Surviving and Thriving in Exile; Vayigash 5786
Why was it necessary for Bnei Yisrael, the Children of Israel to experience enslavement and a brutal exile? Ironically, the experience of exile saved Bnei Yisrael. Being a minority, makes one more aware of one’s identity.
I experienced this phenomenon when I went off to college. My first year of college, on Erev Yom Kippur, another student asked me why I was so dressed up. I explained to her that I was going to attend Yom Kippur services at a local synagogue. She looked at me with a blank stare and I explained that Yom Kippur was a Jewish holiday. This was my Dorothy in Oz moment. Just as Dorthy realized she was “no longer in Kansas”, I realized that I was no longer in the heavily Jewish suburbs of Long Island. Growing up on Long Island, I took for granted that gentiles were familiar with Judaism because they live and interact with us regularly. I had just learned, that being a member of a small minority on a college campus with a modest Jewish student population in upstate New York, was a whole new ball game.
Living outside the heavily Jewish New York metropolitan area, made me much more aware of my Jewish identity. I came to realize, that maintaining my identity would take significant effort. It was easy to take Judaism for granted while being surrounded by Jews downstate, but this simply wasn’t the case upstate.
This sense of longing for what I had left behind downstate, led me to develop a close relationship with the only observant Jewish professor at The State University of New York at Oswego, Dr. Stephen Baron. Over the course of my college experience, I spent a significant amount of Shabbatot at his home. The relationship I developed with Dr. Barron, helped me to appreciate Judaism in a way that I would have not been able to while living in the Jewish heartland of the New York metropolitan area. In fact, after a period of time, I began to regard my Oswego experience as a personal exile, which ironically made me appreciate Judaism in a way that I was not able to while living on Long Island.
As it turns out, my reaction to “exile” was not as unusual as I thought it was. In fact, the story is as old as Judaism itself. As Rabbi Alex Israel explains, if Bnei Yisrael had remained in Canaan among their Semitic neighbors, they would likely have remained just another Semitic clan that would have eventually assimilated into the larger culture. The exilic experience of Egypt, forced Bnei Yisrael to be keenly aware and protective of their identity. Earlier on in the narrative, we were told that the Egyptians found breaking bread of the Hebrews to be an abomination. Later in the narrative, we are told that the profession of shepherding, which Bnei Yisrael practiced, was an abomination to the Egyptians.
Instead of forsaking their identity in an attempt to try to gain acceptance, Joseph instructed his brothers to make a point of telling Pharaoh that they are shepherds. Joseph did so in order to ensure that his family was given their own separate parcel of territory. Why did Bnei Yisrael not attempt to melt away into the greater Egyptian culture as tempting as it would have been? It is because they realized that they were the inheritors of a covenant that their ancestors had entered into with God, charging them with sharing the concept of ethical monotheism with the world.
Time and time again history has proven that those who seek to exit the covenant community in an attempt to gain acceptance to the greater culture fail. Jews who converted to Christianity in order to gain acceptance in European Society could not escape the taint of having “Jewish blood.” Conversos who converted to Christianity during the Inquisition were labeled “Maranos,” meaning pigs and were suspected of being backsliding Jews. Many were murdered during the Holocaust for simply having “Jewish blood” flow through their veins, though they did not consider themselves to be Jewish nor were they considered to be Jewish by the Jewish Community because they weren’t Jewish under the standards of Jewish law.
We Jews in America are now experiencing levels of antisemitism that we are not accustomed to. Let us follow in the footsteps of our ancestors, whose response to adversity was not to fold, but to embrace their identity! By doubling down and embracing their identity under harsh exilic conditions, Bnei Yisrael transformed from a clan into a nation, which changed the world for the better by introducing the concept of ethical monotheism. We, the inheritors of that very same covenant, now must continue their work.
