team colors and helmet designs, oddly proud of this new layer of assimilation.

Our Mixed Media Super Bowl Art

Then I began seeing social media chatter about the halftime show by Bad Bunny. My entire reference point for him was that he had recently won a Grammy and used his acceptance speech to talk about immigration.

I assumed the halftime show would be another moment in the American argument over immigration. So I tuned in.

Even though I speak Spanish, I struggled to follow the lyrics. What I later learned about them—crude and sexual—made it clear this just isn’t music I’m drawn to or would feel comfortable bringing into my community.

But I also found myself noticing other things. The warm, multi-generational families on stage. The wedding scene. He is obviously proud of his Puerto Rican identity, and he raised the American flag.

There was something disorienting about experiencing it as performance—as art—while knowing it would be read as political.

I could already imagine the reactions that would follow. Some would celebrate Bad Bunny as a hero for the oppressed. Others would see desecration of America.

I wasn’t in either camp — just tired of the noise of it all.

And in that space, another set of words surfaced. Not from X, Instagram, or the Grammys. From Mishpatim. From the laws about the stranger.

Our parasha speaks to the stranger, the immigrant—not with policy prescriptions or cheap slogans, but with something we are in danger of losing: human empathy.

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Woven throughout the parasha are commandments about how to treat the stranger.

In context, the commandments are striking. The Israelites had been liberated from Egypt just months before. They carried literal and psychological scars. Some had lost children to Pharaoh’s brutality.

They were traumatized.

There are two predictable human responses to trauma. One is to settle into permanent victimhood. The other is to become fascinated with the kind of power that once oppressed you—to imagine that control over others will finally secure you. Both shrink empathy.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes that hatred of the foreigner is one of the oldest human impulses. We are wired to protect our tribe and to view the unfamiliar as potential threat.

His teacher, Rabbi Nachum Rabinowitz, adds another layer.¹ When we encounter suffering, we sometimes protect ourselves psychologically by telling a story about it. If someone is in dire straits, we think, they must be responsible for their misfortune.

Rabbi Rabinowitz also explores a more uncomfortable possibility: we sometimes demonize the stranger because we see something of ourselves in them. Their instability mirrors our own fragility. Contempt can be a way to create distance.

And yet, knowing all this, the Torah commands:

“You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20).

“You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9).

The Sages counted this warning thirty-six times across the Torah. The repetition, I believe, is an admission: this will not come easily.

The Torah’s response is not to deny how hard this is. To be able to live up to these commandments, it asks us to cultivate a particular kind of memory.

Not abstract historical awareness, but embodied recollection: You know the soul of the stranger. You remember powerlessness. Ethical memory interrupts the instinct to harden against the stranger.

Rabbi Sacks captures the logic starkly: if you are human, so is he. If he is less than human, so are you.

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Many American Jews—particularly those of us committed to Israel—feel under siege. We see antisemitism rising and worry about our future.

In the case of recent immigration flashpoints, some of the loudest activist and celebrity voices advocating against ICE have shown hostility toward us.

It is hard to hear chants that erase you and then extend compassion to those they claim to represent. It is hard to hold nuanced positions in a world that insists compassion and open borders are the same. It is hard to be told that caring about the law makes you heartless.

The Torah never denied that fear can feel justified. But it insists that we resist the thickening of the skin around our hearts that prevents us from seeing the stranger as human.

The stranger is not the activist who claims to represent him. The Venezuelan family rebuilding their life is not the campus protester shouting slogans. The person crossing a border in desperation is not the NGO leader who partners with those who justify violence against Jews.

We can believe in borders and still refuse to dehumanize. We can support enforcement and still recognize that most migration is driven by desperation. We can oppose activists who exploit immigrant suffering and still see the immigrant as bearing the divine image.

This is not naïveté. It is moral discipline.

The Torah repeats the command about the stranger because it anticipates moments like ours—moments when fear feels reasonable, when tribal loyalty feels urgent, when empathy feels like vulnerability.

Mishpatim does not tell us which immigration policy to adopt. It tells us who we are forbidden to become in the process.

Shabbat Shalom,

Mijal

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I really enjoyed our conversation with Izabella Tabarovsky! Izabella recently authored an important book called Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide.

She has been one of the earliest and most astute observers of how Soviet anti-Zionism and antisemitism have migrated to the West and animate so much of today’s discourse. We explored all of this in depth —you can watch above or listen here.

1. In his commentary on Parashat Mishpatim included in his book, נר לנתיבתי.