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J.J Gross

Credit to Pharaoh for being the first to recognize the Jews as a Nation (Shemot)

 וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, פָּרוּ וַיִּשְׁרְצוּ וַיִּרְבּוּ וַיַּעַצְמוּ בִּמְאֹד מְאֹד; וַתִּמָּלֵא הָאָרֶץ, אֹתָם

The children of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and increased and became very very strong, and the land became filled with them

(Exodus/Shemot 1:7)

Were we to come across a  statement like this today we would assume it came from the pen of a vicious Jew hater, some Holocaust-denying latter-day Nazi.

In fact, however, it is the Torah’s description of the Bnei Yisrael in Egypt:

If this does not sound especially flattering, perhaps that was the Torah’s intention. As has often, if not always, been the case in our troubled diaspora wanderings, we Jews did very well for ourselves in Egypt, perhaps too well for our own good. We allowed ourselves to get too comfortable. We invested in real estate (after all what can be more certain than real estate.) We built the most advanced hospitals in which to birth our many babies. We lived in the finest neighborhoods. We sent our precious darlings to the best universities

Barely three verses later, the shoe drops. A new Pharaoh ascends the throne and shrewdly realizes that the Israelites are not merely foreign sojourners, or ethnically other. No, this Pharaoh is the first to recognize that the Bnei Yisrael ARE A NATION, one  that not only practices a different religion and worships a different deity, but one that is doing far better than themselves.

ט  וַיֹּאמֶר, אֶל-עַמּוֹ:  הִנֵּה, עַם בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל–רַב וְעָצוּם, מִמֶּנּוּ.

And (Pharaaoh) said, behold, the nation of the Children of Israel are many, and too mighty for us.

(1:9)

This is a remarkable observation on his part. While God had promised the Patriarchs that they would eventually become a nation, there was certainly no such awareness among fractured sons of Yaakov and the paltry 70 souls who first descended to Egypt.  Now, having achieved such spectacular comfort and success in Egypt, it is hardly likely that Yaakov’s descendants could see themselves as “other”, certainly not as a NATION apart.

Hence this Pharaoh, if nothing else, deserves credit for being the first to actually recognize our ancestors not as mere interlopers or resident aliens, but as a full-fledged nation, one which therefore poses an existential threat the host society.

 הָבָה נִתְחַכְּמָה, לוֹ:  פֶּן-יִרְבֶּה, וְהָיָה כִּי-תִקְרֶאנָה מִלְחָמָה וְנוֹסַף גַּם-הוּא עַל-שֹׂנְאֵינוּ, וְנִלְחַם-בָּנוּ, וְעָלָה מִן-הָאָרֶץ.

Come, let us outsmart them, lest they increase,
and should war occur, they might join our enemies and
wage war against us and depart from the land.

(Exodus/Shemot 1:10)

As mere sojourners, the Israelites may have usurped a bit too much in terms of material success. But as a separate nation, this Pharaoh sees them as a existential threat. He wants to keep them because their presence is an economic boon, yet he feels threatened  by the way they operate.These Jews have international connections, real or imagined. They can’t be trusted.

Pharaoh sees how shrewd and clever the Israelites are. How they have focused all of their intelligence and creativity on increasing their wealth and enhancing the quality of their personal lives. Such a nation could only be dealt with by applying the same mental effort, i.e. to outsmart them.

If our 2,000 year diaspora history is any indicator, by now most of those Israelites didn’t really worship any deity. They expended fortunes on attempts to banish God from the public sphere. They avoided taking up arms with which to protect themselves, let alone the greater society, believing they are protected by their bank accounts, investments and real estate portfolios.

And then a toxic envy among the general populace unleashes a virulent backlash, resulting in appropriation, ghettoization, banishment, even extermination.

In the opening verses of Exodus/Shemot the Torah is providing a dialectical template, the inevitable cause and effect that will define Jewish life in the diaspora. The only things that can thwart this inevitability are either willful economic failure and underachievement – something we Jews are incapable of – or an ability to read the handwriting on the wall while there’s still time to get out. And yet, when the message is up there in bold type, the People of the Book suddenly become as illiterate as aborigines in in the Amazon.

These days everyone is wringing their hands over the proliferating Jew hatred in the United States, in Canada, in England, in Australia, in France, in – surprise, surprise – Germany. What we’re hearing from the haters is literally how the Jews are swarming and multiplying and getting too strong and the land is full of them — especially the land of Wall Street and the land of Hollywood.

Religious Jews continue to mouth empty daily prayers: וְתֶחֱזֶֽינָה עֵינֵֽינוּ בְּשׁוּבְֿךָ לְצִיּוֹן בְּרַחֲמִים. May our eyes behold Your return to Zion in mercy. And they chant “next year in Jerusalem” at the conclusion of Yom Kippur and the Passover Seder, even as their friends andneighbors are being attacked on the streets, and the universities to which they send their precious children are fomenting Jew hatred on a scale not known since Germany in the 1930s.

One might think diaspora rabbis would make some effort to alert their students and congregants. But business is business. A rabbi’s business is his yeshiva in America or his synagogue in Toronto. Encouraging his people to get out wouldn’t be good for business. There’s no parnassah in empty pews or a vacant Beit Midrash. Instead they plug their ears and blindfold their eyes, leading their congregants and acolytes astray precisely by inducing them to remaining where they are – just as most rabbanim did in Europe during the Shoah.

One need not be a prophet to see how this all ends. The Torah describes it perfectly. The Jews had no business remaining in Egypt. They knew that Yosef wanted his remains repatriated to Canaan. They were fully aware of the fact that their homeland was just a camel drive away. But they figured there was time, that they could always go home, just not yet, not while they were doing so well. The real estate business was booming. The stock market was going through the roof. The law firms were busier than ever. They had an Anti Defamation League to protect them. This was no time to head back home.

And the rest is history, And history. And history. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it was ‘deja Jew’ over and over and over again.

About the Author
J.J Gross is a veteran creative director and copywriter, who made aliyah in 2007 from New York. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a lifelong student of Bible and Talmud. He is also the son of Holocaust survivors from Hungary and Slovakia.
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