Hospitality without Guests
Dr Maayan Raveh
Hospitality begins with a distinction between inside and outside. The possibility of inviting someone in presupposes a domain of belonging and some authority in relation to it. This creates an initial asymmetry between those whose place within that domain is already established and those who enter it. Yet the arrival of the guest also changes this relationship. It creates claims upon the host, generates obligations, and places limits on how authority over the domain can be exercised. Hospitality therefore presupposes a boundary while simultaneously transforming what that boundary means.
Jacques Derrida locates this tension within the concept of hospitality itself. The possibility of hospitality presupposes a chez-soi: a domain within which the host possesses some capacity to receive the other or refuse entry. Yet the demand of hospitality is directed precisely at this mastery. Derrida’s distinction between the unconditional law of hospitality and the conditional laws through which hospitality becomes possible describes two demands that can neither be reconciled nor separated. Actual hospitality requires conditions, boundaries, and authority; the demand of hospitality continually exceeds the conditions through which we attempt to regulate it (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000; Derrida 2005). The threshold is therefore both the site at which the host’s authority becomes effective and the site at which that authority encounters its limit.
This raises a question that extends beyond the private relationship between host and guest. What happens when different claims to belonging meet within the same space? Who may define the boundary? What obligations fall upon those who exercise authority over it? And what changes when those on the other side of the boundary do not accept that their belonging depends upon someone else’s permission?
In the Israeli-Palestinian context, the parties do not ordinarily describe their relationship in terms of hosts and guests. Hospitality is useful here as an analytical lens rather than as a description of the language of the conflict itself. At times, discourses of rights, movement, residence, minorities, or recognition can implicitly treat the belonging of one group as more firmly established, while the belonging of another appears as something to be regulated, recognized, or justified. Such assumptions can emerge in different political and national traditions on both sides of the conflict. Hospitality makes visible a question within them: does the other’s belonging stand on its own, or is it recognized within a framework in which my own belonging has already been established as the point of departure?
The Shared Homeland Paradigm changes that point of departure. It combines two states and Israeli and Palestinian national self-determination with freedom of movement and residence, partnership, and equality. Its broader move is from separation to partnership: political and national distinctions remain meaningful within a homeland to which both peoples belong. For the purposes of hospitality, the crucial premise is that neither people’s belonging to the homeland derives from the permission of the other.
This gives rise to the question at the center of this entry: what remains of hospitality when both sides can say, “We are at home”?
Hospitality without Guests
The category of the guest becomes inadequate once both peoples are understood as belonging to the place. Israeli Jews and Palestinians need not become one another’s guests in order to be present in the homeland. Their forms of belonging can remain distinct—in language, memory, religion, institutions, national identity, and political self-determination—without either becoming the source of legitimacy for the other.
There is nevertheless something worth preserving in the concept of hospitality. Hospitality offers a way of thinking about a boundary that opens without disappearing. It presupposes a distinction between inside and outside while making the boundary itself a site of obligation toward the other. The question, then, is what can be retained from hospitality once we relinquish the assumption that one party is at home and the other arrives from outside.
Religious reflections on hospitality provide useful resources for thinking through this possibility. Jewish tradition accords hospitality an exceptionally high religious status while leaving many of its practical limits comparatively open to moral judgment. Islamic tradition offers a somewhat different configuration, in which the limits of hospitality are more explicitly articulated within the obligation itself. Neither requires openness to erase the domain from which hospitality is offered.
Hospitality, Obligation, and “Mine”
Hachnasat orchim, welcoming guests, occupies a striking place in rabbinic thought. It is counted among the deeds whose fruits a person enjoys in this world while their principal remains for the world to come (Mishnah Pe’ah 1:1). The Babylonian Talmud goes considerably further, declaring that “hospitality to guests is greater than receiving the Divine Presence” (BT Shabbat 127a).
The claim is developed through the rabbinic reading of Abraham in Genesis 18. Abraham turns his attention from the divine presence to the three figures approaching him. Rabbinic interpretation transforms this moment into an extraordinary statement about the religious significance of hospitality: attending to those who arrive at the threshold can take precedence even over remaining in the presence of God. Hospitality is therefore more than generosity. It becomes a religious response to the arrival of another.
Its prominence is particularly interesting when compared with the legal elaboration of other interpersonal obligations. Hachnasat orchim is a mitzvah and an important form of gemilut hasadim, yet it did not develop into a legal system comparable in detail to that surrounding tzedakah. Jewish law elaborates charity through questions of amounts, priorities, eligibility, collection, distribution, and communal institutions. Hospitality certainly acquired norms concerning the conduct of hosts and guests, but it remained more closely connected to interpersonal acts of hesed and to the encounter between the person who has a place and the person who arrives.
This distinction should not be understood as placing hospitality outside halakhah. Its religious obligation is clear. What is significant is the difference in the degree and form of codification. Hospitality makes a powerful claim upon the person who possesses a domain while leaving considerable space for judgment concerning the practical limits of that claim.
The home remains the host’s home, yet the fact that it is “mine” does not exhaust the moral question of what may happen at its threshold.
A related tension appears in Pirkei Avot. Among four dispositions toward property, the Mishnah describes one who says, “Mine is mine and yours is yours,” first as possessing an “average disposition,” before adding: “and some say, this is the disposition of Sodom” (Mishnah Avot 5:10).
The juxtaposition matters. “Mine is mine and yours is yours” can describe an ordinary and legitimate boundary: I make no claim upon what belongs to you and preserve what belongs to me. Yet the same formulation can become morally troubling. Obadiah of Bertinoro explains the second opinion through the refusal to allow another to benefit even where the owner suffers no loss. He connects this disposition to Sodom’s attempt to prevent wayfarers from entering despite the abundance of land available to its inhabitants (Bartenura on Avot 5:10).
The Mishnah therefore does not abolish “mine” and “yours.” It places the boundary between them under moral judgment. The question is not simply whether I may have a domain of my own, but what being “mine” permits me to do in relation to another.
This distinction is particularly useful for thinking about a shared homeland. Jewish and Palestinian belonging can remain real and distinct. Each can sustain language, memory, institutions, religious life, and forms of self-determination. Difference itself does not require the other’s authorization. The question arises when the boundary of that difference affects the other’s capacity to exercise a belonging of their own.
Put differently: difference does not require permission; its boundary is not immune from challenge.
A Boundary That Constitutes an Obligation
Islamic tradition offers a different reflection on the limits of hospitality. Ḍiyāfa, hospitality to the guest, is explicitly connected in the hadith literature with faith itself. The Prophet is reported to have said: “Whoever believes in God and the Last Day, let him honor his guest.” Honoring the guest is thus presented as a way in which belief becomes manifest in relations with another.
Yet the obligation appears together with limits. In a hadith transmitted from Abū Shurayḥ al-Khuzāʿī, the guest is entitled to particular honor for a day and a night, while hospitality extends for three days. What is given beyond this is ṣadaqa, charity. Other versions of the same report add a corresponding restriction upon the guest: the guest should not remain until his presence causes the host distress (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 6019, 6135; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1726).
The boundary here does not simply restrict the obligation. It gives the obligation form. The three days delineate ḍiyāfa. Once that period ends, responsibility toward the other does not disappear: further giving acquires another normative description, ṣadaqa. A temporal boundary therefore distinguishes different modes of responsibility without making the end of one category the end of obligation altogether.
The guest, moreover, also inhabits this normative structure. The command to honor the guest gives the guest a claim that is not reducible to the host’s spontaneous generosity. At the same time, it does not grant an unlimited claim upon the host. Hospitality places demands on both parties even though their positions are not symmetrical.
The relationship between hospitality and ṣadaqa is especially suggestive. Crossing the limit of hospitality does not produce a realm in which nothing more is owed or valued. Instead, the normative vocabulary changes. A boundary can distinguish between forms of obligation while allowing responsibility to continue across it.
This provides a somewhat different religious reflection from the Jewish sources considered above. Rabbinic hospitality combines an extraordinarily strong demand to receive the guest with considerable openness concerning the precise limits of that demand; the discussion of “mine and yours” then subjects the exercise of boundaries to moral scrutiny. The Islamic hadith gives hospitality a more explicit temporal form and shows how the boundary itself can organize different modes of responsibility. The two traditions need not be harmonized. They illuminate different possibilities within the relationship between belonging, limits, and obligation.
For a shared homeland, the latter possibility is particularly important. A boundary need not choose between protecting what lies within it and creating obligations toward what lies beyond it. It may define a domain of belonging while simultaneously generating responsibilities across it. The political question is therefore not only where a boundary should lie, but what we owe one another because that boundary exists.
Bounded Belonging
This brings us back to Derrida. The unconditional demand of hospitality and the conditional laws that make hospitality possible cannot be reconciled through a final formula. Every attempt to make hospitality concrete requires conditions, and every such condition remains exposed to a demand that exceeds it. Hospitality takes place within this tension rather than after its resolution.
A shared homeland relocates this tension. The central relationship is no longer between an established host and a guest seeking entry, but between forms of belonging that encounter one another. Each community may sustain real boundaries, institutions, memories, and forms of self-determination. Each also encounters claims generated by another belonging whose legitimacy does not derive from its own.
Recognizing that both peoples are at home therefore does not settle where the boundaries between their forms of belonging should lie. Nor does it determine what happens when those boundaries overlap. A boundary understood by one community as necessary for security, continuity, or self-determination may be experienced by another as exclusion. The same place may carry powerful and legitimate claims of memory, attachment, or holiness for both. The recognition of mutual belonging changes the starting point of such conflicts; it does not make them disappear.
This suggests a lexical reconstruction of hospitality:
Hospitality without guests is the practice of bounded belonging: sustaining forms of collective home that remain open to the claims of others without requiring the dissolution of difference.
The concept retains from hospitality the relationship between boundary and obligation while relinquishing the need to divide the parties in advance into host and guest. Belonging need not disappear in order to become open to another. Nor must the other become part of my community for their claim upon the way I exercise my belonging to have force.
This is a demanding form of hospitality precisely because neither party possesses the secure position of the permanent host. Each can say “this is mine,” but neither can make that statement the final answer to the other. The task is not to dissolve boundaries but to make their exercise responsive to claims that arise beyond them.
From Bridges to a Fence with a Gate
At this point we can return to one of the most familiar metaphors of dialogue and reconciliation: bridge-building.
The bridge is powerful because it allows us to imagine connection where there is distance. It joins two banks and makes movement between them possible. In the language of dialogue, it invites communities to overcome estrangement, encounter one another, and move toward one another.
For precisely this reason, however, it tells only part of the story. The bridge takes the two banks largely for granted and concentrates on connecting them. It tells us comparatively little about the boundaries that constitute the parties, about the value they attach to those boundaries, or about situations in which encounter itself requires the possibility of remaining distinct. When the problem is not only distance but different and sometimes overlapping claims to belonging, connection alone is not a sufficient metaphor.
This entry therefore proposes another image alongside the bridge: a fence with a gate.
The fence marks a distinction. It allows a community to say that there is a domain of belonging, identity, and authority that it seeks to sustain. The gate builds the possibility of crossing into the boundary itself. It does not erase the distinction; it makes openness to the other part of the way the boundary is constituted.
In this sense, the fence with a gate is not the opposite of the bridge. It shifts the focus. Instead of beginning with distance and asking how it might be overcome, it begins with the boundary and asks: what kind of boundary can sustain both belonging and openness?
The fence is not offered here as a constitutional blueprint, nor is it limited to the territorial border. It can describe political, communal, institutional, linguistic, religious, and normative boundaries. Its importance lies not in telling us where a boundary should run, but in allowing us to think about what a boundary means within a shared homeland.
Nor does the gate solve the aporia. It cannot tell us where the fence should stand, who has the authority to determine it, or what should happen when a boundary one community experiences as essential to its security is experienced by another as exclusion. It cannot resolve situations in which both communities say “mine” about the same place, institution, memory, or symbol.
The fence with a gate does not promise to abolish the contradiction. It gives the contradiction a form within which political and normative work can take place. Instead of assuming that the boundary has already been settled, or that connection has rendered it irrelevant, it returns us to the threshold. What does the boundary protect? Who bears its costs? What claims may cross it? Who may decide, and to whom must that decision be justified?
In this sense, the metaphor can be related to the principles of the Shared Homeland Paradigm without turning it into an institutional design.
Mutual self-determination allows each community to sustain distinct domains of language, institutions, memory, religious life, and authority. Difference itself does not require the other’s permission. The ways in which the boundaries of self-determination affect the other, however, remain open to the other’s claims.
Freedom of movement and residence introduces the gate into the fence. It makes it possible to sustain political boundaries and collective forms of belonging without turning them into a principle of complete separation.
Partnership and equality alter the status of the authority exercised through boundaries. They do not require every domain to be governed jointly. Where the boundaries of two forms of belonging meet, overlap, or conflict, however, neither community can make its own claim to belonging the sole and final source of authority.
This also clarifies why hospitality remains useful precisely when there are no guests. Classical hospitality begins with an asymmetry between those who are inside and those who arrive. Hospitality without Guests transfers the question to relations between two communities whose belonging does not depend upon permission they can grant one another. The other does not receive from me the right to be at home. Yet the other’s presence still places a claim upon the way I define the boundaries of my home.
A shared homeland therefore need not imagine a world without boundaries. It require boundaries that cannot declare themselves final simply because they are boundaries; forms of belonging that do not depend upon erasing the belonging of the other; and institutions capable of returning to the threshold when legitimate claims meet there.
The bridge allows us to imagine encounter. The fence with a gate adds the possibility of difference without separation, belonging without exclusivity, and openness without the dissolution of community.
No one needs to become a guest in order for the other to be at home. In a shared homeland, both communities can say, “We are at home.” Precisely for that reason, each must shape the boundaries of its home in ways that allow the other’s belonging to endure.