A war rages within me – whether to address current events or lift our gaze beyond them. As Shabbat approaches, it's important to connect with the deep currents propelling us through history. We are an eternal people. The present is merely one segment in a long continuum where members of this ancient nation wrestle with God and humanity in the valley of death of nations and peoples, through war, destruction, and redemption.
This is how God introduces himself to Moses at the beginning of Exodus, instructing him to tell the enslaved people who sent him: "I will be what I will be," or in short: "I will be has sent me to you" (Exodus 3:14). Not a distant philosophical deity belonging to the past, but one who reveals himself in historical time and shapes the future.
Last Shabbat we completed our nation's foundational book, with Jacob's extended family settling in Egyptian exile. When the nation's founder, Abraham, asked how he would know that he would inherit the promised land, he was answered with a covenant between the pieces and a vision: "Know with certainty that your offspring will be strangers in a land not their own, and they will be enslaved and oppressed."
Individuals don't inherit land – that requires a people who will establish a political entity – a kingdom or state – to assert sovereignty over the land and pass it down to future generations.
And so, to transform individuals into a nation, the embryo of the Hebrew Nation grew in the womb of the Egyptian empire. At the end of this process, it would emerge through terrible birth pangs, in blood, fire and pillars of smoke. This process was dialectical because it carried the terrible danger of assimilation and disappearance from history, as happened to other peoples exiled from their land. Not so for the people of Israel. Our dispersion among nations brought national dormancy and focused on cultural and religious elements, but over time, the national core grows and strengthens in secret, even if it doesn't flood public consciousness.
When the nationalism of host nations awakens, it triggers two processes: The nationalist component stirs antisemitism that causes rejection of Jews in various terrible ways: a ruler arises who knew not Joseph; he enslaves or expels us, and sometimes strikes and seeks to destroy us. Meanwhile, our dormant nationalism awakens within us.
Diaspora Jews don't always understand that the feelings stirring within them aren't just personal or religious, but rather the fruit of national spirit. It takes a push from intellectual, religious and political leadership, and suddenly a person rises and recognizes they belong to an ancient people not born under the whip as a mass of slaves, and awakens their brothers and sisters.
When I told my children the tale of Sleeping Beauty, who with one prick sent the entire kingdom into slumber, I thought of our people; when our heart was pierced on the mount and the Temple burned, our spirit fell asleep and the entire kingdom with it, and we fell into a two-thousand-year slumber. Until a prince came and awakened us with his kiss.
Not only was the nation swallowed in the Egyptian womb; the one destined to lead them from slavery was an almost perfect Egyptian, so much so that Sigmund Freud decided he wasn't actually one of our people. Moses, adopted by Pharaoh's daughter, had nearly assimilated into Egyptian culture. His talents were no less than Joseph's, and presumably destined him for leadership. Not only did the Hebrew slaves learn statecraft while swallowed by Egypt, Moses especially received the finest education of his time and, being of the royal family, learned governance, law and society up close, which he passed on to his people with necessary modifications.
"And it came to pass in those days, when Moses had grown up, that he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens" (Exodus 2:11). On the surface, "his brethren" refers to the Hebrews. So wrote Nachmanides (13th century): "For they told him he was Jewish, and he wanted to see them because they were his brothers." But Abraham ibn Ezra (12th century) wrote that Moses went out to "his Egyptian brothers, for he was in the king's palace." In other words, he went to observe the kingdom's order. So who is right? Apparently at this stage of his life, Moses wasn't sure of his national identity – Egyptian or Hebrew – a common problem among Jews in exile to this day.
What pushes him into his people's arms? "He saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man, one of his brethren" (ibid). At the sight of the Egyptian taskmaster beating and humiliating the Hebrew slave, his consciousness clarifies and he chooses the Hebrew slave, "of his brethren." This is his people. At that moment, he divorces Egypt: "He looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he smote the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand" (ibid 2:12). "No man" doesn't just mean "no one saw him"; we know people saw. "No man" means no one to demand justice for the people's insult, to feel their degradation and act for their salvation. Inspired by Moses, Hillel the Elder taught in the first century BCE: "In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man" (Ethics of the Fathers 2:5), meaning show leadership and guide the wayward to walk the straight path, as written in the commentary "Tiferet Israel."
More than three thousand years after Moses, in the depths of the longest exile, a Jewish journalist was sent from Vienna to France to cover the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely accused of treason. At this stage of his life, Theodor Herzl was less connected to his people's ancient identity. He had entertained solving the Jewish problem through mass conversion. Then he saw a French man striking a Hebrew man of his brethren, tearing off his ranks and breaking his sword, while the crowd cheered "Death to the Jews" and "Death to Judas Iscariot." Unlike Moses, Herzl couldn't save Dreyfus, but he decided to save the humiliated Jewish officer's people, to return them to their ancient homeland, where they would live in an independent Jewish state, free from the temporary grace of other nations. Interestingly, both leaders brought the people to the gates of the land, but didn't merit entering its gates.
Before the burning bush that was not consumed (Exodus 3:2), Moses accepts the mission to free the people. The bush symbolized the people's eternal existence, like the phoenix rising from its ashes. Even if tortured, drowned and burned in furnaces, they could not be destroyed, as Isaiah prophesied in the eighth century BCE: "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you; when you walk through fire, you shall not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon you" (Isaiah 43:2). If in Moses' time this was a promise, in Herzl's time it was historical fact. And still, the Jewish people faced the most terrible test of all later in that Century, and prevailed.
That promise to the first Hebrew and through him to his descendants was that even if we were swallowed in foreign lands and suffered mortal shame, it wouldn't be forever: "And in the fourth generation they shall return here" (Genesis 15:16). They must return, because the covenant between the pieces became a law engraved in history – that we would never disappear from the world stage and would always return home. Against all who rise against us in every generation, including today's evil emissaries, we are promised "Unto thy seed have I given this land" (ibid 15:18). We need patience. And faith.
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**My word of the year: Biblical**
When the massacre's scope became known, I wrote that we were in a Biblical event whose end who could foresee. Then we heard the mothers and fathers at their sons' graves, read the warriors' last wills, heard the battle orders and knew: a new chapter was being written in the Bible.
