Radical Torah

Like many Jews my age, I was raised on the stories of my great-grandparents’ immigration struggles—my great-grandfather waking at dawn to study Talmud before spending the day working as a peddler; my grandfather and his two brothers doing homework together in the room they shared in their family’s tiny apartment in Dorchester, Massachusetts; and the labor struggles at the cap factory where another great-grandfather worked. When I was eight years old, my father took the opportunity of one of my first visits to New York City to introduce me to Union Square and to the story of Emma Goldman. Later, I heard teachers and rabbis speak with pride about the Jewish community’s involvement in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

While we tell these stories about our activist past, the past few decades have seen the Jewish community undergo a well-documented shift to the right—this notwithstanding the significant increase over the past few years in Jewish organizations, books and websites focused on social justice work. The increased conservativism of the Jewish community has coincided, not surprisingly, with the almost complete integration of Jews into mainstream American society. While we continue to speak of ourselves as a minority, virtually all barriers to our absorption into mainstream American life have disappeared. Synagogues thrive in towns where Jews were once not welcome and Jews—especially Jewish men—are considered to be desirable spouses. In the words of Karen Brodkin, Jews have become “just as white as the next white person.” ((How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1998) 35))

What are we to make of this disconnect between the stories we tell about ourselves and our current place in American society?

One of the best-known lines of the Passover Haggadah comments, “in every generation, one is obligated to see oneself (lirot et atzmo) as though s/he, personally, had come forth from Egypt.” The obligation to “tell the story of the exodus from Egypt” instructs us not only to speak of our ancestors’ slavery and liberation, but to see their story as our own.

There are multiple ways to understand this obligation. The most literalist readings point, by way of explanation, to another line in the Hagaddah: “If God had not brought our ancestors out of Egypt, we and our children and our children’s children would still be enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt.” We see ourselves as having been liberated from Egypt because, absent a miraculous series of events, we actually might have been born into slavery. More allegorical interpretations understand this obligation as referring to the different kinds of emotional and spiritual slavery from which we continuously seek liberation. In either case, the point is the same—stories of the past are also stories of the present. When we speak of the struggles and the activism of our parents and grandparents, we are, in fact, telling the stories by which we wish to define ourselves.

The Sephardic tradition maintains a slightly, but significantly, different version of the command to identify ourselves with the generation that left Egypt. According to this tradition, “in every generation, one is obligated to show oneself (l’harot et atzmo) as though s/he, personally, had come forth from Egypt.” In contrast to the introspective nature of the command “lirot et atzmo”—to see ourselves as having come forth from Egypt, the obligation “l’harot et atzmo”—to show ourselves as having come forth from Egypt—demands action.

While most versions of the Hagaddah simply select one form or the other of the command lirot/l’harot, I would suggest that the intersection between these two commands offers an instructive means of approaching the contrast between the stories that we, as Jews, tell about ourselves, and the role that we play in contemporary America.

Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, (1888-1979) suggests a cyclical relationship between the two versions of the Haggadah’s command: when we see ourselves as liberated slaves, we become more willing to assume the obligations that come with freedom. Performing these obligations, in turn, reminds us of our experience in Egypt and helps us to continue seeing ourselves as liberated slaves. In Teitelbaum’s formulation, these obligations consist of the mitzvot laid out in the Torah. I would extend Teitelbaum’s point to argue that our experience as immigrants and strangers in America obligates us to protect today’s immigrants and strangers. In turn, our efforts to protect the marginalized members of our own society remind us of our own immigrant past.

We tell stories about ourselves at least partially to influence the way in which others see us. In the words of Rabbi Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508), saying that we, personally, came out of Egypt helps to “transfer the memory from parent to child.” Children who grow up viewing their parents as former slaves will naturally develop a sense of identification with the oppressed and will come to see themselves as included in their parents’ story of slavery and liberation.

The obligation of memory is two-fold. The commandment “lirot et atzmo,” compels us to identify with our grandparents’ immigration stories and to take pride in the role that Jews played in early civil rights and labor struggles. We tell these stories in order to define our place in the world and to ensure that our children will identify with those who are marginalized.

At the same time, the obligation “l’harot et atzmo” demands action, as well as introspection. Showing ourselves as having experienced poverty, discrimination and inequality requires continuously working to alleviate the suffering of others. It is not enough to tell stories of our immigration experiences without also accepting the obligations that this experience places on us.

Fulfilling the commandment “l’harot et atzmo” in turn, helps us to fulfill the commandment “lirot et atzmo.” Fighting oppression in our time helps us better to understand the experiences of our parents and grandparents. Placing ourselves at the center of struggles for justice also helps to reconcile the disconnect between the stories we tell about ourselves and our current place in American society.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the Director of Education for the Jewish FundS for Justice, a national public foundation dedicated to mobilizing the resources of American Jews to combat the root causes of domestic social and economic injustice.