The Oldest Trick in Pharaoh’s Book

Our Saturday morning service on January 18th, 2025 fell just two days before Martin Luther King Day, which also just so happened to be Inauguration Day, ushering in the second term of the Trump presidency. Just like in the Exodus story of our parshah, Pharaoh is back. Well, technically, it was two different pharaohs, the one Moses fled from and the one that he stood up to, but you get the idea. With Pharaoh dividing us to make us weak enough to subjugate, there is only way out of Egypt: coming together as a mixed multitude.

****

For upcoming Shabbat services and programs, check our event calendar, and see our Accessibility & Inclusion page for information about our venues. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook for more updates.

Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

For those of you who have not yet seen it, I apologize in advance for spoiling a major plot point in the movie Wicked.  If you want, turn your sound off and in 30 seconds turn it on again and the drash will still make sense. Even if you've only watched the original Wizard of Oz, you know the Wizard is someone who is hiding the truth about himself, and when Elphaba and Glinda, two young optimistic students to go meet the Wizard, he shares one of his strategies with them, a strategy to keep him in power, lacking any actual power, certainly lacking the fearsome magical power he pretends to have. The Wizard says, “The best way to bring folks together is to give them a really good enemy.” 

In Wicked, the animals are the enemy. And if you’ve seen Wicked you know, animals played quite an important role in society, professors, doctors, bartenders, nannies, nurses — yet they are made out to be a nefarious force, an Other, worthy of being stripped of their rights and protections. In the book of Exodus, which we begin reading this week, the Israelites are the enemy. The Israelites in the story too, you’ll remember from the last month of Torah readings, were valued members of Egyptian society — with Joseph rising to the level of Pharaoh’s chief advisor, Minister of the Treasury and of Agriculture. Because of his great success and contributions to Egyptian society he’s able to resettle his large Israelite family there, given the best of the land because they were integrated into and so deeply valued by Egyptian society. That’s how the book of Genesis ends. 

So you have to wonder — how does it happen that good people can turn on their neighbors, friends, teachers, doctors, nannies, nurses, baristas, accountants, lawyers, people they might date and marry, certainly people they deeply trust as friends and colleagues, how can they instead to come to villainize, dehumanize, and even personally harm those very people, and stand by while others do the same? To quote my brother-in-law Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein, “How does a multicultural superpower country turn into a tyranny?”

As we begin reading parashat Shemot, that’s that driving question. There are many books that explore this question meaningfully — George Orwell’s1984, Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, Alexy Nevalny’s book Patriot just published posthumously, Tim Snyder’s On Tyranny — and we look to Torah. And we believe in its truth not necessarily because it happened… it’s true because it happens. Meaning, the story we begin reading this week is a familiar story across time and it bears repeating and reading every year (multiple times a year as it turns out because of course we’ll read the story again at Passover)… because it’s a warning our Tradition wants us to take to heart. So while I recommend going back to read some of the classics — I want to look right into the text of the Torah and see what jumps out this year from this timeless story. 

https://youtu.be/0QzVdbk34hk

Let me just say: this parasha is SO RICH — so this is going to be a few choice selections and observations… highly recommend you do a Passover seder-style read through this parsha sometime today with a friend, just to see what you pick out!

וַיָּ֤מׇת יוֹסֵף֙ וְכׇל־אֶחָ֔יו וְכֹ֖ל הַדּ֥וֹר הַהֽוּא׃ 

Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation. 

וּבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל פָּר֧וּ וַֽיִּשְׁרְצ֛וּ וַיִּרְבּ֥וּ וַיַּֽעַצְמ֖וּ בִּמְאֹ֣ד מְאֹ֑ד וַתִּמָּלֵ֥א הָאָ֖רֶץ אֹתָֽם׃ {פ}

But the Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased very greatly, so that the land was filled with them. 

וַיָּ֥קׇם מֶֽלֶךְ־חָדָ֖שׁ עַל־מִצְרָ֑יִם אֲשֶׁ֥ר לֹֽא־יָדַ֖ע אֶת־יוֹסֵֽף׃ 

A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. 

וַיֹּ֖אמֶר אֶל־עַמּ֑וֹ הִנֵּ֗ה עַ֚ם בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל רַ֥ב וְעָצ֖וּם מִמֶּֽנּוּ׃ 

And he said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. 

הָ֥בָה נִֽתְחַכְּמָ֖ה ל֑וֹ פֶּן־יִרְבֶּ֗ה וְהָיָ֞ה כִּֽי־תִקְרֶ֤אנָה מִלְחָמָה֙ וְנוֹסַ֤ף גַּם־הוּא֙ עַל־שֹׂ֣נְאֵ֔ינוּ וְנִלְחַם־בָּ֖נוּ וְעָלָ֥ה מִן־הָאָֽרֶץ׃ 

Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground.”

From verse 6-10 we see the generational shift. Joseph dies, his brothers die, everyone from his generation, everyone who remembers the famine across the region, how everyone was starving and thirsty, but Joseph managed to devise a plan for a benevolent Pharoah to assume ownership of Egypt’s land and have its produce rationed out fairly to the people so they not only survived, but were able to provide for anyone who came to Egypt needing food. The previous Pharoah appears to have had a mindset of abundance — there is enough in this land and enough to go around as long as its being managed and stewarded responsibly. And it worked well for a while. But as we see here, verse 8, “A new pharaoh arose who knew not Joseph.” The policy that saved many lives, and consolidated Pharoah’s power and the wealth of the country under Pharaoh, such that this new Pharaoh had much more power to wield.

And this Pharaoh arose with no memory for the relatively recent history of his own country, no memory for who the great leaders of the past were, for how his country attained the wealth and stability that it had achieved — the role of the Jewish people in helping build that wealth. And, importantly, this Pharaoh does not have a mindset of abundance, wherein his people are capable of strength even as other peoples can be strong as well… No, this pharaoh sees only scarcity, and the prospect of his dominance being threatened, challenged, toppled. Despite his obvious power and dominance over Egypt, this guy is fragile, he’s insecure. Perhaps he remembers the victimhood and vulnerability of famine times but forgets how his people actually got out of them, or is simply incapable of seeing how strong and well resourced his kingdom is. And in his insecurity he asks himself, What’s the best way to bring folks together around your power? Give them a good enemy. 

And so he invents both a fantastical catastrophe, a war, in which, if they were to be on one side, surely these Israelites would join the other. And so we must not allow them to proliferate and increase, LEST they join our enemies. See this in the Hebrew (verse 10): PEN Yirbe, LEST. And so they impose harsh labor upon the Israelites, and then look at verse 12… despite their oppression KEN Yirbe, nonetheless they increased. So the Talmud looks at this turn of phrase from fear to fulfillment, Pen Yirbe — Ken Yirbe, as a way of showing that when Pharoah acts from fear, insecurity and scarcity, God helps him fulfills his own prophecy.

How often does that happen, by the way? Responding to one isolated event — say like 9/11 — terrible, destabilizing, but isolated– leaders in this country took America head-on into a war in Iraq and Afghanistan under the premise of preventing even more death and destruction, instability and insecurity… the eventual result being orders of magnitude greater death and destruction, instability and insecurity. 

Tim Snyder in his book On Tyranny describes how leaders will use catastrophe or even just the prospect catastrophe to justify suspending laws, exempting themselves from due process, finding enemies to prosecute without evidence, in the name of security — and questioning all of this become traitorous. He writes, “Remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.”

Pharoah doesn’t go straight from inventing a catastrophe to enslaving the Israelites. First there is a consistent, repeated propaganda — the use of insults, words that paint the Israelites as vermin, multiplying like bugs if you look at the language, as shrewd and cunning warmongers who will join with their enemies, people who will only understand the language of force. Sound familiar? While the Torah describes this in a verse, you have to imagine that all this happens over months and months — otherwise how could the Egyptians, who had generously taken in Joseph, Jacob, all 12 of his sons and their big families, and over the generations, built real relationships with Israelites, how could they possibly abide the decrees Pharaoh ultimately began making, to enslave their neighbors, to kill their neighbor’s children, in the name security? But sure enough, that’s what they do.

Looking at this moral descent of the society, Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein writes, “Words matter. Defamation matters. The brutal slavery and the killing of babies could not have happened without a prior defamation campaign. Hitler of 1944 was impossible without Hitler of 1930. An armed invasion of Congress is continuous with birtherism. When we tell the story of slavery in Egypt, the story must start with the new king’s media campaign to defame the descendants of Israel, turning the opinion of the Egyptian masses against them, creating a new, mythic Egyptian identity built off its opposition to the newly fabricated nation of Israelites.”

What you have to know here is verse 9 is the first time in the Torah words Am Yisrael — the Jewish People– appear, in the mouth of Pharaoh. Previously they’re referred to only as B’nai Yisrael, the children or descendants of Jacob/Yisrael, a plurality. But AM Yisrael is a singular, an IT, a THING, with essential qualities inherent in this thing-ness, and as such it is dangerous to us, different from us. This is the kind of language that made it possible for white Americans to enslave black Americans, and later once that was officially illegal, to create tiers of legalized inequality, to walk past or even watch lynchings of black Americans like it was entertainment; to first assassinate Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s character, labeling him a radical, an extremist, a criminal, a trouble maker– for coming forward to suggest unambiguously that America could do better than the racial caste system that made a mockery of our founding ideals. Assassinating his character with labels and words, ultimately paved the way for his actual assassination. Words matter. Labeling a group as deviant, vermin like, prone to violence, lazy, diseased, weak, irrational, inhuman– paves the way for actual violence against them, which the “us” group easily justifies because they’ve been made to think these people aren’t fully human.

Now, in much the same way as the queer community has taken what was a slur and reclaimed it into a badge of pride, the Jewish people obviously took what was an insult when Pharoah said it, and we have also reclaimed it as our own. Now when someone refers to the Jewish people, Am Israel, we know we are a global family that includes ethnicities, nationalities, races, languages, culinary styles, musical traditions, across the planet, and there is actually little that we can say is an essential inherent quality, other than a relationship (either biological or spiritual) to this original family and to this story, or a relationship Torah. But when you start trafficking in descriptions of personality traits and aptitudes based on a person’s biological membership in a group, you start skating on thin ice, ice that members of this group will fall through when these stereotypes start being used against them… 

We Jews know this game all too well. And if this is true of us and our people, this is true of EVERYONE who has been turned into an Other for the purpose of creating unity and strength, by being a common enemy, for a different group. It’s dangerous and when we see it and hear it, we need to name it, not let it go unchecked. We can’t be like the Egyptians, who listened to their leader to speak falsehoods, probably said things like “He’s just bombastic, he doesn’t mean it,” or “it’s just words…” until those words became so ubiquitous and familiar they felt like truth, or at least it became too hard to argue with because at that point too many people agreed or assented — either through ignorance, obliviousness, or because they actually came to believe the lie that it’s possible to secure one people’s safety through another’s denigration and dehumanization. And to question it would of course, have been treason. This is why it was so powerful when, in 2016, when the first Trump administration began labeling people from Muslim countries a danger to America — i.e. labeling a billion people, many living under repressive regimes themselves, dangerous — Jewish communities like ours helped resettle Muslim families from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, fleeing those repressive governments. At that R’ Steven’s community in New York stood outside of Mosques to say to the country — with signs that said “We love our Muslim neighbors,” which is to say, We don’t believe the lies we’re being fed. We believe you’re human. His Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum would often say, How different would Germany have been if many Christian communities had done the same thing for Jews?

If the social media platforms in this country — the place where most people, especially young people get their news — are going to abdicate their role in calling out falsehoods and dehumanizing lies, at just the moment when we are about to inaugurate a president and vice president whose popularity is based in part on their creating a common enemy of minority groups in this country, whether undocumented immigrants or trans people or Arabs or Jews or disabled people — we are in a very precarious place. We need to be even more vigilant about naming falsehoods when we see them, naming hate speech when we see it — especially when those falsehoods are painting a dehumanizing picture of our neighbors, or obviously, of us.

On the heels of the Holocaust and WW2 the world learned of how abjectly dangerous this kind of dehumanizing rhetoric and thinking is, how it inevitably leads to violence against its target — and so came together to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is premised, like our Torah, on the inherent dignity and equality of every human being. The right of every person to be free, to be safe. It states that truth in words — the inviolable and inherent right of every person to be safe and free, wherever they live. And I believe that in December of 1948 when the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted world leaders believed that with a universal vision of the rights and dignity of every person, regardless of race, sex, religion or national origin, adopted by every country sincerely, we could create a world where all people live free, full, fulfilling lives on the soil they call home. I think they believed that humanity could do it, if we could just keep our eye on that prize and not succumb to tribalism, fear and scarcity.

As we enter a day honoring the work of Reverent Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, as we enter the next four years of life in this country — as we enter God willing the next chapter between Israelis and Palestinians — may we remember that the Torah begins first with one person in the Garden of Eden as a testament, our sages say, to the notion that no one has the right to say about anyone else that “my ancestors were greater than your ancestors,” because we all stem from one original family. If not brothers — we’re certainly all cousins. It’s true genetically… but more importantly, it’s true spiritually, morally. Let us remember our common enemy isn’t another People, it’s the notion that we should forget our people’s founding truths in the name of self-preservation, pen — lest we lose ourselves. Ken, rather, let us find ourselves even more firmly committed to the dignity of all people as the most powerful expression of our Jewish inheritance. 

Shabbat shalom.