In 1812 and 1813 Napoleon’s armies marched into Russia, capturing Moscow, before retreating to France, defeated by the Russian winter and the tenacious opposition of the Russian people. Napoleon’s campaign into Russia was a turning point in 19th century history and was immortalized by Tolstoy in his great novel, War and Peace. But Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was not only an event in the history of modern Europe and an inspiration to great literature, it was, of course (for how could it not be), a cause for debate and argument among the Jewish subjects of the Russian empire.
For some Russian Jews, the Hassidic rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rymanov among them, Napoleon’s invasion was a heaven-sent opportunity for Russia’s Jews to become free from the oppressive yoke of the tzar. As Napoleon’s armies marched across Europe, the gates of the ghetto were thrown open in city after city and nation after nation and Jews were given equal citizenship and a promise of inclusion in the glorious French vision of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Surely, many thought, this great invasion was the cataclysmic War of Gog and Magog predicted by Ezekiel that would usher in the Messianic Age.
But, while some embraced Napoleon’s promise of freedom and modernity, others felt that the true welfare of Jewish people could best be secured by an alliance with Russia and resistance to modernity and the values of Western liberalism as they were being promoted by Napoleon.
Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the founder of the Chabad Hassidic movement gave the clearest expression to the religious opposition to Napoleon:
“If Bonaparte wins, the wealth of the Jews will increase and their position will be raised. But their hearts will be estranged from their Father in Heaven. However, if Czar Alexander wins, then although the poverty of the Jews will increase and their position will be lower, their hearts will cleave to and be bonded with their Father in Heaven.”
For Rav Shneur Zalman, the western liberal order that Napoleon represented would bring Jews prosperity at the price of our piety. We were better off, in his view, safe within the ghetto, without the risk of assimilation and under the rule of Russia as a defender of the old order. Rav Shneur Zalman, at this point in his life, had already been held captive in a Russian prison – he was not naive about the czar, but he had greater fear of prosperity and freedom and the risk of assimilation. [He was well known for his support of Russia during the war and fled the advancing French armies, eventually settling in Lubavitch. Lubavitcher Hasidim ended up in Lubavitch fleeing from Napoleon].
Of course, Napoleon was a flawed representative of liberal democratic values. He coopted and betrayed the ideals of the French revolution installing himself as a petty dictator, but the antagonism between liberalism and traditional religion is older and broader. Professor James Kloppenberg of Harvard, my own “rebbe in American history” has traced the antagonism between liberalism and religion to far earlier than Napoleon and Rav Shneur Zalman.
“Because liberalism is generally understood,” he wrote, “to have emerged as an alternative to the ruinous wars of religion, both liberals and non-liberals often assume the incompatibility of liberalism and religion.”
Modern liberalism emerged in the aftermath of more than a century of brutal continent-wide civil-war in which Protestants and Catholics killed one another on a vast, vast scale, leaving decimated communities and mass destruction in France and Germany, England and elsewhere. As an alternative to this ruinous warfare, liberals created a secular public square to limit the potency of religion and to neutralize it’s capacity to inspire violence. However, Professor Kloppenberg goes on to argue, it is a mistake to overemphasize this dichotomy between religion and political liberalism.
“Historically, early liberals from Locke through Jefferson and Madison were devout … Conceptually, moreover, central virtues of liberalism descend directly from [religious virtues of] prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice.” “From the early seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century, democracy was an ethical ideal as much as it was a political or economic ideal.”
Which brings us to today, Shabbat Parashat Shemot.
Famously Rashi begins his commentary to the Torah with a provocative question: Why does the Torah include the Book of Genesis? The Torah should have begun with the first mitzvah given to the Jewish people in Exodus 12, in the middle of Parashat Bo. And Rashi gives his answer and Ramban gives his answer to that same question and we’ve spoken before and surely will speak again about who is right and whether or not Ramban is explaining Rashi or disagreeing with Rashi. But, I’ve never seen any classic commentator ask the question of why the first 12 chapters of Exodus are included in the Torah. What is the value of including the story of the Exodus from Egypt in the Torah? Why not begin at Exodus 12 and the first mitzvah? If the question can be asked about the Book of Genesis then the question can be asked about the Book of Exodus as well.
One obvious answer is that the account of Yetziat Mitzrayim is the decisive moment in Jewish history that created our core identity as Jews and that it fuels a sense of Hakarat HaTov, gratitude towards God which has been understood to be the foundation of our relationship with God. But there is not really any need to include twelve chapters of details of our descent into slavery, the life of Moshe in Midian, his return to Egypt and the miraculous exodus in order for us understand that we owe our freedom to God. The Torah is quite capable of summarizing the entire story of yetziat mitzrayim in just four verses which it does in Sefer Devarim (and does so quite effectively; those four verses become the core of the Passover Seder).
Rabbi Aaron Shmuel Tamaras, a Lithuanian pacifist who wrote a number of sefarim in his lifetime, every one of which is currently out of print, had a different suggestion. The account of the signs and wonders of the exodus are not meant to make us appreciate God. Yetziat Mitzrayim was not a magic show in which God produced signs and wonders as a magician pulls rabbits from hats to the adoring applause of the crowd. Yetziat Mitzrayim was educational. God took us out of Egypt to teach us that God opposes oppression and human bondage with such total and unequivocal opposition that a miraculous exodus was undertaken to demonstrate that truth once and forever. We now know that God does not endorse a social structure such as existed in ancient Egypt and that gave us the fortitude to resist oppression in the future.
According to Rav Tamares, the Torah records for all time how God took us out of Egypt through miracles to teach us God’s intolerance for Egyptian slavery. I want to suggest that the Torah records for all time our descent into slavery to teach us the capacity of human beings to victimize one another and to become victims.
In a blink of an eye, the Torah pivots from the grandeur of Yosef and his brothers enjoying life at the pinnacle of Egyptian society, to a new king with new policies who systematically begins the process of disempowering his Jewish subjects, enslaving them, and then trying to kill them off through a genocidal campaign of mass infanticide.
Ramban, in his commentary to the Torah, spells out the steps with precision and with poignant resonance for later Jewish history. Pharaoh feared that the growing population of Israelites in his kingdom had grown too large. They comprised a demographic threat to the security of his nation. They had infiltrated every corner of Egypt and were poised to serve as a fatal fifth column. They would be disloyal in a war and could not be trusted. They were a mortal threat to Egypt.
“Let us deal shrewdly with them,” the Torah says, and Ramban elaborates:
לא ראה פרעה וחכמי יועציו להכותם בחרב, כי תהיה בגידה גדולה להכות חנם העם אשר באו בארץ במצות המלך הראשון. וגם עם הארץ לא יתנו רשות למלך לעשות חמס כזה,… אבל אמר שיעשו דרך חכמה שלא ירגישו ישראל כי באיבה יעשו בהם, ולכך הטיל בהם מס, כי דרך הגרים בארץ להעלות מס למלך כמו שבא בשלמה
Pharaoh and his advisors were not able to kill all of the Israelites at once, for that would have been an act of impossible treachery to kill off a people who had entered his kingdom with permission of an earlier king. And the Egyptian people would not have allowed Pharaoh to commit such a crime. And so he decided to deal with the Israelites in a shrewd way so that the oppression would not be perceived, even by the Israelites. And so he placed a work tax upon them, for work-taxes of this kind are commonly imposed upon foreigners.
And then the working conditions became harder and protections were removed and the Israelites were dehumanized until we were no longer providing corvee labor to Pharaoh but were subjugated to whatever any Egyptian wanted us to do. And when working conditions became harsher and the bondage became more oppressive and our population continued to grow, the command was given to the midwives to kill the Israelite newborn babies. This command was given in secret and midwives were able to resist. And so a broader campaign of murder was initiated.
But even that broader decree was not an official governmental call for mass murder. Pharaoh did not command his army to murder the Israelite babies. Ramban is sensitive to Pharaoh charging the population at large to take every opportunity to throw Israelite babies into the river. In this way, Ramban says, Pharaoh preserved his own “plausible deniability” and any Israelite parents coming forward to report a missing child would be given a bureaucratic runaround:
עדים ויעשה בו נקמה ואם יצעק אבי הילד אל המלך או אל שר העיר יאמרו שיביא
Bring witnesses and we will investigate this crime…
Pharaoh’s gradual descent from suspicion to xenophobia to oppression to murder is a textbook for future antisemites. Pharaoh was so effective that the Israelites themselves did not realize the degree of danger they faced under Pharaoh’s rule. Nechama Leibowitz noticed the powerful irony of the moment when Moshe and Aharon make their first demand that Pharaoh “let my people go” and Pharaoh responds by increasing the demands upon his Israelite slaves, and the slaves turned upon Moshe and said, “you have discredited us in the eyes of Pharaoh!” They were worried about their reputation as loyal subjects of Pharaoh and that Moshe was just a troublemaker. The Israelites never understood that Pharaoh had authorized the murder of their children. They never understood that their bondage growing harsher and more cruel, was an intentional policy by Pharaoh to crush their spirits and eliminate them altogether from Egypt.
We need these details in the Torah to understand how our very existence was threatened by a despot without our awareness of what was happening. And we need these details to learn what sorts of societies can offer us protection from the recurrent human capacity for fear and cruelty.
A multiethnic state where minorities are not considered to be demographic threats but are a source of blessing and diversity will be less susceptible to the fears that motivated Pharaoh. An open society where the actions of government are scrutinized by engaged citizens will be less at risk from murderous schemes hatched in the highest corridors of power. A free and fair court-system where “Israelite Lives Matter” will protect us from being victims without recourse to justice.
And, as Professor Kloppenberg argued, creating a society of this sort, one in which the virtues of liberalism are manifest, need not coincide with a process of secularism or assimilation. On the contrary, there is nothing secular about orienting a society around the principle of “don’t be like Pharaoh.”
Pharaoh was the first in a string of tyrants and antisemitics who have confronted our people and Czar Alexander, alas, was not the last. Rav Shnuer Zalman was wrong to think that Jewish identity could only survive under authoritarian government. He was wrong to see an inherent conflict between devout religious commitments and a liberal political order. On the contrary, Jewish lives are uniquely at risk under conditions of oppression, and democracy represents a unique opportunity for us to secure the peace and prosperity necessary to devote ourselves to God and to God’s Torah.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 