What does the Torah say about loving the stranger?

Exodus 22:20 states the command first in negative form: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus 19:34 restates it as a positive obligation, using language that deliberately echoes the more famous command a few verses earlier: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The ger in these verses — usually translated “stranger” or “sojourner” — referred in its plain biblical sense to a non-Israelite living among the Israelites, someone without the land inheritance or clan protection that gave native-born people security; later rabbinic tradition narrowed the term further to mean specifically a convert to Judaism. What distinguishes this command from most other Torah laws is its justification: rather than appealing to abstract fairness, both verses ground the obligation in a specific, shared memory — Israel knows exactly what it feels like to be a powerless outsider, because it was one in Egypt, and that memory is meant to produce empathy rather than mere compliance. Jewish tradition has long noted that some version of this command — protecting, not wronging, or loving the stranger — appears more times in the Torah than any other single commandment, including the command to love God. Rabbinic commentators have taken the sheer repetition itself as evidence of how easily this particular duty is neglected, and how central the Torah considers it to a just society: the test of a community's integrity is not how it treats its own members, who have leverage and belonging, but how it treats those with the least standing to demand it.