Human Rights Shabbat - Parashat Vayigash

    Shabbat Shalom. This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Vayigash, in which Joseph, the viceroy of Egypt, reconciles with his brothers. The older brothers repent for their past misdeeds to Joseph, and prove their worth in trying to protect their youngest brother, Benjamin, from meeting a similar fate when Joseph, still hiding his true identity from them all, threatens to imprison Benjamin for a crime he did not commit. After Joseph reveals himself to them, and they all cry and hug and make up, the brothers go back to Canaan and bring their father and their wives to Egypt. Joseph sets aside the land of Goshen for them, and thus the Hebrews come to settle in Egypt.

Although we know this goes badly for them in a couple generations, at first they are warmly received. When Jacob dies in a few parshiyot from now, Pharaoh gives Joseph the time off from work and the resources to give Jacob a fancy funeral caravan to take them back to the Holy Land so that Jacob can be buried in the Cave of Machpaleh with his parents, grandparents, and one of his wives. It’s not clear how much the Israelites fully assimilated into Egyptian society in their years of comfort in Goshen, or if they kept to themselves, but it’s clear they were cared for by the royal court as long as Joseph lived, and that they continued to live with enough safety and material comfort for some time after that to enable them to sustain many children in each household for a few more generations.

The narratives of the Israelites in Egypt is our first source text for bigotry and tolerance. The Israelites are initially accepted, but are always seen as separate. They are considered distinct, different, foreign, even after they’ve been in the land for generations. Their cultural contributions to Egyptian society are forgotten, and they are punished simply for existing. I think it’s safe to assume that there were probably some Egyptians who were mistrustful of these outsiders and resentful of their settlement of the land of Goshen from the beginning, and there were probably some Egyptians who opposed the enslavement of the descendants of Jacob. We can imagine how their voices might have sounded, their reasonings for their fear and their reasonings for their embracing; the defences and arguments from both sides. We can imagine how the arguments ebbed and flowed throughout the intervening generations between the Joseph narrative and the Moses narrative we get in the Torah. How certain rhetoric probably came in and out of fashion a few times before it reached the zenith we see in Exodus. We can imagine these likely realities, because they probably sound a lot like the arguments and responses we hear in our Holocaust studies, and hear still today about racism, antisemitism, and anti-immigration rhetoric. If we’re listening, it might be the same arguments we have heard around the world against the Armenian, Tutsi, Bosnian, Darfuri, Rohingya, Uyghur, and any number of other ethnic and religious minorities, or other perceived political opponents to tyrannical regimes.

As Jews living in a period of increased antisemitism in America, we are on edge. But we know we are not alone in living in a time of increased hate crimes, and we know that we have seen all these things before. We know that we are stronger than bigotry, that love is stronger than hate, and that we have friends and allies in Prince William County with whom we can stand against bigotry of all kinds. I’d like to close with two poems I found while looking through the materials on the T’ruah website for Human Rights Shabbat. The first is the famous Holocaust poem from Pastor Martin Niemoller:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The second was a response to this written by Rabbi Michael Adam Latz:

First they came for the African Americans and I spoke up—

Because I am my sisters’ and my brothers’ keeper.

And then they came for the women and I spoke up—

Because women hold up half the sky.

And then they came for the immigrants and I spoke up—

Because I remember the ideals of our democracy.

And then they came for the Muslims and I spoke up—

Because they are my cousins and we are one human family.

And then they came for the Native Americans and Mother Earth and I spoke up—

Because the blood-soaked land cries and the mountains weep.

They keep coming.

We keep rising up.

Because we Jews know the cost of silence.

We remember where we came from.

And we will link arms, because when you come for our neighbors, you come for us—

and THAT just won’t stand.

This Human Rights Shabbat, may we find ourselves celebrating diversity in this time of adversity, and may we find peace and strength in our richly diverse communities. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.