Pavel And The Tree Army

Heidi Smith Hyde
How are you a stranger?
Stranger things have happened.
Pavel and Anatoly feel like they don't quite belong. Jewish people are no strangers to being the stranger; Jews have a long history of living as outsiders in foreign lands. The ultimate example is the hundreds of years that the Jewish people spent in ancient Egypt as strangers and then slaves. But adversity can lead to empathy. The mitzvah ("commandment") of showing kindness to a stranger appears in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) a whopping 36 times, more than any other: "You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Leviticus 19:34). In other words, you've been in their shoes, so treat them as you would want to be treated.
Book Box 1