Sh’mot verses 1-22

Sh’mot,  this week’s portion, is a storytelling and exegetical bonanza – one of the most symbolically rich and emotive in contemporary Jewish life. After the familial broigues and reconciliations of Genesis, and the focus on human deviation from divine ideas of appropriate behaviour, Sh’mot heralds an arrival into the domain of worldly politics. 

Although 2024 is the secular new year, our Jewish life is of course tied up in practice with the material, social and political world around us.. The year looks set to bring a remarkable number of important nation-state elections. More than 60 countries representing half the world’s population will go to the ballot, for example: India’s legislative elections – the biggest democratic exercise in the world, Indonesia’s presidential election, even tiny North Macedonia, and perhaps our own. And the USA.

On reading Sh’mot I had a few thoughts on:

• The ways we see people deal with earthly power when it runs up against what they believe is right
• How useful Sh’mot can be, to think more openly about collectives and belongin.

First a little summary of Sh’mot: after a roll call of the tribes who’ve entered into Egypt, we hear about a ‘new Pharaoh who did not know Joseph’. This King of Egypt fears the Israelites but craftily sees the potential for labour exploitation, in the form of slavery. Pharoah also wants to kill all the Hebrew boy babies.

In the bit we didn’t read Moses is born, hidden by his Mum in the rushes of the Nile, found and adopted by Pharoah’s daughter, and lives an Egyptian life for a while. In self-exile in Midian (apparently Jordan or Saudi) after killing an Egyptian for their cruelty to Hebrews, he experiences the sounds and visions of God calling him, instructing him, to lead the Israelites out of Egypt to a Land flowing with Milk and Honey.  Even with miraculous signs and wonders, Moses is daunted – he finds it hard to speak publicly –  but Aaron, a good head of communications , steps in to support.  As the brothers attempt to put God’s plan into action, Pharoah remains not only intransigent to the Hebrews’ request for a holiday, but decides to make working life harder for the Israelites: from this point on, the slaves must gather their own straw for bricks. We leave Moses at the end of Sh’mot begging God to tell him why things have only got worse: “Why have you brought evil on this people? Why did you send me? Ever since I came to Pharoah to speak in your name, he has ill-treated this people, and you have done nothing to rescue your people.’ A feeling many of us who want to make change can identify with, that things have got worse before getting better.

What we’re faced with here is discrimination and persecution on the basis of an assigned group identity, and – however divinely inspired – earthly political advocacy for their liberation. Michael and I had a conversation this week about the importance of getting political communication right to secure the support of politicians, without diluting or betraying political realities. The human actors in Sh’mot squaring up to Pharoah have to address a tension between resistance to unjust, badly wielded power on the one hand, and how to negotiate with him. Our key lobbyists here may appear to be Moses and Aaron, but some feminist Torah commentators in particular explore roles of women in Sh’mot in refusing to comply with wily Pharoah. As well as Moses’ amazing sister Miriam who cannily brings in their birth mum to be the ‘wetnurse’ employed by Pharoah’s daughter to bring up Moses, there’s a very powerful moment when midwives Puah and Shiphrah go against Pharoah’s instruction to kill all Hebrew boy babies, because the two midwives, we are told, ‘fear God’. 

This appears to be a major act of defiance. But again, like Miriam, the midwives seem to use strategy and tactics in their resistance rather than grounding their non-compliance in obvious disobedience or challenge, or references to values of compassion, or their belief in God. The midwives in fact deploy an excuse of cultural difference to explain why they can’t kill the babies in their birthstools: ‘The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; they are robust, and give birth before the midwife arrives’, they say. 

A contemporary understanding I encountered in some online commentaries is that Sh’mot is the book where the Israelites become a fledgling nation. As ever with the word ‘nation’, I felt my inner sociologist’s alarm bells gently ringing. One key text is Benedict Anderson’s book, Imagined Communities – where he outlines the very modern invention of the idea of the ‘nation’ as a corollary of the development of European state power, and its generalisation across the world, often through colonialism. He points out that nations are huge acts of collective imagination facilitated by modern technology and often promoted by elites, as people who will never have met one another become national beings through shared everyday acts and symbols. It is likely the word ‘nation’ may have existed before this time, and English translation from Hebrew and Aramaic may have used it to describe a form of political collectivity.

But I wonder if we need to tread with care by thinking about the Hebrews as a nation in modern terms, and all that comes with it. There is very little in Sh’mot that necessarily suggests that the Hebrews or Egyptians see themselves as a nation in the way that political society has done so over the modern period.

It’s clear that in the telling that the Hebrews are a viciously exploited group, prohibited from leaving Egypt but also reviled and feared as a population threat by Pharoah. We don’t much hear about ordinary Egyptians, although we know people are employed as taskmasters and tax collectors who harass Israelites, and of course Moses murders an Egyptian who is mistreating a Hebrew. We have no easy way of knowing in Sh’mot how the difference between the two groups was marked and delineated other than through enslavement and discrimination. What marked the social distinction? Was it language? Was it dress and custom? How did they tell one another on the street? Did the difference become circular, as difference often does? 

Michael (Lomotey)l shared with me an excellent essay by Professor Lewis A Gordon, an Afro-Jewish academic. Gordon directly addresses the danger of a whitewashed and homogenised vision of the Exodus.  Those leaving Egypt were of course people of colour, he points out. He highlights how mainstream/hegemoni  Jewish institutions to this day often presume Jews of colour have ‘come to Judaism’ rather than acknowledging movement across in-out lines over time. In fact Jews are a creolised and mixed group, he says. And rather than an easy simplicity of two totally separate people, there are hidden links and ambiguities here. Firstly, Moses grows up in Egyptian high society – indeed, Pharoah’s own Egyptian daughter is happy to adopt a Hebrew child (and the Torah remarks that he is a most appealing baby!) Rather like George Eliot’s assimilated and socially privileged Daniel Deronda – a well-off Sephardi Jew in UK high society at a time when Ashkenazi Jews in the UK were considered socially unpalatable – Moses appears to be extremely well-integrated. In fact, sometimes Moses uses the term ‘this people’ in the Hebrew, rather than ‘my people’. 

 It is their sympathy for the marginalised population to which they are linked in part that kickstarts a stronger identification. There is something about Moses’ relative assimilation and links to Pharaoh that mark him out – initially – as a useful leader to lobby and advocate for the Hebrews with Pharaoh. As we have seen – it is not his verbal prowess.

And the midwives Puah and Shiphrah who we read about: some commentators point to a lack of complete clarity in the Torah Hebrew about what we would call the ethnicity of those midwives. Are they Hebrew midwives, or midwives to the Hebrews? Or like Moses, are they Egyptianised Hebrews? It seems fairly likely that across the two groups, culture was shared, and sometimes chromosomes too. I wonder if any Egyptians went with the Hebrews who left the region? I wonder if those became Hebrews? I wonder who stayed behind? I wonder if other people from other neighbouring lands – in what would now be Libya or Sudan – went along for the ride? We don’t know, but it’s a great counter-imaginary exercise to Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments. 

How Sh’mot is read and imagined, in other words, has always mattered and it matters now. It is used by some to express their own sense of victimhood alongside superiority, such as the Boers in South Africa in the 18th Century, and the first settlers in America, both escaping religious persecution in Europe, but bringing ill winds to indigenous communities and first nations. And Sh’mot can be read through an Ashkenazi or Euro-Sephardi lens as something ‘long, long ago’. The experience of enslavement, through colonialism is much more proximate or complicated, Gordon points out, for some groups of non-Ashkenazi Jews. But Sh’mot is also a text used to inspire resistance to racism and discrimination, and to claim a full place in society – as in African American struggles for full political and civil rights. Sh’mot is our first step towards Pesach, the Jewish festival of freedom. It is an invitation to explore, and challenge the dividing lines we sometimes use to define who is ‘really’ part of the Jewish collective, and what we mean when we say ‘our people’.

Reading: 

Prof Lewis A. Gordon (2021): Reflections on Racism, Oppression and Antisemitism. https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizing-modernities/afro-jewish-critique-liberation/