January 12th: Va’era
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich
One of the great moral questions of the Torah regards the punishments of the ordinary Egyptians. The plagues God sends affect all the Egyptians—not just the Pharaoh who rules Egypt with unchallenged authority and who single-handedly refuses God’s insistence to “Sh’lach et ami! / Let My people go!” Even if one expands the responsibility to the Egyptians actively involved in the oppression of the Israelites, one suspects that there are many Egyptians who are not guilty. Yet, when God sends the blood, the frogs, the lice, and the flies, all the Egyptians are plagued—even the seemingly innocent ones. And there are the animals—since the cattle boils are not just a problem for the livestock owners. Our humanitarian concerns reach their climax in the Tenth Plague, the Smiting of the First Born.
“In the middle of the night, the Lord struck down all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sat on the throne to the first-born of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the first-born of the cattle…there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was no house where there was not someone dead.” (Exodus 12.29-30)
All except the house of the Israelites—whose doorposts and lintels are marked with the blood of the Passover lamb. The Angel of Death passes over our houses.
Do all the Egyptians deserve such punishments? Tradition struggles with this one, and, though we are taught that God loves all humans—and feels real remorse for our suffering, this question of the seeming punishment of the innocent haunts us and leaves us wondering.
The great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel approaches this question—in terms of modern social justice—with a statement both inspiring and troubling. “Some are guilty. All are responsible.”
Does this mean that we are responsible for the crimes or missteps of others? How can we be responsible for the sins of people who lived years or centuries before us—who may not even be related to us? For example, how can Jews be responsible for the White Invasion of the Americas or the Enslavement of Africans when almost all of us were in Europe and having our teeth kicked in by Cossacks and the like? How can modern people be blamed for the sins of people who lived hundreds of years ago? No one living in America today enslaved Africans, or fought with Jackson or Custer in the many Indian Wars, or expelled the Mexicans from Texas or California. And so, when someone tries to blame us moderns —or to induce guilt—for the sins of the past, the illogic of such misbegotten thinking is galling and repellent. Terrible things have been done in the past, but modern people are not at fault. Why then would some be tempted down this path of projecting guilt—and is Rabbi Heschel one of them?
There is a tendency among sensitive and loving people to take on guilt that they do not deserve. They look at the world’s problems and feel empathy for those who suffer, and they wish with all their hearts that things would be better, and then they transform their empathy into guilt. It happens all the time, and there is even a local example. Remember the Sandusky Scandal and how many people in State College began with sadness and outrage but then progressed to guilt. The crimes were committed by an individual and were kept secret. They were even missed by the child-welfare authorities. This was not a communal sin, but there was so much community guilt that the local clergy put together teams to talk to people and help them deal with guilt for sins they did not commit. Shock and terrible sadness were appropriate, but not guilt. Not responsibility. One was guilty; we were not all responsible.
Bothered by Rabbi Heschel’s exhortation, I decided to look up the definition of the word responsibility. As it turns out, there are five definitions—and some light began to dawn in my mind about the point this great Tzaddik was trying to make.
(1) the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over someone.
"A true leader takes responsibility for the team and helps them achieve goals."
(2) the state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something.
"The group has claimed responsibility for a string of murders."
(3) the opportunity or ability to act independently and make decisions without authorization.
"We would expect individuals lower down the organization to take on more
responsibility."
(4) a thing that one is required to do as part of a job, role, or legal obligation.
“He will take over the responsibilities of overseas director.”
(5) a moral obligation to behave correctly toward or in respect of.
"Individuals have a responsibility to control personal behavior."
When I heard Rabbi Heschel’s exhortation, “Some are guilty. All are responsible,” I was thinking about Definition #2 (the state of being to blame for something). This is the basis of my argument. However, if Rabbi Heschel means Definition #1 (having a duty to deal with something) or perhaps Definition #4 (being required to help—as a function of our Jewishness) or Definition #5 (our moral obligation to participate in Tikkun Olam/The Repair of the World), then this makes all the difference in the world. I am not being told to feel guilty about the sins of past generations, but rather reminded that I have a responsibility to help right our societal ship.
Back to the Egyptians. Our minds strain to fathom God’s justice. Could not God customize the punishment so that only the guilty suffer? Or would that kind of punishment be ineffective—not accomplish God’s purposes of teaching a moral lesson to the world? Perhaps God’s stated intention—“to mete out punishments to all the gods of Egypt” (Exodus 12.12 )—requires a greater “stage” for effective communication. Or has God already tried the individual punishment strategy with the many Pharaohs and their many accomplices over the four hundred years the Israelites suffer cruel bondage? Or could there be a societal guilt—given that the Egyptian people have had some four hundred years to do whatever it takes to repent and change?
We try to understand God’s justice, but we are small-minded and possessed of limited wisdom. As God challenges Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth…?” (Job 38.4) Are profound humility and trust in the Divine our only options? Or can Midrash help us?
The Torah speaks of a group called the Erev Rav / Mixed Multitude, non-Israelites who join us as we are leaving Egypt. Could they be Egyptians who separate themselves from the immorality of their country—siding with God’s justice and the Israelites? Think about the blood-on-the-doorpost rituals. Does God really need to see blood to know who is inside, or is this a chance for everyone—Hebrew and Egyptian—to choose sides? Could there have been other chances—opportunities for non-Israelites to join God’s people and thus not be party to the immorality of slavery—or its consequences? When surveying God’s justice, a wider purview can help us see.