Love!

Did you know that one of the most frequently occurring commandments of Torah is to love the "stranger"? The commandment is repeated in various forms over 30 times in the Jewish Scriptures, for instance “You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD” (Lev. 19:18); “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God” (Lev. 19:34); “Love the stranger, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:19); “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 22:21); "When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong” (Lev. 19:33); “Do not oppress the stranger” (Zech. 7:10); “Cursed be anyone who perverts the justice due the stranger” (Deut. 24:19); “The stranger shall be as the native born children of Israel among you” (Ezek. 47:22), and so on. Clearly the LORD does not want people to feel ostracized, excluded, or otherwise left out of His providential and loving plans... Indeed, the message of the universal love of God is at the heart of the gospel itself, harkening back to God’s earliest promises to redeem humanity and restore paradise lost. “Religion,” tribalism, prejudice, ethnic pride, and so on, are anathema to the Kingdom of God. [Hebrew for Christians]