Sh'mot: From Names to Anomie, to Hearing the Name of God

 

What's in a name? Possibly, redemption.

"Names" is the literal translation of Sh'mot, the Hebrew name of the second book of the Bible (which readers in English call Exodus). That's because the book begins with the list of the names of all the Jews who went down to Egypt at the invitation of their family member, Joseph.

And then, for a good long while, no names appear in the text. The Jewish people are treated as a swarming mass. Even the Pharaoh who is afraid of their fertility and their numbers and therefore enslaves them is not called by his name, only by his title. 

Namelessness and despair

Why have the Jews, who were individual members of the family of Jacob and his four wives when they entered Egypt at the end of the book of Genesis, become an anonymous horde?

Possibly, it's just because there are so many of them. We are told that it was in Egypt that the Jewish people became a nation.

Possibly, it's that they lost their identities. Instead of being proud of their ancestors and the God they worshiped, the enslaved Israelites may have tried to assimilate into the Egyptian culture. Some rabbinic commentaries claim they stopped circumcising their male children! (Others insist on the opposite reading.)

Possibly, the anonymity is related to anomie. After generations of being treated as nothing more than slave laborers, the Jewish people might have accepted that this is all they could be, that they had no power to resist, and that nothing would ever change.

Where does the change begin?

Change begins with the resistance mounted by the Hebrew midwives. The Pharaoh has commanded them to keep newborn Jewish girls alive (as slaves? as future brides?) but to kill all the newborn Jewish boys. 

But the midwives shrug their shoulders. "Those Hebrew women--they give birth before we can even arrive!" 

Picture Pharoah's frustration. Picture the midwives' sly smiles.

And notice that the midwives, Shifra and Puah (may their memories be for a blessing!), are the first living people in the Book of Exodus who are identified by name. And they found the courage to resist.

Who else gets named in this Torah portion?

The next personal name we hear in Parshat Sh'mot is that of Moshe (to English readers, Moses). And all of a sudden, like he's wielding a Midas touch, everyone Moshe comes in contact with has a name. 

His wife, Tziporah. His first son, Gershom. His father-in-law, Yitro (Jethro). His brother, Aharon (Aaron). Eventually, but not in this parshah, his sister Miriam, his parents Amram and Yocheved, many other Jewish tribal leaders and followers. 

 

But most dramatically: in this parshah, God has a name. And it's a name that speaks of possibility.

14. And God said to Moses, "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh." God continued, "Thus shall you say to the Israelites, 'Ehyeh sent me to you.'"

This new name means, "I will be what I will be." (Or even, "I will become what I will become.") 

There are no limits to how God can appear in the lives of the enslaved Jewish people. So, there are no limits to their ability to be redeemed out of slavery, to become free, to resume becoming who they were supposed to become all along.

15. And God said further to Moses, "Thus shall you speak to the Israelites: The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you.

This shall be My name forever,

This my appellation for all eternity.

The new name by which God will be known links back to the names by which God knew their ancestors. The past becomes present, the present becomes possibility, and the future becomes imaginable again.

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I'm reading through Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's amazing commentary on the biblical Book of Exodus, The Particulars of Rapture. Each chapter expounds one of the portions we read in the synagogue weekly. It's slow going because it is so rich with insights. To keep on track, I will post at least one insight weekly between now and mid-March, when (God willing) I finish the book.

Joseph: Brat, Brother, Authoritarian, All Too Human

My teacher, Julius Lester, was appalled. "Joseph was not a brat," he stated.

It was the 1980's, and I had met Julius at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where (as a graduate student) I'd taken his course Blacks and Jews: A Study in Comparative Oppressions. 

But we were not in the classroom: we were at the synagogue where I taught, and he sometimes led services, and we were in the middle of the Torah discussion--sometime about this time of year. The Torah portion was part of the Joseph saga.

I never found out why Julius was so outraged at my statement about Joseph. Was it pure piety? Joseph was a man who could resist seduction by Potiphar's wife, who could interpret dreams and give all the credit for the interpretation to God. He could rise from prison to the palace, save the land of Egypt from starvation, rescue his family, and forgive them for having sold him into slavery. How could a man like that be less than a saint (or as we would say, a tzaddik)?

I don't know if that's why Julius was shocked at me. But here's why I thought Joseph was a brat.

The obnoxious little brother

Joseph was his father Jacob's favorite son--and he knew it.

 

Joseph's mother, Rachel, was the woman his father fell in love with and worked seven years to marry. The other women his father married were an afterthought. His father gave him the coat of many colors, a sign that Joseph was his designated heir.  

 

Then Joseph had two dreams that both signified he would someday rule over his whole family. Did he keep his dreams to himself? No. Did he tell his father privately? No. He told his whole family. How did he imagine his brothers were going to react?

 

The brat in power

Joseph seems to have had a blind spot for other people's emotions. Only if they had power over his life did he seem to care about them.  

 

* He refused to sleep with Potiphar's wife because of the loyalty he owed his master, not for any other stated reason. 

 

* He sucked up to Pharaoh's cupbearer in the prison to try to get himself out of jail, but once he was appointed to high office by Pharaoh, the cupbearer is never mentioned again. 

 

* True, he kept the people of Egypt from starvation, but the price they paid was turning over all their land and becoming serfs to Pharaoh. Can you say "authoritarian personality"?

 

A different way of understanding Joseph

Just this week, however, I learned a different way of looking at Joseph, one that makes me feel more sympathetic to him. (I give all the credit to participants in Rabbi Ruti Regan's #ParshaChat on Twitter.)

What if, instead of feeling superior as a child, Joseph just felt singled out?

It could not have been easy, being the youngest brother (because his mother had not yet given birth to Benjamin), and the half-brother of all these grown men, and being put on a pedestal by his father. Even if he sensed he had some kind of destiny awaiting him, he could not ignore the way it made his brothers hate him, right there, right then.

What if telling his dreams was not oblivious, not a power play, but a plea for understanding? 

It's not just Dad who thinks I'm special, he might be saying. It's not just me putting on airs. Look, there's a sign from God that I have a role to play. Can you please stop blaming me now?

But they can't. They throw him into a pit. Then, they sell him as a slave.

What Joseph learns, and what he never grasps

If this interpretation is right, it would explain why, in Egypt, Joseph takes care to attribute his dream-interpretations to God and not to himself. Raising yourself in other people's eyes is a dangerous business!

If this interpretation is correct, it would explain why Joseph takes an Egyptian name and an Egyptian wife and tries to forget the painful scenes with his family. He did everything he knew how to do to keep his father's love without incurring his brothers' hatred, and nothing worked. Now, as second to Pharaoh, he is competent and powerful.

If this interpretation holds water, it also contains new insights into why Joseph apparently torments his brothers when they come looking for food during a famine. Joseph may be testing them, to see if they've changed, but at the same time he is learning that he has changed, too. He has learned that other people have feelings too (especially Judah, who reveals his love for their father and his guilt for the way they treated Joseph in an eloquent speech). 

And he has learned there is an alternative to dominating or being dominated--and that is forgiveness.

Sadly, Joseph seems to have learned about forgiveness and love only in relation to his own family. He still wields power over the enslaved Egyptians in a way that foreshadows how the Egyptians will eventually exploit the enslaved Israelites. 

So, he is not entirely a brat, entirely a tzaddik, or entirely a reformed character who has learned from experience. Joseph is a complicated human being. That may be why, thousands of years later, we still read and reinterpret his story.

 

Three Things to Remember Now that We've Made Biden President-Elect

 

Three things we should all keep in mind this morning:

1. Count all the votes. Yes, still.

It's not a partisan issue. It doesn't matter if your candidate for President is winning or losing right now, or if the additional votes would help them or hurt them. It doesn't even matter if the final vote count won't change the results from the preliminary counts. It's your right, my right, everybody's right that when they cast their ballot, it matters. That says that every citizen matters. People have fought and died so that they could participate in democracy in this country. Count all the votes.

2. Remember the people who were excluded from voting this election.

Close to 1.5 million formerly incarcerated people in Florida who had served their time were given their voting rights back by a constitutional amendment passed by people who could already vote in that state in 2018. The Republican elected officials interpreted that law to mean the new voters were still out of luck unless they could pay all fines and court fees they owed: in some cases, thousands of dollars. Only about a quarter of them voted this year. And that is just one example of voter suppression in 2020.

Work to make sure everyone who's legally entitled to vote actually has the chance to do so, even in local elections, certainly in national ones.

3. Black women are owed.

 

I am seeing lots of kudos for Stacy Abrams for her heroic work getting voters registered in Georgia, which may yet be the state that tips Biden-Harris over the top into victory. She deserves them. Across this country, though, tens of thousands of Black women have been the spearhead of this campaign. They are owed more than thanks.

I remember a political theorist writing about thirty years ago that we should make every policy as if it were designed for a pregnant Black woman, and that would make sure we benefited everybody else. Time has proven that perspective too limited (what if the pregnant Black woman is also a lesbian? or an immigrant? or disabled?), but it makes a point.

Not only should Black women (and men) have a seat at the table. Everyone sitting there should be listening and finding out what they need.

Jews Aren't Perfect, and We Don't Have to Be

Lots of Christians are puzzled by Jews. I hear it from them in many ways. 

"What's your solution to sin?" a young woman asked my wife at a social gathering.

"Don't you want to go to heaven?" a child asked me when we were both in elementary school.

 

More recently, and at more length, I see Christians online propounding the proposition that Jews are trying to do something impossible: to live a perfect life. As they understand it, Jews are "under the Law" (their term for Torah, which actually means "Teaching" instead). 

To be "saved," they theorize, Jews have to live up to all 613 commandments in the Torah, all the time. Since no one can do that, they argue, we are playing a mug's game. We should accept Jesus and be saved by faith alone. This approach is summarized in the popular slogan, "Christians aren't perfect--just forgiven."

Aside from the fact that Judaism isn't about salvation from sin, or heaven and hell, all these formulations miss something very basic:

It is not at all impossible to live the way God wants us to live, according to Judaism. In fact, it's easy, if you try.

Learning from Psalm 15

I was reminded of this basic Jewish belief just this morning, when, as part of a worldwide program of Hebrew Bible study, I read Psalm 15. At first glance, the psalm seems to set an extremely high standard.   

1. A psalm of David. LORD, who may sojourn in Your tent, who may dwell on Your holy mountain? 

2. He who lives without blame, who does what is right, and in his heart acknowledges the truth; 

3. whose tongue is not given to evil; who has never done harm to his fellow, or borne reproach for [his acts toward] his neighbor; 

4. for whom a contemptible man is abhorrent, but who honors those who fear the LORD; who stands by his oath even to his hurt; 

5.who has never lent money at interest, or accepted a bribe against the innocent. The man who acts thus shall never be shaken.

In fact, as Rabbi Yaakov Bieler points out, at least one rabbi around the time of Jesus looked upon these works, so mighty, and despaired. But another one cheered him up.

When R. Gamliel would read this text, he would be reduced to tears. He said: Who is capable of doing all these things? However, when R. Akiva read these verses, he would laugh. 
Gamliel asked him: Why are you laughing?

He said to him: See what the Torah says concerning “swarming things:” (Leviticus 11:43) “You shall not draw abomination upon yourselves through everything that swarms, you shall not make yourselves ritually impure therewith....” One might think that one doesn’t become ritually impure until he is contaminated by all of the various types of swarming things. Yet if an individual comes into contact with a single bean-size swarming thing, he is deemed ritually impure.

 

God’s desire to do good is 500 times greater than his inclination to punish. If touching a single bean-size swarming thing is considered equivalent to having had contact with all of them, doesn’t it logically follow that if a person does a single aspect of one of the commandments listed in Psalm 15, he will be considered as if he has carried them all out? (Yalkut Shimoni, #665)

Gamliel said to R. Akiva: You have comforted me. You have comforted me. 

 

So I say to all my Christian friends who are worried about the state of my soul, because I am "under the Law" which is supposedly so hard to fulfill: cheer up! Even if I believed in the kind of vengeful God who would send me to hell forever for doing the wrong things--the New Testament God--it is very easy to do enough of the right things to win God's forgiveness.

Jews aren't perfect, and we don't have to be. 

(Psst: we don't think you need to be, either. With or without Jesus. We can disagree about this, but realize that if we actually believed the same things as you about God, we would be Christians. The differences are real.)

 

Before and after you read Halakhah, by Chaim Saiman: what should you know? What will you learn?

I have written in glowing terms about the book  Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, by Chaim Saiman. It's a novel explanation of an important topic, and the author writes well. But it is still not easy going.

If you plan to read it (and I hope you do!), think about acquainting yourself with these terms first:

1. Torah
2. Rabbi
3. Mishnah
4. Gemarah
5. Talmud
6. Midrash
7. Halakhah
8. Aggadah
9. Shulchan Aruch
10. Responsa

The Judaism 101 and My Jewish Learning websites would be good places to start.

And here's your reward: in addition to being able to follow Saiman's ingenious arguments and examples, you'll learn about topics like the following!

• The way that Jewish interpretation of text changed from Talmudic times through the early and late medieval periods and into the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
• How Ashkenazi Jews thought and wrote about halakhah differently from Sephardi Jews.
• Quick sketches of major thinkers like Maimonides, Nahmanides, and the sages known as the Rif, the Ran, the Tur, and the Brisker.
• The difference between Talmud, codes of law, and responses to particular questions (and the way that all those differences can get blurred sometimes by creative interpretation).

Honestly, you could spend years of study just following up the introductions that Saiman gives you in this book. But if you only read this book, you'll get a road map that you never had before.