When the Bed Is a Battleground: October 7, Beta Israel Theology, and Redemption

A close friend of mine lives in Montreal. She is active in an important organization dedicated to women’s rights, particularly helping women who have suffered as a result of wars and armed conflicts. She is an extraordinarily compassionate person, deeply sensitive to human suffering and committed for many years to protecting women and defending their rights. Most of the people around her share those commitments. They are people who genuinely want to do good and devote themselves to worthy moral causes.

Then came October 7.

Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israeli communities and homes, murdering civilians, including children and infants. During the attack and in captivity, women were subjected to horrific sexual violence. It was precisely at this moment that my friend encountered something she had never expected. Some of the women with whom she had worked for years in defense of women’s rights began to distance themselves from her. Instead of straightforward compassion for the victims, she sometimes encountered silence, hesitation, and, in certain cases, arguments that seemed to explain away the atrocities by invoking the broader political context.

This experience raises a question that continues to trouble me: How can people who have spent their lives defending women’s rights fail to show compassion for Israeli women who were victims of sexual violence on October 7, simply because they view Israel as the oppressor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?? How can an ideology originally intended to give victims a voice become, at a critical moment, an obstacle to hearing a particular victim’s cries?

The question is not whether we may examine the historical and political context of the conflict. Of course we may, and indeed we must. The question is what happens when context becomes more important than the human being. What happens when predetermined categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed,” of powerful and powerless, dictate how much compassion we are prepared to extend to a particular victim? At that point, morality risks ceasing to be universal and becoming conditional upon the identity of the person who suffers.

This experience brought me back to a much broader human paradox.

Imagine someone who escapes a brutal totalitarian regime, a society in which fear, coercion, and rigid hierarchies have shaped everyday life, and arrives in a free, prosperous democracy. We might expect someone who has personally experienced oppression to be especially sensitive to the freedom of others. Yet history and human experience suggest otherwise. Sometimes a person leaves the regime, but the regime never leaves the person. The patterns of power from which that individual escaped—the desire to control, silence, and determine who is worthy and who is inferior —can resurface even after that person has found freedom in a democratic society.

The same paradox applies to those who have suffered discrimination and persecution. We might assume that someone who has lived at the bottom of a social hierarchy would want to dismantle that hierarchy altogether. But sometimes the desire is different: not to abolish the ladder, but to climb it. Not to eliminate the distinction between those above and those below, but to exchange places.

The essential question, then, is not simply who was the victim and who was the oppressor, but what the individual learned from the experience. Did suffering teach that hierarchies which degrade human beings are inherently wrong? Or did it teach only that one must never again occupy the lowest rung?

Why does suffering not necessarily produce opposition to oppression? How can someone escape an oppressive system while continuing to carry its logic within?

These questions bring me to Parashat Bereshit, the opening weekly Torah portion of Genesis, which recounts the creation of the world.

We read the same portion last year. The text has not changed, and I assume it never will. But we have changed. And when we change, our reading changes with us. New questions emerge, different themes become more pronounced, and familiar stories acquire meanings we had not previously recognized.

I once heard Rabbi Yehuda Amital suggest that anyone who believes he fully understands the biblical account of creation, and knows precisely how the world came into being, has missed something essential about the mystery of creation itself.

I therefore do not intend to explain how the world was created. Instead, I want to draw from the creation narrative a question worth carrying into the new year: What kind of consciousness should guide the way we live?

As I often do, I will turn to the religious tradition of Ethiopian Jewry for insight.

Our starting point is the book of Ben Sira, a work regarded by the rabbinic sages as an apocryphal book, outside the Jewish biblical canon, but preserved within the sacred literary tradition of Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jewish community. The particular story I want to examine, however, comes not from the Book of Ben Sira itself, but from a separate, later work known as The Alphabet of Ben Sira.

The story describes the creation of Lilith, Adam’s first wife:

When the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first man without a partner, He said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” According to the The Alphabet of Ben Sira, God created a woman for man from the earth, just as He had created him, and called her Lilith. Immediately they began to quarrel over the nature of their intimate relationship.

Lilith said, “I will not lie beneath,” and Adam said, “I will not lie beneath, but above, for you are meant to be below and I above.” She replied, “We are equal, for we were both created from the earth.” […] When Lilith saw what was happening, she pronounced the Ineffable Name of God and flew into the air. […] Immediately the Holy One, blessed be He, sent three angels […] who overtook her in the sea, in the mighty waters where the Egyptians would one day drown.

At first glance, this appears to be an intimate disagreement between a man and a woman, perhaps even an argument in the bedroom. But the language of their dispute transforms it into a much larger human question: Who is above and who is below? Who rules and who submits?

Adam insists, “I am above and you are below.” Lilith responds, “We are equal, for we were both created from the earth.”

Challenging Adam’s worldview that organizes relationships through hierarchy, Lilith’s frame of reference is the fundamental equality represented in the creation of mankind. We share the same origin. We are made from the same earth.

Then the story introduces a seemingly strange detail. The angels find Lilith in the very sea where the Egyptians will later drown.

Why does the author consider it important to identify this particular sea?

I do not claim that the following interpretation I present necessarily reflects the historical intentions of the story’s author. However, the detail invites a literary and theological reading.

Biblical Egypt is more than the geographical location of Israelite slavery. It represents a civilization organized around a single question: Who is above and who is below?

Pharaoh stands at the top, his subjects beneath him, and the slaves at the bottom. The power of one depends upon the weakness of another. The master’s identity requires the existence of a slave.

Egypt built pyramids not only out of stone, but out of human beings.

This is why the demand “Let My people go” threatens Pharaoh with something far greater than the loss of a labor force. It challenges the worldview through which he understands his own identity. If a slave can become free, then the entire assumption that some are born to rule while others are destined to submit begins to collapse.

Here the two stories meet.

The argument that began in Genesis over who must be above and who must be below leads us to the sea where a civilization built upon hierarchy will ultimately drown. At that sea, the human pyramid collapses. The ruling empire sinks beneath the waters, while the slaves emerge into freedom.

This brings me to a concept that, in my understanding, is central to the theology of Ethiopian Jewry: toda’at hageulah, a consciousness of redemption.

A consciousness of destruction assumes that human relationships are necessarily a zero-sum game. If another person rises, I must fall. If another person is right, I must be wrong.

A consciousness of redemption offers a radically different possibility: We can both stand upright without either of us forcing the other to kneel.

This does not require us to erase differences, identities, or disagreements. It requires us to abandon the assumption that difference demands hierarchy, or that an identity needs an enemy in order to survive.

Here lies the distinction between liberation and redemption.

Liberation changes the balance of power. Redemption changes the consciousness through which power is understood.

If yesterday’s slave becomes tomorrow’s master, we have not truly left Egypt. We have merely exchanged places within the same pyramid.

Perhaps this is the danger expressed in the Book of Proverbs: “Under three things the earth trembles […] under a slave when he becomes king” (Proverbs 30:21–22).

The danger is not that someone who was once enslaved might rise to power. The danger is that yesterday’s oppressed person may become tomorrow’s oppressor, that someone who suffered exclusion may use newly acquired power to exclude others.

A person can escape a dictatorship while continuing to carry the dictator within.

But the Bible does more than challenge hierarchy. It establishes a theological foundation for human equality in the creation narrative itself:

“For in the image of God He made man” (Genesis 9:6).

The text does not say that God created the Jew, the king, the powerful, or the member of my particular group in His image. It says that God created the human being in His image.

Human worth is not determined by ancestry, appearance, social standing, or group membership. Nor can it be measured in money, power, or usefulness. A human being can never be treated merely as an instrument for achieving some other purpose, because every person bears the image of God.

I learned from my late grandfather, Abba Dajan (Gideon) Mengesha, of blessed memory, that a simple but profound principle lies at the heart of Beta Israel theology: Before God, all human beings are equal.

No one is “more human” or “less human” in God’s eyes. A person is judged by actions, not by ancestry, appearance, or communal identity.

In this sense, racism ultimately makes a simple claim: “My father is better than your father.”

The Bible answers that claim from its very beginning: We all share common human parents.

Our differences are real, but they do not determine our fundamental worth.

This understanding also invites us to reconsider another biblical question: Why was Abraham chosen?

After humanity’s repeated failures—the Garden of Eden, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel—the Bible could have described God beginning again. He might have taken dust from the Land of Israel, perhaps even from Jerusalem, and created an entirely new kind of human being: a Jew, fundamentally different from the rest of humanity.

But the Bible tells no such story.

Abraham is the son of Terah. He is made of precisely the same human substance as everyone else. His distinctiveness is not genetic. It is moral and spiritual.

The Bible itself explains the reason for his selection:

“For I have known him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice” (Genesis 18:19).

Abraham is not chosen to stand above others, but to assume greater responsibility.

Being chosen does not confer superiority. It imposes an obligation.

Perhaps this is one of the most important contributions that the biblical tradition, and the tradition of Beta Israel in particular, can make to contemporary moral discourse.

Alongside the language of rights, we also need the language of responsibilities.

The image of God does not merely endow me with rights. It obligates me in my relationship with others. It is not enough to ask, “What am I entitled to?” I must also ask, “What is required of me?”

This is why the Torah repeatedly returns to the experience of slavery in Egypt:

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20).

You once occupied the lowest place. Do not construct a world in which someone else must occupy it.

You once knew what it meant to be a stranger. Do not turn another human being into an outsider merely to strengthen your own sense of belonging.

The memory of Egypt becomes redemptive when it prevents us from creating a new Egypt for someone else.

True liberation, therefore, cannot consist merely of escaping an oppressive place. A person may cross a border, change countries, adopt a new language, and acquire a different social position, yet still carry within the very structures of domination from which he fled.

A deeper liberation requires us to leave behind the hierarchical consciousness itself.

And this, perhaps, is the question we should carry from Parashat Bereshit into the new year, especially at a time when the boundaries between good and evil, darkness and light, truth and falsehood, and life and death can seem so painfully confused.

Do I need someone else to be beneath me in order to feel that I stand above?

A consciousness of redemption answers: I do not need another person’s destruction in order to build myself. I do not need another person’s inferiority in order to recognize my own worth. And I do not need another person’s disappearance in order to know who I am.

The most difficult lesson may be that suffering, by itself, does not necessarily teach compassion. Someone who was once a stranger does not automatically become sensitive to the next stranger. Someone who has been persecuted does not necessarily free himself from the mentality of the persecutor. And someone who has lived at the bottom of a hierarchy may, when given the opportunity, seek only a higher position within that same hierarchy.

Redemption begins not when those who were below finally succeed in rising above, but when, having risen, they no longer need anyone else to take their place at the bottom.