It is always melancholy after the passing of a great writer, like that, last week, of Toni Morrison. But it is also a message to read or re-read their works, and I have been doing so this week. I’m sort of a non-fiction guy, and will get around to re-reading Beloved, promise. But I just finished one of her last volumes, The Origin of Others, a group of lectures published in 2017. Already the stench of the person occupying the highest office in the land was pervading our conversations, and, despite our best efforts to ward him off, infiltrating and (dare I use the word?) invading our thoughts. Let me quote Morrison, describing the contents of a novel, not one of hers:

It is a disturbing encounter that may help us deal with the destabilizing pressures and forces of the transglobal tread of people. Pressures that can make us cling maniacally to our own cultures, languages, while dismissing others; make us rank evil according to the fashion of the day; make us legislate, expel, conform, purge and pledge allegiance to ghosts and fantasy. Most of all, these pressures can make us deny the foreigner in ourselves and make us resist unto the death the commonness of humanity.

“The foreigner in ourselves.” What does that mean? In Torah and Tanach, there are few admonitions as oft repeated as the injunction, as in last week’s parsha to “decide justly between any man and a fellow Israelite or stranger.” (Deut. 1: 15.) To treat anyone justly, you cannot fear them. And you cannot fear them because they are a stranger, because you too have been, like Moses’s son Gershom, a stranger in a strange land, and you likely will be again. The stranger is not only your brother and sister. The stranger is yourself.

It’s difficult to read of all the wars and massacres that the Israelites meted out on their enemies as they conquered the promised land. I always keep two things in mind. First, most biblical scholars and archeologists argue that the Israelite conquest of the Holy Land never happened. Second, what the Tanach described was just the way the world worked back them. Peoples migrated, took over territories, and then someone tried to take over your land, and they often succeeded. The Israelites defeated the Canaanites, the Assyrians and then the Babylonians defeated the Israelites. God’s message: stuff happens.

For over two millennia, national borders were porous. The Roman Empire was overthrown by migrating tribes of peoples from Central Asia, who also went in the other direction and overthrew the Han dynasty in China. The Angles and the Saxons settled in England, Arabian tribes spread Islam, the Vikings settled in Normandy, Sicily, and Ireland, the Magyars and the Rus came to Eastern Europe, and Genghis  Khan and Tamerlane established dynasties in the Middle East. (And the Jews, too few in number to conquer anyone, just moved around a lot.)

But eventually, by the 18^th and 19^th centuries borders became easier to defend and nations, their territory more secure, and their population became more fixed. Nationalism became a celebration of the people living within a country’s borders, or living within the borders that some people thought a country should have. (Let us leave aside, for the moment, the imperial conquests of the European powers, and stipulate that the creation of Israel and Zionism doesn’t fit this pattern.) The migrations of people continued, but, for the most they came not as conquerors but as suppliants, as migrants, humbly seeking rather than demanding admittance, and often as refugees, bringing nothing but themselves. They now came, not as invaders, but as the “tired and the poor” (but as the person in charge of American immigration policy said the other day, please only poor Europeans, and only poor people with a lot of money.) Let’s move the Statue of Liberty to El Paso.

We are now going through a heighted wave of nativism, the third such in our nation’s history, the first that has the president of the United States as its wretched cheerleader and instigator. His goal is to inflict as much pain and suffering on immigrants as possible, whatever their status, supposedly to discourage them from coming, or staying, but really just to inflict pain and suffering, because he gets a sadistic glee in watching people suffer, and he knows that there are millions of Americans just like him. And then just wait for the occasional fanatic who thinks the administration is not getting rid of persons of Central American descent quickly enough and starts to murder them in department stores.

There is a psychological and spiritual dimension to all of this. Anti-immigrant haters are afraid of the bit of foreignness in their souls, and wish to rid themselves of all internal dissonance about who they are. They look to immigrants, and those who look like immigrants as vessels into which they can place all of their fears, disappointments, and rages about their lives and their worries about their status and future. They can only feel secure by depriving others of their security.

What is to be done? I don’t know to exorcize the malign ghosts that haunt America today. It lies too deep in the bone for easy answers. I know that this fear of foreignness cannot be rationally argued with. It must be defeated and cannot be accommodated. No compromise with evil. There is no “crisis” at the border. The only crisis is that innocent people are being abused as the targets of other people’s darkest fears. There is no alternative but to recognize the stranger and foreigner in ourselves, and somehow, perhaps by being resolute, getting others to recognize this as well. This problem did not begin with the current president, and will not end on that glorious day when he vacates his office. All I can say is that the good people of the United States have defeated nativism in the past, and the good people in the United States will defeat nativism again, and once again live in a country which is not defined by the imperviousness of its borders. But those are political solutions. To deal with the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the current crisis, one thing to do is to read authors who expand our minds, and makes us more sensitive to ourselves and to others. Like Toni Morrison. Let me give her the last word:

There are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from. For the stranger is not foreign, she is random, not alien but remembered; and it is the randomness of the encounter with the already known —although unacknowledged—selves that summon a ripple of alarm. That makes us reject the figure and the emotion it provokes—especially when these emotions are profound. It is also what makes us want to own, govern, and administrate the Other.