Is it good for Jews to interact with the non-Jewish community? For thousands of years the answer has been, frankly, no—it was NOT good for Jews to interact with the non-Jewish community. Our rabbis explain that some laws in the Torah—kashrut and shatnez to name just two—exist as a tool to keep us from developing relationships with our non-Jewish neighbors. If you can’t eat with a gentile and you can’t drink wine with a gentile you won’t marry a gentile, so the logic goes. The Talmud, moreover, declares that Jews should refrain from doing any sort of business with gentiles on their holidays, lest the passion of the holiday overtake the non-Jews and cause them to turn violent against the Jews. In fact, historically, ghettos originated as a walled-city to protect Jews from their non-Jewish neighbors. Only later did they become a tool of negative isolation. With few exceptions, the last 2000 years have shown that the Jewish-gentile relationship is strained at best.

In this week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach, Jacob returns, at God’s behest, to the Land of Israel. Jacob, however, is nervous because returning to the land means encountering his brother Esau, from whom he had “negotiated” nearly two decades earlier the birthright. Like Jacob, Esau has become the patriarch of a great clan. According to the Bible, Esau becomes the ancestor of the Edomites who sided with the Babylonians in destroying the First Temple in Jerusalem. For the rabbis, though, Edom is a code word for the Romans, who as pagans destroyed the Second Temple and who later became the Holy Roman Empire and a long-time persecutor of the Jewish people. Jacob goes to great lengths to protect himself and his family from Esau but ultimately the Torah tells us, “Esau ran to greet [Jacob]. He embraced him and, falling on his neck, he kissed him; and they wept” (Gen. 33:4). While the rabbis read Esau’s embrace not as a hug of loving affection but a football tackle followed by an attempt at Jacob’s throat, the plain meaning of the Torah text is that, simply, Esau and Jacob reconnected as distant family should-- first with a hug, and then with an acknowledgment that each should continue to go his own way. And, ultimately that is what Jacob and Esau do: they reconnect, meet each other’s family, and then agree to go their separate ways, each still somewhat tenuous of the other.

Is this then the paradigm for Jewish-gentile relations? A brotherly hug followed by each going his separate way? The Conservative movement puts it this way: “In the second half of the twentieth century (and now into the twenty-first), no relationship between Jews and Christians can be dignified or honest without facing up frankly to the centuries of prejudice, theological anathema, and persecution that have been thrust upon Jewish communities, culminating in the Shoah (Holocaust). No relationship can be nurtured between Jews and Muslims unless it acknowledges explicitly and seeks to combat the terrible social and political effects of Muslim hostility, as well as the disturbing but growing reaction of Jewish anti-Arabism in the Land of Israel … It is part of our mission (as Jews) to understand, respect, and live with the other nations of the world, to discern those truths in their cultures from which we can learn, and to share with them the truths that we have come to know” (Emet ve-Emunah, pg. 43-44).

Is it good for Jews to interact with the non-Jewish community? Absolutely, so long as it is done with understanding, respect, and awareness of the complexities of interreligious dialogue. Sometimes we are best going in our separate directions but, other times, a hug of reconciliation is long-overdue.