Beshallach Drash
Rabbi Lauren Henderson, Mishkan Chicago
Parshat Beshalach, January 26, 2018
We’ve reached the moment in Torah where the Israelites finally leave Egypt. And while it’s true that Moses and the plagues wore Pharaoh down to the point where he said, “Go, get out here,” the Israelites still had to choose to liberate themselves. .
As people who have been told their entire lives that they have no value, they’re only worth what they can build or produce - to finally realize: I’m a human being! I can take control over my life! - this is a pretty miraculous moment.
But not every former slave who left Egypt could make the shift that quickly, from slave to human being. When the Israelites make it to the edge of the sea, with Pharaoh’s chariots at their backs, it gets real. A bunch of them cry out, Were there not enough graves in Egypt, that you brought us out here to die in the desert?!? [clearly the uniquely Jewish blend of humor and guilt was created very early on.]
They’d rather go back to Egypt and have rations and a regular schedule while enduring back-breaking labor than face the dangers of freedom. They say: “Just leave us alone, let us be slaves for the Egyptians, because it’s better for us to serve them than to die right here in the wilderness.”
And my heart just breaks for them. It must have been so scary to not know what was next. To have choice for the first time in their lives. And it reminds you that no one leaves their home, even if it means staying enslaved in a place like Egypt, until the circumstances get so horrible and so violent that you have no other choice. As the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire, writes:
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city
running as well...
you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.
The Israelites ultimately left Egypt for the desert out of some sheer, maybe reckless faith that they were more than slaves - that they were human beings, who deserved a better life.
Look at the news, and you’ll see group after group of people who have been told for decades or even centuries that they’re less than human, now rising up and saying - we are more. Tonight, I want to tell you about one current story that’s gained momentum recently, which is the case of African asylum seekers right now in Israel.
My first time in Israel was when I went on Birthright, as a 20 year old college sophomore. I had been taking a class the whole semester before where the professor was trying to wake us all up to the realities of the occupation, and my head was swirling trying to take it all in. Was Israel good, or evil? I was immediately suspicious of any attempt on my Birthright trip to sugarcoat Israel’s history. But I remember, on one of the final days of the trip, getting to Independence Hall, listening to the recording of David ben Gurion declare Israel’s independence, and feeling this surge of pride and gratitude. As someone who didn’t grow up around a lot of Jews, and I didn’t feel yet that this place was MY home, but I knew that it was the first safe home so many Jews had ever known. This was a place that stood for the REhumanizing of the Jewish body and spirit. A place that told us that we didn’t deserve all the horrible treatment we’d been given. A place where Jews could finally create a better home for ourselves and others.
But even by 1959, just over 10 years after the founding of the state of Israel, people began to realize that the dream of a Jewish state that was synonymous with the Jewish values of welcoming the stranger wasn’t an inevitable reality. Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, a major American Orthodox rabbi of the mid-20th century, wrote in that year,
“The pages of history are bloody with the acts of European society. Judaism is not better because we are better than them but because we never had to face the challenge. A private person cannot do the injustices that can be done by a state...Now that we have a Jewish state, will we act ethically? Will we refrain from injustices, or immoral practices?”
Right now, Israel, like America, is in a national conversation about what it means to be Israeli, and who has a right to live within its borders. For the past decade, refugees have been fleeing forced military conscription and ethnic cleansing in South Sudan and Eritrea. Many fled on foot into neighboring countries like Chad, then made their way into Egypt, where many became victims of human trafficking, rape, and murder. Of the ones who survived the journey, many of these asylum seekers have found their way into Israel - for them, the promised land. A place that represented democracy and a safe haven, as it had for so many Jews.
But last month, Israel’s government issued orders of deportation against the 38,000 African asylum seekers living there. They have been told that they have two options: be deported to Rwanda or Uganda, or we will jail you indefinitely. It’s an order that is fueled by dehumanizing rhetoric: even in official government paperwork, these people aren’t referred to as asylum seekers - they’re called infiltrators, migrants, not recognized as people who were fleeing persecution in their home countries, who have nowhere else to go. Over 99% of their claims for asylum haven’t even been processed, even though in other nations, the majority of refugees from Eritrea and Sudan have had their refugee status recognized.
Last time we met for Shabbat, Rabbi Lizzi spoke about how words have power - how even as we see truth fading and words being thrown around as meaningless, it’s our job to reassert that the words we choose matter. And I want to underscore this point: The capacity for humans to harm other human beings only becomes possible when we dehumanize one another, which starts with words. Michelle Maiese, professor of philosophy, defines dehumanization as: “the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment.” We start with an enemy image, which we paint as morally inferior - those people are money grubbing, criminals, rapists - and once we see those on the other side as dangerous and even sub-human, we can justify any number of atrocities against them. It creates moral exclusion - where the targeted group eventually falls out of the scope of who is naturally protected by our moral code.
Here is an outrageous recent example of this: Last Thursday, an Eritrean refugee named Emanuel Yemani was interviewed on Israeli television about his experience going to the Ministry of the Interior in B’nei Brak to renew his visa. He sat in front of the clerk and gave him his visa and a letter from his lawyer, and the clerk said to him, “So, I don’t want to take this declaration from you, because next week, we’re going to fly you away from here. Go sit underneath a tree, open your mouth, and wait for the bananas to fall in.”
And Emanuel, astounded but composed, responded: Chaver, friend - Ani benadam. I’m a human being. And the clerk said, “Don’t you see yourselves? You look like monkeys.”
While I know that not every Israeli bureaucrat is this callous or racist, the fact remains that when Emanuel Yemani went to lodge his complaint with the manager of the department - he was fined, thrown out by force, and had his temporary visa revoked. What we see as the worst of Jewish moral failure on an individual level ends up being reflected in policy.
But bureaucrats like this don’t represent all Israelis. Thousands of Israelis have been in the streets, writing letters and op-eds and social media posts protesting these deportations, including Holocaust survivors, rabbis, and El-Al pilots. Iddo Elad, one of the pilots who publicized his disapproval of the plan, wrote on Facebook, “I will not fly refugees to their deaths. I will not participate in barbarism.”
If we’ve learned anything from Torah and from thousands of years of Jewish history, it’s this: Our work as Jews is to rehumanize the Other. We feel it in our bones, every time another group of people is referred to in any way as less than a full human being. Our own human dignity is offended, regardless of who the target of that dehumanization is. That’s what it means to be a Jew!
On Wednesday next week, a number of rabbis here in Chicago are heading to the Israeli consulate to share our perspective because we haven’t yet given up on the idea of Israel as a light unto the nations. For me, every time Israeli doesn’t live up to this vision, it hurts - and I want to hold myself, and us, accountable to not say it’s a lost cause, but to engage even more. To not get cynical. Rav Soloveitchik wrote almost 60 years ago:
“If the state does not live up to our ethical values, then the entire past 2000 years, the entirety of Jewish history will be reinterpreted in a different light. It will prove to the world that Jews are not better and only did not act wickedly because they did not have a chance.”
I want to bless us tonight with the courage to find our place in this conversation, as Jews, shaping a Judaism whose core message is one of love, human dignity, and faith in the possibility of a redeemed world, against all odds. Shabbat shalom.
Parshat Beshalach, January 26, 2018
We’ve reached the moment in Torah where the Israelites finally leave Egypt. And while it’s true that Moses and the plagues wore Pharaoh down to the point where he said, “Go, get out here,” the Israelites still had to choose to liberate themselves. .
As people who have been told their entire lives that they have no value, they’re only worth what they can build or produce - to finally realize: I’m a human being! I can take control over my life! - this is a pretty miraculous moment.
But not every former slave who left Egypt could make the shift that quickly, from slave to human being. When the Israelites make it to the edge of the sea, with Pharaoh’s chariots at their backs, it gets real. A bunch of them cry out, Were there not enough graves in Egypt, that you brought us out here to die in the desert?!? [clearly the uniquely Jewish blend of humor and guilt was created very early on.]
They’d rather go back to Egypt and have rations and a regular schedule while enduring back-breaking labor than face the dangers of freedom. They say: “Just leave us alone, let us be slaves for the Egyptians, because it’s better for us to serve them than to die right here in the wilderness.”
And my heart just breaks for them. It must have been so scary to not know what was next. To have choice for the first time in their lives. And it reminds you that no one leaves their home, even if it means staying enslaved in a place like Egypt, until the circumstances get so horrible and so violent that you have no other choice. As the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire, writes:
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city
running as well...
you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.
The Israelites ultimately left Egypt for the desert out of some sheer, maybe reckless faith that they were more than slaves - that they were human beings, who deserved a better life.
Look at the news, and you’ll see group after group of people who have been told for decades or even centuries that they’re less than human, now rising up and saying - we are more. Tonight, I want to tell you about one current story that’s gained momentum recently, which is the case of African asylum seekers right now in Israel.
My first time in Israel was when I went on Birthright, as a 20 year old college sophomore. I had been taking a class the whole semester before where the professor was trying to wake us all up to the realities of the occupation, and my head was swirling trying to take it all in. Was Israel good, or evil? I was immediately suspicious of any attempt on my Birthright trip to sugarcoat Israel’s history. But I remember, on one of the final days of the trip, getting to Independence Hall, listening to the recording of David ben Gurion declare Israel’s independence, and feeling this surge of pride and gratitude. As someone who didn’t grow up around a lot of Jews, and I didn’t feel yet that this place was MY home, but I knew that it was the first safe home so many Jews had ever known. This was a place that stood for the REhumanizing of the Jewish body and spirit. A place that told us that we didn’t deserve all the horrible treatment we’d been given. A place where Jews could finally create a better home for ourselves and others.
But even by 1959, just over 10 years after the founding of the state of Israel, people began to realize that the dream of a Jewish state that was synonymous with the Jewish values of welcoming the stranger wasn’t an inevitable reality. Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, a major American Orthodox rabbi of the mid-20th century, wrote in that year,
“The pages of history are bloody with the acts of European society. Judaism is not better because we are better than them but because we never had to face the challenge. A private person cannot do the injustices that can be done by a state...Now that we have a Jewish state, will we act ethically? Will we refrain from injustices, or immoral practices?”
Right now, Israel, like America, is in a national conversation about what it means to be Israeli, and who has a right to live within its borders. For the past decade, refugees have been fleeing forced military conscription and ethnic cleansing in South Sudan and Eritrea. Many fled on foot into neighboring countries like Chad, then made their way into Egypt, where many became victims of human trafficking, rape, and murder. Of the ones who survived the journey, many of these asylum seekers have found their way into Israel - for them, the promised land. A place that represented democracy and a safe haven, as it had for so many Jews.
But last month, Israel’s government issued orders of deportation against the 38,000 African asylum seekers living there. They have been told that they have two options: be deported to Rwanda or Uganda, or we will jail you indefinitely. It’s an order that is fueled by dehumanizing rhetoric: even in official government paperwork, these people aren’t referred to as asylum seekers - they’re called infiltrators, migrants, not recognized as people who were fleeing persecution in their home countries, who have nowhere else to go. Over 99% of their claims for asylum haven’t even been processed, even though in other nations, the majority of refugees from Eritrea and Sudan have had their refugee status recognized.
Last time we met for Shabbat, Rabbi Lizzi spoke about how words have power - how even as we see truth fading and words being thrown around as meaningless, it’s our job to reassert that the words we choose matter. And I want to underscore this point: The capacity for humans to harm other human beings only becomes possible when we dehumanize one another, which starts with words. Michelle Maiese, professor of philosophy, defines dehumanization as: “the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment.” We start with an enemy image, which we paint as morally inferior - those people are money grubbing, criminals, rapists - and once we see those on the other side as dangerous and even sub-human, we can justify any number of atrocities against them. It creates moral exclusion - where the targeted group eventually falls out of the scope of who is naturally protected by our moral code.
Here is an outrageous recent example of this: Last Thursday, an Eritrean refugee named Emanuel Yemani was interviewed on Israeli television about his experience going to the Ministry of the Interior in B’nei Brak to renew his visa. He sat in front of the clerk and gave him his visa and a letter from his lawyer, and the clerk said to him, “So, I don’t want to take this declaration from you, because next week, we’re going to fly you away from here. Go sit underneath a tree, open your mouth, and wait for the bananas to fall in.”
And Emanuel, astounded but composed, responded: Chaver, friend - Ani benadam. I’m a human being. And the clerk said, “Don’t you see yourselves? You look like monkeys.”
While I know that not every Israeli bureaucrat is this callous or racist, the fact remains that when Emanuel Yemani went to lodge his complaint with the manager of the department - he was fined, thrown out by force, and had his temporary visa revoked. What we see as the worst of Jewish moral failure on an individual level ends up being reflected in policy.
But bureaucrats like this don’t represent all Israelis. Thousands of Israelis have been in the streets, writing letters and op-eds and social media posts protesting these deportations, including Holocaust survivors, rabbis, and El-Al pilots. Iddo Elad, one of the pilots who publicized his disapproval of the plan, wrote on Facebook, “I will not fly refugees to their deaths. I will not participate in barbarism.”
If we’ve learned anything from Torah and from thousands of years of Jewish history, it’s this: Our work as Jews is to rehumanize the Other. We feel it in our bones, every time another group of people is referred to in any way as less than a full human being. Our own human dignity is offended, regardless of who the target of that dehumanization is. That’s what it means to be a Jew!
On Wednesday next week, a number of rabbis here in Chicago are heading to the Israeli consulate to share our perspective because we haven’t yet given up on the idea of Israel as a light unto the nations. For me, every time Israeli doesn’t live up to this vision, it hurts - and I want to hold myself, and us, accountable to not say it’s a lost cause, but to engage even more. To not get cynical. Rav Soloveitchik wrote almost 60 years ago:
“If the state does not live up to our ethical values, then the entire past 2000 years, the entirety of Jewish history will be reinterpreted in a different light. It will prove to the world that Jews are not better and only did not act wickedly because they did not have a chance.”
I want to bless us tonight with the courage to find our place in this conversation, as Jews, shaping a Judaism whose core message is one of love, human dignity, and faith in the possibility of a redeemed world, against all odds. Shabbat shalom.
