This is excerpted and adapted from a D’var Torah I gave in January 2023, when MLK Weekend began on Shabbat with Parashat Shmot, the opening reading in the book of Exodus. Here I’ve omitted the (long) opening, which is very similar to most of the other words I have posted about those opening chapters of Exodus. The textual question is whether in the last part of Exodus 2, Moshe is aware that the people who are oppressed are “his brothers”, or whether only the narrator and the reader is. The human question that stems from that is why the Torah would introduce that ambiguity. Is the story a different one if Moshe is aware or not aware, if he active associates or sees himself as different? In this version of my reflections, I suggest that the answer about Moshe’s identity isn’t fixed at that moment. That doesn’t mean what I’ve written and said in other years isn’t also what I think!
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…I would argue that Moshe doesn’t fully arrive at his commitment to the Israelites until they are at their worst moment internally, at the Golden Calf, when God offers to get rid of them and start over with him. And Moshe says very clearly you can’t have me without them. However bad they seem to be, that is my people, that’s who I am in solidarity with.
I think this line of interpretation is the most interesting way to understand Moshe, who is a civil rights leader and a fierce advocate for his own people, his nation. For a long time he does not have a clear answer as to who he is in relation to the people he is allied with at first, and eventually completely committed to. He doesn’t have a clear answer to how he is supposed to handle his Egyptian-ness too, at least nothing the text makes completely clear even when he is delivering demands to Pharaoh. In the movies Moshe always wants to save Raamses and the Egyptians, not just get the Israelites out.
How is it possible for him to stand up and defend these Israelites in Egypt all alone, if he doesn’t automatically and immediately understand them as his brothers? Yet he doesn’t understand this right off, or at least it comes and goes. The Torah is honest about this — you can be dedicated to principle, to God, and have a hard time understanding where you fit in the picture of the people who are involved — who are suffering, who are hurting others, who are rising up, who are leading, who are standing alongside.
You don’t have to know your answer all at once. Acting helps you toward that answer, not the other way around. Moshe’s many possible connections to Egyptians, to Israelites, to people who suffer as humans — they make it hard for him but they are also an asset; they position him uniquely to be the messenger, to speak and to act.
This is us, when we think about issues of race in this country and our relation to them as Jewish Americans. We are like Moshe, in an ambiguous and evolving relationship to everyone — to white Americans, to African-Americans. We in this congregation are mostly white-skinned but certainly not entirely, and therefore we have different relationships to the wider worlds and experiences of white Americans and people of color.
We have many connections, many possible identities in the work of racial justice that continues and that are on our minds as we celebrate the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Just like it was for Moshe, it is important for us not to close down the thinking of who we actually are or who we want to be, in relation to every group and to the collective and the ideal that is America. We have not figured this out — we aren’t by any means at the moment Moshe got to later, when he could finally say these are my only people.
Back when I was teaching American history and literature to Jewish high school students, my co-teacher Leslie Bazer and I decided to define for our students a citizenship philosophy for Jewish Americans. The term we used was “connected critic”, which comes from the American and Jewish political philosopher Michael Walzer.
Walzer posited that all the way back to the biblical prophets, the only people who help any society realize its ideals are people who are loyal to it and identified with it, but who also often feel a bit to one side because they notice when ideals are being watered down or ignored, and others are rationalizing that. Jews in modern America are suited to this role of connnected critic because we don’t expect to be 100% insiders all the time, and because we have a tradition of criticizing even our own Jewish communities, and because we know what a uniquely good thing America can be and often is. So as teachers Leslie and I wanted our high school students to learn America’s story and culture as connected critics.
When we got to slavery and the Civil War, we were sitting in a bigger room than our own classroom so we could watch a video about contemporary race issues. It was a room I liked to think of as exactly the same size as an early New England church meetinghouse, the kind of original American small-town democracy. We introduced the topic of whites and blacks, and a student named Michal said: “You’re just assuming that we in this room are the whites, and I don’t accept that. I’m not black but I’m not white, I’m Jewish; and that’s not the same as being one of those whites even though I have white skin.” Those weren’t her exact words but that’s the thought.
We accepted this, Leslie and I, as a friendly amendment, and we reframed the unit — who can we be as Jewish Americans who came to a country where this black-white divide was defining. Michal was saying: I don’t see myself defined by my white-ness, though I have some, and I don’t want to see myself stuck with the worst of that legacy.
Our student Michal got to this much faster than Moshe in his own teenage years. For her it was clear who were and weren’t her “brothers”, quote-unquote.
What I only learned later is that deciding not to identify with the slaveholder legacy of being white, or the complicity legacy of other whites, is not only something an American light-skinned Jew gets to decide easily for ourselves. Over time, most American Jews have become “white.” Not that our skin color changed. Many of us have sought the acceptance that comes with becoming a white group; we have sought the relief from tension and the protection that comes from passing easily.
I know that I have assumed too quickly sometimes a brotherhood with African-Americans out of my sense of my Exodus tradition and our history of suffering. Those resonances are the launching point, not the proof of brotherhood. This was driven home to me a couple summers ago at the apex of the activity of the Proud Boys outside the meetings of Nashua’s Board of Education. I spent about half an hour one evening confronting them patiently. I talked about Judaism and Jewish experience and about racism. Later when the people who had gathered opposite them debriefed, I listened as our local African-American leaders talked about how in danger they felt, how frightened about both the Proud Boys and the police who were there assessing how to respond. My experience of that evening was very different from that of my African-American colleagues.
Many of us are like Moshe in the verse where the narrator describes some people as his brothers, but also as “Hebrew” to him, “other” in some way. Are we rooted in this land, in America, or like Moshe in friendly Midyan do we often think of ourselves still as strangers in a foreign land? Are we who are white Jews more brothers to other white people? Are we as Jews more brothers to people of color, whose sufferings we see into or think we do? Do we need to feel more connected to people before we can stand up with them, or is it enough to act out of a sense of universal humanity?
Do we whiplash back and forth? I know I do.
And we should accept this and put it to our advantage. We Jews are well-situated to be connected critics of this country. To seek to be comfortable, to seek many kin, but not to value comfort at the cost of what’s right. When we look at the unfinished work of racial justice, and see ourselves in it somewhere, we should realize that our stake in it is a lot about us and our own sense of belonging. Our desire is to fast-forward from “I have been a stranger in a foreign land” to “these are my only people.” We have to earn that with our actions.
We have a sacred history as Jews of involvement in civil rights — in the legacy of Justice Brandeis, the founding of the ADL to fight anti-Semitism and racism, the Rosenwald schools in Jim Crow south, the partnerships that made legal challenges and political change possible in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the iconic marches of rabbis with King and the students who risked and gave them lives in the Freedom Summer. We can’t rest on those laurels, which many of us and many African-Americans don’t know about.
We have to resist any temptation to see African-American leaders only in light of Kanye’s antisemitic rants; one of our most prominent Nashua Black Lives Matter leaders denounced him publicly. We have to take responsibility for the move toward racism among those Israeli religious political leaders who no longer struggle with the occupation as a dilemma but relish the mocking of Arabs. Not just to dissociate ourselves, but to stand up to it and to strengthen especially the religious Israelis who say no to it.
We have to show up next to our friends of color when racism permeates our local public meetings over housing and education. There is plenty to do here to make ourselves sisters and brothers in fact and not in history and legend.
I have no doubt that there is a perspective like the narrator’s in Exodus 2 — where all American Jews and all people of color are brothers, where all American Jews are side by side with white Americans to purify our souls, where we play a role of binding and joining that we are uniquely situated to play. Let’s make that our identity on the inside as well, and leave no room for interpretation as to whether it is so.
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