Pharaoh’s Willing Executioners (פרשת שמות)

In Parshat Shemot (פרשת שמות), we read that after the death of Joseph and his generation, “the sons of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and grew very vast, and the land was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7). As Bible translator Robert Alter notes, these terms (including the Hebrew word for land, ארץ, which also means earth) allude to the Creation story. In a fulfillment of God’s covenantal promise that Abraham will become “a great and mighty nation” (Genesis 18:18), Alter writes, “the Hebrews now exhibit the teeming fecundity of the natural world.”

It is precisely this teeming fecundity that so alarms Pharaoh:

And a new king arose over Egypt who knew not Joseph. And he said to his people, “Look, the people of the sons of Israel is more numerous and vaster than we. Come, let us be shrewd with them lest they multiply and then, should war occur, they will actually join our enemies and fight against us and go up from the land.”
(Exodus 1:8-10)

There is some debate about whether the words רַב וְעָצוּם מִמֶּנּוּ should be translated as more numerous and stronger than us, as Alter does, or too many and too strong for us, as Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, the 1917 JPS translation of the Bible, and Nehama Leibowitz do. The difference, it seems to me, is immaterial. Regardless of how we understand this phrase, Pharaoh’s antagonism toward the Jews clearly stems from a perceived demographic threat and from a perception of Jewish power.

Pharaoh’s paranoid fears find contemporary echoes in the slogan “Jews Will Not Replace Us” that far-right extremists chanted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. As the Anti-Defamation League explains: “The slogan is a reference to the popular white supremacist belief that the white race is in danger of extinction by a rising tide of non-whites who are controlled and manipulated by Jews.” This extremist “replacement theory” has fueled murderous acts of hatred around the world, including mass shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand in 2019.

Motivated by a similar conspiratorial belief, Pharaoh implemented a three-stage policy: first, he imposed a special tax on the Jews in the form of a corvée (forced labor); second, he directed the Jewish midwives Shifrah and Puah to kill all Jewish boys at birth; and third, when the midwives courageously foil his plan, “Pharaoh charged his whole people, saying, ‘Every boy that is born you shall fling into the Nile, and every girl you shall let live’” (Exodus 1:22).

Why does Pharaoh need to “be shrewd”? He was the most powerful ruler in the ancient world. Why not declare open war on the Jews from the outset and destroy them immediately? Summarizing Nachmanides, Leibowitz suggests three reasons: first, Pharaoh needed a pretext to ruthlessly exterminate an entire people, especially one that came to Egypt at the bidding of his predecessor; second, his own subjects would not agree; and third, it would have meant risking an unnecessary confrontation with a strong people. For these reasons, Nachmanides argued, Pharaoh shrewdly formulated his three-stage policy.

Leibowitz writes: “The originality of Ramban’s interpretation lies in his explanation of this command [to kill every male Jewish child]. The text states that Pharaoh commanded ‘all his people’ rather than ‘his princes and servants.’ This was not therefore an official royal edict, but behind-the-scenes provocation. The government gave no order but merely closed its eyes whilst the Egyptian masses ‘spontaneously’ vented their indignation on the foreigners.” Today, too, powerful leaders close their eyes to nativism and xenophobia. But there is a problem with Leibowitz’s interpretation. How do we square it with her earlier suggestion that Pharaoh’s own subjects would not agree to genocide? “He could not suddenly order the indiscriminate slaughter of persons,” she writes, “who had been good neighbors for so long.” (Leibowitz is probably thinking here of Exodus 3:22.)

So what was the provocation that induced Pharaoh’s people to become his willing executioners—so willing that (according to Nachmanides) they searched Jewish homes to take children from there, and things eventually got so out of hand that Pharaoh had to suspend the decree? Perhaps it was Pharaoh’s propaganda depicting them as lazy idlers (Exodus 5:17), but that hardly seems sufficient. Nor can it be the resistance of Shifrah and Puah because Pharaoh arranges things so that he cannot be implicated in the actions he commands them to do. (“Who,” Leibowitz asks, “would be able or dare to point an accusing finger at Pharaoh?”) The answer, I suspect, lies in Joseph’s actions in Parshat Vayigash (Genesis 44:18 - 47:27). In that portion, Egypt’s peasants offered their land and themselves for some of the grain that Joseph had the foresight to stockpile. Joseph accepts, and they consequently become a class of landless, enslaved sharecroppers for Pharaoh. The peasants, we read there, are grateful to be kept alive. But, as I have written elsewhere, it seems likely that their gratitude would eventually turn to resentment, directed not at Pharaoh but at Joseph and his people. A new king in Egypt could easily exploit such resentment.

Moses the Marginal Man (פרשת שמות)

The marginal man ... is one whom fate has condemned to live in two societies and in two not merely different but antagonistic cultures.

Robert E. Park

Why did השם choose Moses to take the Jewish people out of Egypt? What made Moses especially suited for this undertaking? Perhaps Moses was best qualified for this task because he was what the sociologist Robert Park called a “marginal man.”

For Park, the “marginal man” was a distinctive personality type produced by contact and communication between peoples. He was a “cultural hybrid, a man living and sharing intimately in the cultural life and traditions of two distinct peoples; never quite willing to break, even if he were permitted to do so, with his past and his traditions, and not quite accepted, because of racial prejudice, in the new society in which he now sought to find a place. He was a man on the margin of two cultures and two societies, which never completely interpenetrated and fused.” In his 1928 article “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” Park identified the Jew in the modern era, “when … the walls of the medieval ghetto were torn down and [he] was permitted to participate in the cultural life of the peoples among whom he lived,” as the marginal man par excellence.

In this week’s portion, Moses appears as just such a marginal man. He is Jewish, descended from Levi (Ex. 2:1), but cut off from his people when his mother places him in a basket afloat in the Nile. This is a highly symbolic act. As Robert Alter notes, “Egypt is associated with water, almost everything there being linked with its central waterway, the Nile,” which is “an Egyptian deity, as Rashi notes, and the very source of life in Egypt.” Pharaoh’s daughter finds the baby and gives him the name Moses, “for I drew him from the water” (Ex. 2.10), again symbolizing his immersion in Egyptian culture and society. Indeed, the boy Moses grows up in an Egyptian household as a son to Pharaoh’s daughter (Ex. 2:10). However, as befits Park’s notion of the marginal man, Moses doesn't break with his Jewish past: he “went out to his brethren and saw their burdens” (Ex. 2:11). This means, according to Rashi, that Moses did not merely observe but “directed his eyes and heart to share their distress.” And when Moses sees “a Hebrew man, of his brethren,” struck by an Egyptian taskmaster, he leaps to the defense of the Jewish slave with deadly force (Ex. 2:11-12). As a result of this act, Moses finds that he is no longer accepted in the Egyptian society in which he was raised: “Pharaoh heard about this matter and sought to kill Moses” (Ex. 2: 15). As this conflicted upbringing demonstrates, Moses was “a stranger in a strange land” (Ex. 2:22) even before he left Egypt.

While Moses certainly fits the profile of the marginal man, how did this prepare him to take the Jewish people out of out of Egypt? Robert Park suggests that the marginal man is characterized by two related personality traits: he is both “enlightened” and “emancipated.” The marginal man is enlightened insofar as “he learns to look upon the world in which he was born and bred” with less prejudice and more objectivity. He is emancipated insofar as “energies that were formerly controlled by custom and tradition are released…. [H]e is not bound as others are by the local proprieties and conventions.” In contrast to Moses, both the Egyptians and the Jews were bound by customary modes of action and thought. While the Egyptians were unable to see the injustice of their ways, the slave mentality of the Jews deprived them of the courage to resist injustice. As a marginal man, Moses was liberated from both constraints. His ties to the Jewish people freed him to “see” the injustice of their burdens (Ex. 2:11), while his princely Egyptian upbringing (as Ibn Ezra pointed out) gave him the courage that Jewish slaves lacked.

These leadership qualities are most evident when Moses flees from Egypt into the wilderness (Ex. 2:15), undertaking on a personal level what he must later lead his brethren to do collectively. The wilderness, as Robert Alter notes, is a “liminal space” between Egypt and the Promised Land, “where freedom will be realized and new obligations incurred.” Moses does not fear to journey into this symbolic space. Indeed, herding the sheep of his newly acquired father-in-law Jethro, Moses “led the flock to the farthest end of the wilderness” (אחר המדבר) until he arrived “at the Mountain of God, toward Horeb” (Ex. 3:1). Horeb, as Ibn Ezra noted, means “dryness” or “parched place”; it is thus the antithesis of watery Egypt. Here in the wilderness Moses is free from the fear of Pharaoh’s death sentence, which was a reiteration of Pharaoh's previous genocidal order to drown every Jewish son in the Nile (Ex. 1:22), and Moses incurs new obligations (“you shall take My people, the Children of Israel, out of Egypt”), prefiguring the receiving of the Torah by the Jewish people.

When an astonished Moses asks, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should take the Children of Israel out of Egypt,” השם answers cryptically, “this is the sign” (זה–לך האות). To what does זה (“this”) refer? Perhaps to the marginality that has brought Moses to Horeb and prepared him for the task ahead.