Shemos--Same As The Old Boss?

“’And a new king arose who knew not Joseph’--Rav and Shmuel: one says the king was new, one says his policies were new" [TB Sotah 11a]

Among other things inspired by the Trump administration, there have appeared attempts to draw from the Jewish experience attempting to find a salient analog for this administration.

Those who haven’t compared Trump outright to Haman [if not Hitler] have occasionally made him out to be a modern Ahasuerus with Stephen Bannon playing the role of Haman himself.

Bernard-Henri Levi has actually drawn the most direct analog between the changing or changeling Pharaoh of this parsha and Trump [find the quote].

It is eminently possible—pace Levi—that Trump’s mercurial temperament may eventually lead some of his most ardent supporters to experience a painful disillusionment akin to Exodus 1, particularly if his oft-stated penchant for the “Ultimate Deal” forcefully overrides his ostensible sympathies for a permanent Jewish presence over the Green Line.

However, not only are none of the aforementioned analogs salient, but one can find better ones in the literature, some not far off.

Start with the Pharaonic.  There are several hints scattered around the text in Genesis that the “previous” Pharaoh may not have been as Hebrephilic as might be assumed by the “melech chadash”.  To wit: Pharaoh actually hands almost all administrative power of attorney to Joseph, simultaneously absolving him from the wrath of a possibly angry and restless and starving populace when austerity measures are imposed.  (“And the people cried to Pharaoh—go to Joseph….”)

(This is also reminiscent—conversely—of the relationship between Ahasuerus and Haman as described by Yoram Hazony in “The Dawn”, his classic political study of Megillas Esther: spooked by Bigtan and Teresh’s assassination attempt, the King takes all decision making out of the political system and concentrates it in Haman’s hands.  It is possible that Pharaoh had the same idea by handing power of attorney to Joseph, and would have given himself the royal privilege of executing him—like Ahasuerus did Haman—if royal prerogatives were threatened.  (One might notice a few linguistic parallels between Miketz and Esther that the writers certainly made use of: “yafked pekidim”, for one.]

(We also might mention the ethnic tension that exists even under this ostensibly benign regime: even before Joseph gets out of jail, the pejorative references to his Hebrew origins by Mrs. Potiphar and the wine steward; even after Joseph has come to power, there’s the blatant refusal of the Egyptians in his court to eat at the same table as the 10 Hebrew tribes.)

Additionally, in Vayechi, when Joseph has to negotiate directly with Pharaoh to bury his father back in Hevron under suspicions of dual loyalty (maybe the earliest Biblical example thereof), Yosef has to threaten to blow the lid off of Pharaoh’s veneer of omniscience (“I keep my oath to my father, or I reveal that you don’t know Hebrew”), we get a glimpse that the relationship is more tenuous than a casual glance at the text reveals.  (If one removes the possible Hebrephobic context, one also reveals a natural tension and mistrust between a #1 and his #2 which is otherwise endemic to politics.)

In the end, using either Pharaonic narrative—pre- or post-Joseph—probably does less to illustrate how to gauge the “Jewish” relationship with Trump, from either angle. 

Even more forced would be an analogy to Ahasuerus, who TB Megilla describes as being nearly as anti-Semitic as Haman: celebrating (erroneously) the perceived non-fulfilment of Jeremiah’s prophecy of return after 70 years, and punctuating said celebration by profaning the Temple hardware; putting a halt to the previously greenlit rebuilding of the second Temple (maybe he wasn’t so sure he had the count right, after all); and, finally, letting Haman craft and promulgate the genocidal edict he always wanted to issue but never really could bring himself to.   So—very much unlike our current President—this King assumed his office with clearly Judeophobic inclinations, and his policy bent that way from the get go, particularly with regards Jerusalem.

The better example?

Darius, the son of Ahasuerus and Esther herself, who reverses his father’s edict halting the rebuilding of the second Temple that his predecessor Cyrus has initially greenlighted.  As noted in TB RH 3b-4a, the esteem in which Darius was initially held “soured” (as the Talmud puts it); one reason given is that he gave specific construction edicts vis a vis the Temple, so that in case the Jews proved disloyal, he could dismantle it forthwith.  Yet everything eventually turned out mostly better than it had been prior to his reign: he was no Cyrus, but he certainly wasn’t his father.

The possible lessons?

For the harder “Right”:  Rav Shimon Schwab was known to say the Americans are not our enemies, but they are not our friends.  Before one attaches willy-nilly any reflexively Judeophilic intentions to even a benign ruler—even one who makes some very clear reversals of a predecessor’s hostile policies—one would be behooved to remember “Al tivtechu bindivim” and “Al tisvada larashus”.   One should definitely be thankful that the administrational alternative didn’t come to pass; but don’t be too quick to “marry” oneself to all its initiatives.  Bannon's dispensability should be proof enough.

For the progressive “Left”:  Stop trying to apply “Esav sonei es Yaakov” and other “machmir” interpretations of governmental Judeophobia to this administration.   For one thing, any Leftist “chumras” are almost mezuyafin mitocham: one might think them as cute as counterintuitive, but they actually look and sounds ridiculous.  Furthermore, there might have been a time where anti-Trumpers could attempt to make a prima facie case that this administration was either hostile to Jewish initiatives, or at least, not any “different” than their WH predecessors, which the overwhelming majority of leftists celebrated and protected.  Assertions of that WH “having our backs” were more than arguable then, and are almost entirely indefensible now in the wake of the new Jerusalem policy.  

They kept trying to say—and still try to say—“pen”.  Apparently, the answer is “ken”.

Shemos: Syllabi

The question is asked in the very first Rashi in Bereishis why the Torah doesn’t start from “Hachodesh hazeh lachem rosh chadashim”, in Bo. The answer there is given that its to teach the lesson that, b’kitzur, G-d giveth and taketh away—-or, more poignantly, G-d taketh away and giveth to someone else you may not at all like—-at his leisure and convenience, because everything belongs to Him.

Jump to the beginning of Sefer Vayikra and from the outset we are referred back to Bereishis, when the posuk says “Adam ki yakriv mi-kem”: your sacrificial offerings msut be as free from the taint of gezel as if from “Adam”, i.e. the categorical impossibility of Adam HaRishon stealing anything, because everything in the world belonged to him.

(I’m not sure whether Tony Montana had this Rashi in mind when he adopted “The World Is Yours" as his motto. However, he knew when someone was a "chazzar": "the guy, he wants more than what he needs.")

This provides another one of the classical midrashic-haskafic conundra that pop up from time to time (e.g., the free will mishna in Avos, “hakol tzafui he-hasreshut nitnah”), but I propose that the apparent tension inherent in these two Rashis—everything is G-d’s vs. everything is Adam’s—can be used to illustrate the links between what might be termed the central theme of S'farim Bereishis and Vayikra, how Shemos serves as the bridge between the two, and how the "bridging" is the theme of Shemos itself.

Once at a (mighta been an UWS) shabbos meal I mused aloud that Sefer Bereshis was, when you got down to it, all about…relationships. Specifically, relationships involving…relations; especially, inappropriate relations, ones that ran the gamut in levels of impropriety.

(What I’m obviously circumlocuting here is that I said Bereishis was all about sex. It got everyones attention but ultimately detracted from what I was trying to point out. Occupational hazard.)

One way to illustrate this—-and, tangentially, the tension between a universal G-d- given absolute morality yet one reliant to some degree of human intuition—-is the fact that ostensibly, the 7 mitzvos benei noach weren’t given until after the Flood, leaving the dor hamabul with a possible ex-post facto defense. Obviously, since it didn’t hold up in Court, there must have been a reason for its rejection. The Gemara in Sanhedrin details that, really, the 7 mitzvot are couched in various remazim from psukim in Bereishis when G-d talks to Adam, so the law was, as it were, already “on the books”.

Yet the fact that it wasn’t truly codified until after the mabul (hence “mitvzos benei Noach”) indicates that G-d was, to some extent, relying upon humankind to, as it were, almost intuit morality on their own (this may be one way to explain the tzelem elokim). G-d almost allowed there to be a moral laboratory, with very little constraint upon experimentation; witness the description of how idolatry began and proliferated, and the concomitant widespread explosion of sexual practices (which, Rashi and the medrash intimate, involved serious issues of lack of consent in many cases). Yet G-d didn’t close the lab until it became clear that there were no rules anymore whatsoever and the everyone’s aim was to just hurt one another. Post-flood, G-d steps in and makes the rules a bit more clear; its obvious that people needed to be pointed in the right direction.

Despite the Divine input and legislation, these themes obviously recur in a loop throughout Sefer Bereishis: both in terms of arayot (two examples: Avraham having to fight two monarchs to keep them off his wife, and the whole episode with Er and Onan and Yehuda and Tamar; see my Tznius series) and damim (for an “international” example, see Nimrod and Avraham; for an internecine example, see Yosef and his brothers).

By the time we get to the end of Sefer Bereishis, it seems that some lessons have been learned the hard way. This is indicated at the beginning of this weeks parsha: “shivim nefesh ve-yosef haya be-mitzrayim:” some semblance of a family unit with a set of stable relations between persons and sexes had been established, as a result of the travails involving Yosef.

Shemos indicates that some of the lessons of Bereishis have been learned—witness Shifra and Puah’s defiance of Pharaoh and the culture of life promulgated by the Jewish women in the direst of circumstances (“shesh be-keres echad”; “ken yirbeh”).

Then again, it indicates that there is much to be learned, both on an international level (the first recorded instance of the imposition of a specifically racio-ethno-nationally based enslavement, the Curse of Canaan notwithstanding) and internecine (Moshe, “refing” the Datan-Aviram bout, realizing that the lessons are obviously not yet learned. “Achen noda ha-davar”, indeed).

Sefer Shemos, then, links the “kol ha-aretz shel hakadosh baruch hu hi” of Bereishis 1:1 and the “Adam ha-Rishon lo hikriv min ha-gezel” of Vayikra 1:2, the bridge between the true ben Adam le-chavero: the Genesis Syllabus, if you will--and, the ultimate ben Adam la-Makom: the Vayikra Syllabus.

In truth, the syllabi aren’t all that different. Which may explain why is isn’t until Kedoshim that we will see “Ve-ahavta la-re’acha kamocha.

Somewhere after the Vayikra midterms.