An In or Out Moment Is Upon Us

There’s a line in the Haggadah that seems to me especially meaningful this year. And, although my letters to you all have been getting darker and darker as the year has progressed since last October, the line in question—when read in the correct light and with the correct background information—that line contains a message of hope that I think may be just the thing for all of us as we live through our annual festival of freedom and feel, it seems with each passing week, less certain where this will all lead.

The line opens the long Magid section in which seder-meal participants fulfill the mitzvah of telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The setting really could not be better known. The leader uncovers the matzot, lifts the plate, and recites words we’ve all heard a thousand times. “This is the bread of affliction. Let all who are hungry come and eat…and let us gather together next year in Jerusalem.” Most seder-regulars can easily recite the words from memory. At some tables, they are sung aloud, which only makes it easier to remember them from year to year. But hiding behind the words is a riddle that will feel particularly relevant to this nightmarish year through which we have all been living since last October.

The invitation to the hungry to come and join in the feast is suggestive of the natural sense of hospitality that Jewish people bring easily to the celebration of Jewish holidays. But there is a problem here, and it has to do with the second part of that invitation, the part represented above by the three dots that separate the invitation to the hungry and the prayer that we all have seder together next year in Jerusalem. The familiar words, kol di-tz’rikh yeitei v’yifsach, are often mistranslated as “Let all who are in need come and celebrate Passover with us.” That makes it sound like a mere restatement of the opening remark: “let those who are hungry come and eat / let those who have no seder to attend feel welcome at ours.”

So that’s a nice sentiment. But that’s not precisely what the words mean. The Torah enjoins upon the Israelites the eternal obligation to celebrate Passover by offering up the sacrifice called the paschal offering or, more commonly in Hebrew as the korban pesach or the zevach pesach and then by consuming its meat on Erev Pesach, on the Eve of Passover. That being the case, a more literal translation would be something like “Let all enter who need to share our korban pesach, our paschal offering.”

And that too, of course, is a noble thought. The Torah says unequivocally at Exodus 12:8 that “you shall eat the meat [of this sacrifice] on that night; broiled in fire and with matzah and bitter herbs shall you eat it.” So what could be more natural than helping others perform the very mitzvah your own family has already gathered to undertake?

But there’s a detail that needs to be considered: the Torah specifically requires that the Israelites consume the sacrifice in chavurot, which is to say: in pre-formed groups constituted of the specific sponsors of the specific offering they will then consume together. And, indeed, this is the law. Maimonides, for example, writes unequivocally that “the paschal offering may only be slaughtered as a specific offering for its specific sponsors,” who become the people thus entitled to consume it (Hilkhot Korban Pesah 2:1). So how can the seder leader blithely invite any in need to eat the korban with his or her own family? Such people specifically cannot accept the invitation without breaking the law.

So that’s the riddle. What the “real” answer is, who knows? But what the riddle means to me, and particularly in this year of pogrom and war and surging anti-Semitism, is that sometimes you need to step around your normal practice for the sake of a greater good. Yes, the invitee—the specific person the seder leader is addressing when inviting the hungry to come eat and the needy to share in his or her family’s paschal sacrifice—that person being invited in should have signed up for his own sacrifice, should have sponsored a korban pesach in the specific way required by law. But that’s not what happened! And who can say why not? Was the invitee too poor, too shy, or too unfamiliar with the law properly to have dealt with its requirements? Was the invitee held back by physical disabilities, or by mental or emotional ones? Was the specific person being invited in a traveler, a stranger, or perhaps an alienated local who up until that very moment was certain that the very last thing he or she wanted was to do the whole Pesach thing with someone else’s family? Whatever! This person has somehow appeared at the door. The time limit for slaughtering the pesach is long past. The kohanim, the Temple priests, are all off to attend to their own seder meals with their own families. The Temple itself is shut down for the night, its nighttime security detail in place but otherwise empty. The moment has clearly passed to do this the right way. And yet, as the burden shifts from obligation to generosity, from harshness to kindness, from halakhah to aggadah, the host, accepting the situation not as it ought to be or could be but as it actually is, turns to the person standing at the door and, preferencing the real over the ideal, invites that person in to join the family inside and to participate in celebrating Passover by consuming the flesh of the sacrificial offering with which the festival shares its name. The folk genius of the Jewish people allows for things like this, for people knowingly to step occasionally around the rules for the sake of a greater good.

And that is where we are today in the wake of the Simchat Torah pogrom. What is needed, more than anything really, is for the Jewish people to set aside the political or even religious debates that divide us and to face the future united as one people possessed of one Torah and devoted to the service of the one God. As everybody knows all too well, we are a fractious people. Arguing is what we do best. (The old joke about “two Jews, three opinions” is funny and not funny at the same time.) But the bottom line is that what we need to do now is to come together. We don’t all have to agree about everything. We certainly don’t all have to like Bibi or his politics, and neither do we all have to agree whether the IDF has done all it could to free the hostages held captive in Gaza. We certainly don’t have to agree with anything our own President or Vice President have said about Israel over the last half year, both speaking so regularly out of both sides of their own mouths that we barely even notice the disconnect between today’s comment and yesterday’s and the day before’s. But what the Haggadah is saying is that we have to open the door and invite all in who are somehow still on the outside wondering if they even would be welcome at a seder without having first signed up to sponsor a korban pesach in the Temple.

What that line in the Haggadah about the korban pesach and the unsigned-up stranger at the door is there to teach us is that the pursuit of the greater good will always be the wiser choice. That thought should be our watchword as we negotiate these stormy seas on which we are all afloat this year: the key is to draw into our ranks all who would seated at our table and then, united and with one voice, to face the world and demand justice—justice for the captives in Gaza, justice for the people whose own lives were ruined on October 7 or whose loved ones were murdered, justice for Israel in the international halls of justice that so frequently, almost routinely, treat Israel unfairly and unreasonably harshly. If we can’t speak as one now, then when exactly will we? And if not now, then when?

If we can manage that, we’ll have done a lot. Yes, there will be those who cannot bring themselves to stand with Israel or with the Jewish people. I regret that, but I also accept it—but I am thinking about swelling our ranks, not thinning them. And so, even with the seder meals behind us now, I invite you all to join me in opening up the doors—of our homes, of our synagogues, of our communities—to all those Jewish people (and they are legion) on the outside and inviting them in to stand with Israel and to stand with all of us who stand with Israel. And allies in the non-Jewish world whose hearts beat with Israel are welcome in my house too. There are moments in history when you have to stand up or back off, to be in or out, to declare yourself a part or apart. This, I think (and, yes, fear) is one of those moments. 

Pesach 2024 - Leil Shimmurim

History is filled with Rubicon moments, moments at which the course of history is altered by an event so widely understood to be of colossal importance that everything that follows feels related to that specific juncture in time, to that specific event. Pearl Harbor was that kind of moment in history. 9/11, too. So must have been also July 4, 1776. And the original Rubicon moment—when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River into Italy in January of 49 BCE and thus initiated the insurrection that led to the end of the Roman Republic and, eventually, to the reorganization of the nation as the Roman Empire with Caesar’s biological nephew and adopted son Augustus as its first emperor—that was (obviously) the first of them all. The famous words Caesar spoke aloud as he crossed the river into Italy, “the die is cast,” sums up the moment aptly: just as you can’t unroll dice, so did Caesar mean to say that his act of leading an army across the border into Italy could not be undone and would have to be allowed to lead wherever it went as the future unfolded in the wake of his decision. In the history of the Jewish people, Pesach itself is the original Rubicon moment. And it involved crossing a body of water as well!

Was October 7 such a moment for Israel? Was it one for Hamas? Or was it one for both, and also for diasporan Jews in all the various lands of our dispersion? I suppose those questions could conceivably all have different answers, but it doesn’t feel that way to me: as the months have passed since that horrific day last fall, things feel to me more and more as though the Simchat Torah pogrom permanently altered the course forward into the future for all directly and indirectly concerned parties. As Pesach approaches, this notion of a Rubicon moment has become the lens through which I feel myself called to think of the Simchat Torah pogrom.

The specific way in which the conflict in Gaza has poisoned the atmosphere not solely on our college campuses, but even in our nation’s high schools and elementary schools, is by now common knowledge, as is also the way that this conflict has opened the gates to the expression of overt anti-Semitism in the American work place and at other public events that feel totally unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict like the Christmas Tree lighting in Rockefeller Center last December. Nor are the halls of government immune: the fact, once unimaginable, that a member of Congress could formally decline to condemn people in her own district chanting “Death to America” at an anti-Israel rally and that that refusal be greeted by her colleagues with an almost universal shrug, is only this week’s example of how things have changed for Jewish Americans in the last half year. That people at the highest echelons of our American government could overtly—and without any sense of shame—suggest that American material support for Israel could, and possibly even should, be conditional on the elected leaders of Israel obeying the instructions of their American masters rather than those of their own constituents is just further proof that October 7 was a Rubicon movement for us all.

But history is not all Rubicon moments. Two weeks ago, I wrote to you about the slow deterioration of the Israelites’ status in ancient Egypt as year after year passed until their enslavement ensued almost naturally. Could slavery have been averted? Surely, it could have been: the Israelites had scores upon scores of years to pack up and go back to Canaan, but chose instead to remain permanently in Egypt on the assumption that their status would never change, that they would always be welcome, that no one would ever resent them as privileged foreigners living off the fat of somebody else’s land. I won’t repeat here what I wrote there, but the bottom line was (and is) that they could have saved themselves but, because there was no specific Rubicon moment, no pivot, no event that changed everything, they apparently chose to assume that nothing was changed at all. And then, just like that (or so it must have seemed), they were slaves possessed of no civil rights at all in a world in which midwives were charged not with assisting women in labor but with murdering the babies born to them.

I’ve written before about my relationship with Erna Neuhauser, my parents’ next-door neighbor. Born in 1898, Erna was in her 60s and early 70s when I was a teenager. But, long before that, she was a young married woman with a young daughter in Nazi Vienna, the city of her birth and the place in which she grew up. Some readers may recall that I’ve mentioned many times that Erna was a childhood friend of the woman later known as Miep Gies, the woman who risked her life years later to hide Anne Frank and her family in German-occupied Amsterdam. But the reason I mention her today is not related to Miep Gies’s story, but to her own. Erna was the first Shoah survivor I knew intimately. Of course, she never let anyone call her that because she was, she always insisted, not a survivor at all: she, her husband Ernst, and their daughter Liesel had been able to escape Vienna in 1938, first traveling to Sweden (where her brother had acquired residency earlier on and was able to sponsor them as refugees) and then to New York, where they settled and lived out their lives. But, also of course, she was a survivor—of the Nazification of Austria, of the intense anti-Semitism Anschluss brought in its terrible wake, of the degradation experienced daily, sometimes hourly, by the Jews of Vienna. And it was her story that framed my first effort to think seriously about the Shoah and to establish my own relationship to the events of those horrific years.

It was from Erna that I learned that the difference between Rubicon moments and non-Rubicon ones is not as clear as historians sometimes make it out to be. Yes, the moment Hitler annexed Austria—the event then as now known simply the Anschluss, the “Annexation”—was the Rubicon moment back across none could step. But it only seemed that way after the fact and what really happened was not one disastrous transformation from being welcome, respected citizens to despised Untermenschen, but the slow, step-by-step deprivation of the rights and privileges to which all had become accustomed. Jews couldn’t get their hair cut in non-Jewish barbershops. Jews could no longer ride the streetcars. Jewish children could no longer attend public schools. Some patriotic souls hung on, certain that things in their beloved homeland would soon improve. Others fled—some to America, others to the U.K. or to Sweden, still others to British Palestine. Many committed suicide in despair. I remember Erna saying that things somehow changed slowly and quickly at the same time. I’m feeling that right now in our nation, that sense that things are unfolding quickly and slowly somehow at the same time.

Wasn’t it just yesterday that Jewish parents would have been overjoyed to send a child to Harvard or to Stanford no matter what the cost? When did it feel reasonable not to wear a kippah on the subway or even on the LIRR? At what point did it feel wiser for Jewish teachers in New York City’s high schools not to mention their pro-Israeli sentiments for fear of being attacked by their own students? When did it start to feel normal for synagogues to hire armed guards to protect worshipers? When did I stop speaking in Hebrew on the phone in public places? I can’t even say that I don’t do that anymore—but I certainly don’t do it if I think someone might overhear me.

This isn’t the Weimar Republic we’re living in and it certainly isn’t Nazi Vienna. The center, at least so far, is definitely holding. Both presumed nominees in this fall’s presidential election self-present as allies of the Jewish community. The issue of anti-Semitism on campus is finally being addressed by people with the authority to effect real change. And, at least eventually, I still think reason will prevail, that people will come back to their senses and understand that Israel is not only our nation’s sole true friend in the Middle East, but also a fully reliable ally. But I am also sensitive to Pesach—now almost upon us—not solely being our annual celebration of freedom, but also our annual opportunity to obey the Haggadah’s famous injunction to think of ourselves not only as now-free people, but as once-enslaved ones…and to use that opportunity to consider how the Israelites ended up as slaves after having watched small micro-aggressive incidents become more and more overt, more difficult to endure, more suggestive of what was soon to come.

At Exodus 12:42, the Torah calls the eve of Pesach by the mysterious name leil shimmurim, a night of “keepings,” of “things kept or guarded.” What that means exactly has been a matter of debate for millennia. But for me it means: a night of holding on to history, of seeing time present through the lens of time past, of understanding our current situation as a function of what we’ve already experienced. Pesach is a hopeful holiday that celebrates the liberation of slaves from their bondage. But there is a monitory side to Pesach as well, one intended to make us think carefully about the present by focusing our gaze on stories from the past and in their light formulating our hopes for the future. Elijah comes to my seder table specifically with his intoxicating promise of redemption and survival. But Erna also comes, and her message is far more sobering than intoxicating…even after four cups of wine.

Like a Letter Left Unread

The whole eclipse thing earlier this week made a big impression on me, but not (maybe) for the reason you’d think.

It all started when I mentioned to one of my grandchildren that I hope it will be a clear, non-cloudy day when the sun goes into eclipse. This was met with the kind of equanimity only a child can muster up effortlessly: “Me too, Saba. But if it’s so cloudy you can’t see anything, the next eclipse is in just twenty years and we can see it then.” Well, okay, I thought, and just how old will I be on August 23, 2044? You see where we’re going here: I surely do hope to be somewhere in the summer of 2044 looking up through safety sunglasses at a clear, cloudless sky as the moon passes before the sun and hides it totally from view for a few minutes. But suddenly the whole discussion made me feel mortal—not fragile especially, just more aware of where I am actuarially than I generally enjoy being. Of course, it could have been way worse: she could have reminded me that Halley’s comet is due back in the summer of 2061.

How to relate to a total eclipse of the sun is a different matter entirely, however. For most moderns, it’s just a thing—something that happens every so often and creates a dramatic effect for a few minutes, then stops happening. Not good or bad, not something overly to focus on and certainly nothing to fear. But our sages in ancient times were less certain: possessed of the conviction that the Creator at least occasionally speaks through the medium of Creation itself, they sought meaning in all sorts of natural phenomena that moderns tend to wave away. Nor is this solely a rabbinic thing—the biblical story of Noah ends with God’s observation that rainbows are not just natural phenomena that sometimes occur, but signs from God that there will never again be a flood that wipes out humanity as was the case in the days of Noah and his ark. And it’s for just that reason that tradition dictates that we recite a short prayer—just a few words acknowledging the rainbow as a symbol of optimism and hope—when we see a rainbow. How often does this happen? Often enough! Joan and I saw the most beautiful rainbow in Niagara Falls, New York, just last week on our drive to Toronto. And, yes, I said the blessing.

But the rabbis were less sure about eclipses. There’s a semi-famous passage in the Talmud (at Sukkah 29a) that declares that any solar eclipse should be taken as a bad sign for the world, for example. And the text then goes on to flesh that thought out with an elucidatory parable: a solar eclipse, they taught, is God behaving roughly in the manner of an earthly king who prepares a giant banquet for all of his servants, perhaps as a way of thanking them for their loyal service. But then, suddenly, the king becomes aware of some specific way in which his servants have conspired to do him ill. So what does he do? He can’t cancel the banquet entirely—that would be (I’m guessing) bad form—but what he can do is instruct his personal valet to remove the torches that had been illuminating the banquet hall. And that, according to the parable, is what a solar eclipse is like: suddenly aware of some way in which humanity has failed to behave honorably or decorously but not quite prepared to wipe clean the slate as in Noah’s day (and which God had promised never again to do anyway), God simply darkens the sun as a way of expression divine displeasure.

Other sages, however, took a more nuanced view. Rabbi Meir, for example, agreed that both solar and lunar eclipses are bad omens, but solely for the Jewish people not for the entire world. And he too had a parable to back up his lesson. The situation that pertains during an eclipse, he taught, bodes poorly for the Jewish people only because they are m’lummadin b’makkoteihem. That’s not that easy an expression to translate, which even Rabbi Meir apparently thought might be the case. And so he too offered up a parable to make his point a bit clearer. A solar or lunar eclipse, he taught, is like when a teacher comes into the classroom and he is already holding a giant razor strop, the kind that was apparently used in Rabbi Meir’s day to punish school children for their poor behavior. Who gets the most jumpy upon noticing the strop in the teacher’s hand, Rabbi Meir asked rhetorically. And he then answered his own question: the student who is beaten with it the most often gets the most nervous—because that student supposes that the teacher is intending to beat him again. And that is what it means to be m’lummadin b’makkoteihem, as above: Jewish people are so used to suffering and being again and again beaten down, must not it be they specifically who are being prompted to fear the worst when the sun disappears and the world is plunged into darkness? (The words literally mean “well-versed in their own beatings” or something like that.)

Still other rabbis took an even more nuanced approach. Solar eclipses, they opined, are bad news for everybody, whereas eclipses of the moon are meant specifically to augur bad times for the Jewish people. And the rationale behind this approach has its own logic to it: the Gentile nations, who use a solar calendar to count off their years of their lives, are addressed through the solar event, whereas Jews, who maintain a mostly lunar calendar, God admonishes by making the moon disappear briefly from the nighttime sky. And then they go on to discuss solar eclipses, discussing the specific significance of the location of the sun in the sky when the eclipse takes place and assigning specific meaning in terms of the disaster soon to ensue to the hue the sun in eclipse takes on.

And then, as if all this weren’t enough, the Talmud goes on to quote an ancient source that lists the specific sins for which a solar eclipse may reasonably be taken as the divine response. That thought—including the peculiarly modern-sounding horror of people in an urban setting simply ignoring a woman calling out for help in fending off a would-be rapist—founders, though, on the fact that it isn’t correct: people fail to show proper respect for deceased community leaders all the time (another sin on the list) and yet the sun does not go into instant eclipse as a response!

Is there anything to any of this? We moderns understand what eclipses are and why they occur, and we also understand that they are fully naturally phenomena that are not related to, much less triggered by, the behavior of Jewish or non-Jewish terrestrials. As a result, our natural response is to turn away from tradition and make a kind of smug virtue out of feeling grateful that we know better. The Talmud, after all, is filled with ancient ideas about all sorts of things that we moderns, who understand that epilepsy is a disease and not a function of the circumstances under which the epileptic individual was conceived, can only smile at. And, indeed, the Talmud is filled with all sorts of medical observations that no one today considers even remotely to be scientific truths. So it would be more than reasonable just to wave all this away. But I have a different idea I’d like to propose, one a bit less literalist and more fanciful, but also, I think, reasonable.

In a long, fascinating passage towards the end of the talmudic tractate Berakhot, the Talmud offers up a detailed lesson regarding the correct way to interpret dreams. It’s a long passage filled with lots of theories about the meaning of dreams, but the basic principle set forward is that the importance of dreams depends fully on their interpretation. In other words, nothing in a dream means anything at all until the dream is ably interpreted by the kind of oneirocritic trained to offer up that kind of interpretation. So the dream contains solely the meaning we find embedded in it, a principle later to serve as the foundation of Freudian dream analysis. When the Talmud says that a dream left uninterpreted is like a letter left unread, it means precisely that: leaving a dream uninterpreted deprives it of the chance of having any impact on the dreamer at all, just as an unread letter has no potential to affect the person to whom it was addressed at all.

Maybe we should apply that kind of thinking to eclipses. I was in Glen Cove last Monday at 3:18 PM and, looking up at the sky through the special glasses, I saw almost all of the sun disappear behind the moon. As the sky darkened and the temperature fell, I felt the trappings of civilization falling away as I stood there under the sky and watched the sun that defines our lives here in earth darken. I felt small and fully insignificant as the planet on which I was standing and the sun it orbits and the moon that orbits it began their brief cosmic dance. My interpretation of the whole event, therefore, had to do with humility. And with resolve: more than I do usually, I felt the presence of the Earth, alive and not alive at the same time, sturdy yet fragile, immeasurably big yet also cosmically insignificant. And I felt a renewed sense of responsibility for the planet, for its climate and its ozone layer, for its air and its water, for its wellbeing and security. My interpretation of the eclipse, therefore, is that the sun and the moon teamed up to remind us that we are, at best, stewards of this world we inhabit. And that the degree to which we shuck off that feeling of insignificance that the eclipse did its best to instill in us—that will also be the degree to which we have left this rare celestial phenomenon as a letter left unread, as a dream left uninterpreted.

 

 

Israel in Egypt

Slow change is hard to notice. This, we all know from daily life: you hardly notice children growing taller if you see them every single day, whereas you are often amazed at how much those very same children have grown if you haven’t seen them in a few months. The same is true about gaining or losing weight: you can see changes easily in people you see once a year that you would hardly notice at all if you saw that same person daily. And the same is true about far more challenging aspects of life than height or weight: it’s always hard to notice incremental change.

With Pesach approaching, the story of Israel in Egypt is on my mind. There are a thousand different ways to think about that famous story, but the one that seems the most relevant—and chillingly so—to our current situation has to do with just that notion, with the concept of incremental change.

Sometimes, the Torah teaches its best lessons so subtly that it is entirely possible to miss them entirely. When Jacob comes to Egypt, he is awarded a private interview with Pharoah, something that must have been as rare and special in his day as it would be today. Their conversation is an interesting one in lots of different ways, but the most interesting part is when Jacob tells Pharaoh that he is 130 years old. It sounds a bit like a throwaway line to most: Pharaoh asks and he obviously has to answer, so he does. And yet there is a lot packed into that single number.

Jacob comes to Egypt in the second of the seven years of famine. That would make him 135 when the famine ended five years after his arrival and life in Egypt returned to normal. But the Torah makes the point later on that Jacob lived to be 147 years of age. So why, Scripture prompts us to wonder, didn’t Jacob and his clan return to Canaan once the famine ended and they needed no longer to fear starvation back at home? (Jacob would have had a full dozen years to get that all organized.) The question is unasked, so also unanswered. But then Scripture tosses some new numbers into the mix.

Joseph, who was sold into slavery at seventeen and who was thirty when he became the grand vizier of Pharaoh’s Egypt, presided over the seven years of plenty that preceded the seven years of famine. That would make him thirty-nine years of age when his father and his father’s family arrived in Egypt in the second year of famine, and forty-four years of age when, five years later, the famine ended. That being the case, he would have been fifty-six when, twelve years later, Jacob died. But the last lines of Genesis report that Joseph lived to be 110 years of age, which means that the Israelites would have been living in Egypt for something like fifty-four years when Joseph died.

Eventually, a Pharaoh came to the throne who, to quote Scripture, “knew not Joseph” and that was the Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites. Were there Pharaohs in between the one who welcomed Jacob’s family to Egypt and the one who knew not Joseph? The Bible doesn’t say. But what it does say—albeit subtly—is that the Israelites were in Egypt for more than half a century, and possibly a lot longer than that, when their situation had finally deteriorated to the point at which they could no longer just go home and, in fact, they had no choice but to endure the misery that slavery brought them in that land not their own.

They should obviously have left when the famine ended, but they didn’t. I suppose they eventually realized that. (After the fact, everybody’s a chokhom.) But my question has to do with the years between the end of the famine and the rise of the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.

Let’s imagine another half-century passed as things began to deteriorate for the Jews of Egypt. At first, it was small things, what moderns would call instances of extra-legal microaggression. Then as now, these kind of things were easy to shrug off: an overheard insult, a vulgar joke, an instance of being made to feel unwelcome in familiar places—in the locker room at the gym or at the pool or in the supermarket. But public opinion began slowly to shift as the Israelites were increasingly less welcome in their host country, increasingly resented, increasingly disliked. Could they have stemmed that tide by acting forcefully to make things right? There’s no answer to that question, but in my fantasy version of the long stretch of time I’m imagining between Jacob’s death and the Israelites’ eventually enslavement, things began slowly to snowball as the Israelites’ prosperity was resented, their clannish ways disliked, and their refusal to embrace the national religion of Egypt found more and more insulting.

But the Israelites failed to notice any of that. Or to take any of it too seriously. They withdrew into their communities, failing entirely to understand the depth of the antipathy they were dealing with as they circled their wagons and took pride in the degree to which they had managed to keep the world at bay while, at the same time, missing the point about the level of rage that was slowly reaching boiling point in the world in which they actually lived. In other words, they managed to make a virtue about looking inward when what they really should have been doing is looking out at the storm brewing on the horizon and working to fix things before they truly became unfixable.

Could they have returned to Israel? Was that door ever really shut? Or did the Israelites just like living in the world’s most sophisticated superpower, in a center of world culture, in one of the handful of nations never to have been conquered or subjugated by any hostile neighbor ever? Did they think of themselves as Egyptians? It’s a less silly question than it sounds at first. They must have spoken Egyptian. (How else could have communicated with the citizens of their host nation?) They surely must have had contact with Egyptian officials of various sorts. I imagine that, at least in the beginning, they did think of themselves as some version of Egyptians, perhaps some going so far as to think of themselves as Egyptians-of-Israelite-origin, something in the away the more assimilated Jews of Germany used to refer to themselves as deutsche Staatsbürger jüdischer Herkunft, as German citizens of Jewish origin. (This was only ironic after the fact, obviously.) But things got worse, not better. At first no one even noticed, not really. And by the time they all fully understood how things were, they were making bricks for Pharaoh and building his storage cities as his fully unwilling slaves.

We just came back from a few days in Canada visiting with Joan’s family. Everything seemed normal. But things have changed, almost without any of the locals noticing. The Canadian government, once a staunch defender of its citizens civil rights, has outlawed kosher slaughter. Of course, they didn’t put it that way and said instead that they were enacting a new law that would guarantee that animals be slaughtered in a way that they argued would be more humane than the way Jewish tradition requires and they simply didn’t care if that basically meant outlawing kosher slaughter. (This from a nation that sanctions as legal the clubbing of baby seals because outlawing such a barbaric practice would offend the basic right to cultural self-preservation of the Inuit nation that inhabit Canada’s Arctic. For more on that, click here.) Of course, Canada is not alone. Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Estonia, Slovenia, and Finland have also outlawed kosher slaughter, in effect saying that Jews are tolerated in those places as long as they don’t mind abandoning their own traditions and living as others would prefer them to live. But my point today is that none of this is evident—and not even slightly—on the streets of Toronto. Everything really did feel normal. When I asked some of the people we met about the kosher meat thing, they mostly shrugged. Yes, they agreed, it’s terrible. But what can you do? We’ll just import meat from the States. So it will be a bit more expensive—it already costs a fortune so it will cost slightly more of one. It’s just the government. It’s just the Liberal Party. It's just the New Democrats. It’s just the Greens. It’s just Justin Trudeau. It’s always just something! No one said any of this to me in Egyptian, but they might as well have! (To be fair, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, a kind of umbrella group representing Canada’s Jews, is suing the government to force them to amend the legislation. But I don’t think anyone is especially hopeful this effort will be successful.)

And that brought me to thinking about our nation in that same light. Things have changed quickly and slowly at the same time. Some of our most prestigious college campuses have become centers of intolerance, including of the violent kind, aimed directly at Jewish students. Some of our most revered public officials—including the President, the Vice President, and the Senate Majority Leader—have spoken hostilely, even crudely, about the duly elected Prime Minister of Israel. (The President’s endless critique of Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the settled results of a fairly-held election seems only to apply to our own country, not to our allies.) Suddenly, things feel different. The bond between Israel and our nation feels less strong, less sturdy, less un-unravelable. The degree to which the Trump campaign has begun openly to mix evangelical tropes into its campaign rhetoric feels ominous, not merely exclusionary and off-putting. The subtle sense that it might be wiser not to wear a kippah on the subway, a feeling I had previously only felt strongly on the Metro in Paris, suddenly feels fully reasonable.

Everybody knows that you can boil a frog alive in an open petri dish if you only heat the water slowly enough. Whether that’s actually true or not, I have no idea. (The blogosphere is equivocal.) But the Haggadah’s famous remark that Jews are required at Pesach to think of themselves as though they personally were slaves in Egypt and were personally liberated from their bondage by God’s might hand and outstretched arm—that remark seems to me to include the parallel obligation to think about all the years that led into slavery, decades of ever-increasing signs of degeneration blithely ignored by all until it really was too late.