Fellowship

Re'ut is fellowship. Fellowship is the essential relationship of civil society. 

The stranger is the one who does not qualify as a fellow. Treating the stranger as a fellow in the national context is the act of extending civil society to the national scale. 

To love your fellow as yourself is to define welfare in terms of the greater rather than the lesser person. It is to organize one's judgments around the happiness of civil society rather than around one’s individual welfare. 

To love the stranger as yourself is to extend civil society to the national identity. It is to incorporate xenia into the national self-definition. 

YHWH's Otherness is the basis for the incorporation of the other, be he one's fellow or one's stranger, into one's own calculus of action.