Love the stranger

Love the stranger is the Torah commandment Rabbi Kaplowitz uses to frame compassion toward Palestinians as a religious obligation, not merely a political preference. Its force in the novel lies in the tension between that inclusive ethical demand and his insistence that the settlement remain on its hill, even as he recognizes the damage its presence causes.

The Commandment as an Ethical Claim

In conversation with the narrator, Rabbi Kaplowitz affirms that compassion and forgiveness should extend especially to Palestinians, whom he identifies as strangers in the land. He grounds the claim in the Torah’s command to love the stranger and emphasizes its recurrence: the command appears thirty-six times. Repetition gives the principle weight in his argument. The stranger is not a marginal exception to religious concern; care for the outsider is a demand the tradition makes insistently.

The commandment enters a political conversation the narrator says is difficult to avoid in the country. Rather than treating compassion as a sentiment separate from political responsibility, Rabbi Kaplowitz applies it directly to the Palestinians’ circumstances. That move makes the rule a standard against which the actions of his own community must be judged.

Applied to Pisgat David

Rabbi Kaplowitz is the rabbi of Pisgat David. When the narrator challenges the settlement’s account of its location, he points out that Palestinian shepherds grazed sheep on the hillside and that the settlement cuts off three Palestinian villages from one another. He also accuses its residents of taking fields and water. The rabbi does not deny these charges: he agrees that such acts are crimes and that those responsible should be punished, and accepts that the situation is very hard for the settlement’s neighbors.

His response extends beyond conceding wrongdoing. He says that some members of his community despise their Palestinian neighbors, sometimes steal or harass them, and fail to show the compassion the Torah requires. He includes himself in the failure, acknowledging that he has not been an adequate rabbi to his people in this respect. The commandment thus turns inward as well as outward: it measures not only how Palestinians should be treated, but also the rabbi’s own leadership and the conduct of the community he serves.

Yet his admission does not resolve the political conflict. Rabbi Kaplowitz insists that his people must remain on the hill because, as he understands it, God commands their presence there. When the narrator presses him about what an alternative for Palestinians would mean, the rabbi says they cannot stay. He calls for generosity and open hands, and for finding a way to compensate them, but pairs those appeals with their exclusion from the land. The passage does not present the commandment as an easy solution; it makes visible the gap between professed care and the displacement his position accepts.

Hagar and Ishmael as a Precedent

To explain what he believes the community must do better, Rabbi Kaplowitz turns to Abraham and Sarah’s expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael. He describes their failure to provide enough food or water and says that God rescued Ishmael, and through him the Arab people, from the danger created by that expulsion. In the rabbi’s account, even revered ancestors can commit grave wrongs; religious inheritance does not make their treatment of an outsider a model to follow.

The comparison sharpens his appeal to the commandment. The lesson he draws is not that Palestinians may remain, which he explicitly rejects, but that those expelled must not be abandoned to harm and that the present community should act more generously than Abraham and Sarah did. That distinction reveals both the reach and the limit of his ethical reasoning: he recognizes a duty of care toward those made vulnerable, while preserving a political conclusion that denies them a place on the hill.

The Commandment Against the Background of War

The novel places this exchange within a broader landscape of moral responsibility for Palestinian lives. Charlie recalls hearing shots, Arabic commands over loudspeakers, and screams during the killings at Sabra and Chatila. His unit did not intervene while civilians were murdered; he describes soldiers waiting for orders that did not come. The episode gives stark narrative context to the difference between naming an obligation to protect vulnerable people and acting when they are in danger.

Charlie also recounts killing two ten-year-old boys in Lebanon after mistaking them for armed fighters. Before his service, his parents had told him to shoot if he believed his life was threatened, even without complete certainty, and to face the consequences together afterward. That advice supplies a competing imperative of self-preservation; the deaths and the account of his father’s subsequent anguish show what it cannot settle. Against these episodes, Love the stranger stands as an explicit religious demand to recognize outsiders as people owed compassion. The novel does not claim that the commandment by itself resolves the competing claims of security, land, and responsibility. Its dramatic and ethical significance comes from making the discrepancy between the command and the treatment of strangers impossible to overlook.