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by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar
It’s been a head-spinning time in world events. Last week we witnessed the capture of Venezuela’s President in a US military raid and his subsequent arraignment on drugs and weapons charges, as well as the killing of a U.S. Citizen, Renee Nicole Good, 37, in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent during the current administration’s mass deportation campaign — resulting in demonstrations by thousands of protestors.
This week we are also witnessing a brutal crackdown by the Iranian government against its citizens, who had taken to the streets themselves, initially to protest economic conditions and then as a broader rebuke of the theocratic authoritarian regime governing the country. Reports suggest that over 3,000 protestors have been killed.
Meanwhile, the Jewish community witnessed an antisemitic arson attack on a synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi last Saturday, destroying Beth Israel Congregation’s library and administrative offices, along with two Torah scrolls. The synagogue is unusable for the foreseeable future. It currently houses the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, whose curriculum Society Hill Synagogue uses in our Hebrew School. The synagogue had already been firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1967, when its rabbi spoke out in support of the civil rights movement.
One day after the arson attack in Mississippi, a synagogue in Pasadena, California, which had burned down as a result of wildfires last year, was vandalized with graffiti that spelled out “RIP Renee, [expletive] Zionizm [sic].”
In an act that was even less ambiguous in its allegation of “Zionist” ties to world events which had little or nothing to do with the Jewish people, the State of Israel, or Zionism, the acting President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, days after the capture of President Nicolas Maduro, declared that the capture “undoubtedly had Zionist undertones,” an assertion for which there is no evidence and that plays into centuries-old antisemitic conspiracies about Jewish plots of global domination.
I raise all of this to name that, while there is no doubt that the war in Gaza over the last two years — launched by Hamas’ terrorist attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 — has been devastating to all involved, while there is no doubt that the people of Gaza have suffered immensely and that there have been repeated episodes of settlers terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank, and while Israel should absolutely not be immune from criticism, we are witnessing ways in which anti-Israel and anti-Zionist rhetoric often masks an underlying, fundamental antisemitism, which, consciously or otherwise, scapegoats Jews as the worst manifestation of whatever phenomenon is most pernicious in the world, and in which society after society sees Jews as a stand-in for whatever is most villainous at that moment.
While on the one hand it is too broad of a brush to paint all anti-Israel rhetoric as antisemitic, it is similarly oversimplified to imagine that no antisemitism can be encountered in anti-Israel or anti-Zionist language. There absolutely can be and there absolutely is.
We pray for a world in which each people has a pathway to dignity and peace, and we pray for a world in which antisemitism, and all forms of hate, no longer cause harm to people and to communities.
Next, I’d like to share the D’var Torah I offered last Friday night in honor of our Immigration and Citizenship Shabbat organized by our Social Action Committee, chaired by Society Hill Synagogue member Judge Steven A. Morley (retired):
One of the opening verses of this week’s parashah, this week’s Torah portion, has always felt ominous to me, probably because it is:
Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph
Vayakam melekh-hadash al-Mitzrayim asher lo-yada et-Yosef
וַיָקָם מֶלֶךְ־חָדָשׁ עַל־מִצְרַיִם אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יָדַע אֶת־יוֹסֵף
This comes on the heels of the description that our ancestor Jacob, also known as Israel, and all of his children and their households had made their way down to Egypt — that that generation had died out. The text says that the Israelites had been fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased very greatly, such that the land was filled with them.
And then comes the verse: “Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph.”
We have the hindsight to know that the ominous feeling invoked by this verse was justified, years of oppression and slavery trailed in its wake. But even if we didn’t know the fate that was to befall the Israelites, I am imagining that those similar feelings would still be invoked.
The question is, why? Why does this feature of “not knowing” Joseph present such a problem?
The ancient rabbis, Rav and Shmuel, debate the meaning of this verse as a whole. One takes the literal meaning; it means what it says: a new king who did not know Joseph arose. The other says that couldn’t be; for starters, the Torah says nothing about a previous king having died, an otherwise strange omission, and also, this rabbi questions, how could an Egyptian king not, at the very least, have known about Joseph? Joseph, after all, had saved a generation of Egyptians through his interpretation of Pharoah’s dreams and through his advice to Pharaoh to save food for a forthcoming famine. Instead, this rabbi says, “he did not know” means, “he made himself as though he did not know.” As Avivah Zornberg writes, “this interpretation allows for repression, the strategy of un-knowing what one knows. Pharaoh’s mind, his heart, numbs itself so as not to know.”
Yada, to know someone, in Jewish tradition, in most cases, means something far more fully-dimensional than just “to be aware of.” As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel points out, it often connotes a level of intimacy. In fact it is the word often used as a euphemism for physical intimacy, Adam “yada” — knew Eve, and she conceived.
Sometimes yada, to know, means a reception into the soul, there is a soul connection. At the very least, Heschel writes, to know in the Torah often means to have a sense of concern for someone, a sense of inner engagement, dedication, or attachment.
In Psalm 31, the poet sings, “I will rejoice and be glad for Your steadfast love, because You have seen my affliction, yadata b’tzarot nafshi, You have known the troubles of my soul.” King David sings a love song to God, because yadata “you have known the troubles of my soul.” You know my inner experience.
That is what we yearn for.
In fact, in this very Torah portion, just a couple of chapters later, it is that very yada, knowing/being known, that unleashes the power of the Exodus story.
“The Israelites were groaning under the bondage and cried out,” it says in Exodus 2:23, “and their cry for help from the bondage rose up to God. God heard their moaning, and God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and “vayeda Elohim, God knew.” God knew all that needed to be known at that point about what was going on for us.
Knowing in Torah is not just cognitive awareness, but identification and understanding, a reverberation between soul and its source.
Conversely, it is the very absence of that knowing that ominously rolls in at the beginning of our Torah portion, clouding the future, the livelihood, the very existence of the Israelites.
“There arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph,” who in no way took into account the humanity of Joseph, and therefore of his descendants.
While perhaps it takes a Passover seder to be able to identify with that chapter of our people’s story, we all, I imagine, can tap into moments in our lives when we have felt profoundly not-known; not understood; not fully appreciated in our full dimensionality, in our full human-ness, with all the dignity that should entail. I invite you to think about such a time.
It could be related to one’s Jewish identity, watching people dismiss antisemitism without fully knowing or understanding all that being Jewish entails; it could be our professional lives, a new leader not knowing all the energy we’ve poured into our workplace, all the history we have with that community; it could be a family dynamic, being regularly placed into a particular box, not fully being taken into account for all of the complexity we bring.
To be not known, to have to re-prove ourselves, to re-establish ourselves, to feel as though there is no history or shared understanding to draw upon, can be a profoundly destabilizing experience.
Which brings us to this Shabbat. On this Shabbat on which we are centering the experience of the immigrant, the refugee, we can imagine all the ways in which those who are journeying to these shores, trying to find a home and put down roots, feel this sense of profound unknownness.
And yet that is the very thing our tradition asks, or I should say commands, of us. As God tells Moses, among the ordinances to set before the Israelites, “You shall not oppress a stranger v’atem yadatem,” there’s that word again: yadatem, for you know the feelings, the heart, of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.
We’re being asked to ensure that the experience of the strangers, the immigrants in our communities, is not one of alienation, of displacement, of feeling not-known, because that is an experience we ourselves are familiar with, and as Jews, with the collective consciousness of our experience through the generations, and in our personal lives as human beings.
We’re being invited to broaden our sphere of concern to feel a sense of identification with those who must be going through something similar at this moment.
This sense of known-ness in Torah, the ominousness of its absence but more importantly, the satiation that comes from its presence, is something we are invited to feel on this Shabbat and further, to ensure that others feel it, too.
Wishing you a Shabbat of the satiation of the known.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi K.
