I have heard that in politics you are never supposed to publicly thank the staff for an idea. I neither work in politics nor have staff, but I would like to acknowledge that my wife, Emily, told me that I must deliver the following sermon during Sukkot. 

You see, Emily had never read The Odyssey, the classic Greek epic poem about Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his ten year journey to return home after the fall of troy. While some might have not read it in this room, Emily has read everything, she has an obscene amount of books from all over the world, and is a professor of poetry at Colgate. 

I discovered that she had never read it on our honeymoon in Greece when tour guides would make references left and right about physical landmarks or themes from the epic and she had no idea what they were talking about.

And because my wife makes her own epic journey every week to Colgate, she decided to rectify this by getting the odyssey on cd to listen in the car when she commutes. And of course, she accidentally checked out a series of 10 1-hour lectures about the odyssey…so she hasn’t actually read it yet, but fancies herself an expert and shared the following with me:

There was an ancient Greek custom of Xenia, the highly-regimented protocol of guest/host relations.

During the holiday of sukkot, we Jews also have a protocol of guest/host relations. We welcome friends, and family, and sometimes strangers into the sukkah to share a meal. We also invite ritually a spiritual guest for each day: traditionally Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and David.

This practice of welcoming spiritual guests goes back to a midrash about Abraham when he welcomed the angels into his tent before they told him of the upcoming miracle birth of Isaac. The midrash goes that it wasn’t a tent, it was a sukkah. Abraham was celebrating sukkot before it was cool and welcomed the angelic guests as part of his ritual.

Xenia is different than the Jewish version of welcoming guests, known as hakhnassat orhim.

Xenia consists of two basic rules:

1.The respect from host to guest. 

The host must be hospitable to the guest and provide him/her with food, drink, bath and gifts when they leave. It is not polite to ask questions until the guest has finished the meal provided to them. The host cannot ask the guest even their name until after they have eaten, because the host must welcome the guest completely and they might not want to if, say, they find out that the guest is related to a foe who murdered their relative in the Trojan war.

2.The respect from guest to host. 

The guest must be courteous to the host and not be a burden. The guest should also provide a gift if they have one.

The importance of welcoming guests in ancient Greek culture can be seen in the word “xenos”, which is a word with four meanings depending on the context: host, guest, stranger, friend.

This word shows the multidirectional importance of the welcoming ritual: both host and guest have a role to play in respecting each other, and a stranger becomes a friend the minute they step over the lintel.

It is an important theme in the Odyssey. Odysseus uses xenia as a way to judge whether or not a society is civilized. In the case of the cyclopes, instead of making his guests a meal, the cyclopes makes his guests into the meal.

It is hard in a world that isn’t ancient Greece to have a nameless guest show up at your door after a long battle or journey begging for hospitality, but that doesn’t mean that this type of hospitality is moot.

Xenia is really about fostering a paying it forward mentality in a society. Since a host might not necessarily need to be hosted by their guest in the future, its more about a society where people take care of each other. Where people are striving to turn strangers into friends.

A trope that appears in both Ancient Greek and Jewish folklore is the test about whether people will perform xenia or hakhnassat orhim, welcoming guests. The Greek gods, as well as Elijah the prophet, dress as beggars and show up at people’s houses or banquets looking for a place to stay or a bite to eat. 

I think these folk stories are acknowledging both the importance of welcoming a stranger and turning a stranger into a friend, as well as the reality that it is easier said than done. The best way to practice turning strangers into friends is to start with someone you already know.

This high holiday season, I had a number of people come up to me to apologize (all after Rabbi Mitch’s judge-a-holic sermon/sermon against judging people) for pre-judging me—consistently related to my gender, and sometimes also related to the fact that I happened to have married a fantastic woman, who is an expert in xenia.

This is not to shame them, on the contrary, in that moment, we both walked over the lintel together. In that moment, we both began to really know each other for the first time in the year and change I have been a part of the community. I think the more we know our closest neighbors the easier it is to extend that welcoming to those a little more distant.

That is why the rabbis teach us to welcome:

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and David, or if you prefer, Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca, Leah, Miriam, Abigail, and Esther.

The more we know those closest to us, the better we can serve those more distant. The more we know about our history, the better prepared we are for our future.