People without Names
When I wrote about Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other by Judy Klitsner last week, I didn’t give an example of her analysis. Rabbi Golden noted this, and I had to admit that the reasons for that were weak: the lateness of the hour and the large enough word count. This week I will offer that with an example that relates to the parshah of the week, Shemot.
In Shemot, there is a new Pharaoh who has enslaved the Israelites. He has dehumanized them and has developed a genocidal plan to kill them off slowly through the systematic murder of all of every male infant. At first, he entrusted the Hebrew midwives to carry out this plan. However, the midwives' resistance slows his plan. This is their story:
“The king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, saying, ‘When you deliver the Hebrew women, look at the birthstool: if it is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, let her live.’ The midwives, fearing God, did not do as the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, ‘Why have you done this thing, letting the boys live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women: they are vigorous. Before the midwife can come to them, they have given birth.” And God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and increased greatly. And [God] established households for the midwives, because they feared God.” [Shemot 1: 16-21]
Klitsner relates this story to the Tower of Babel, placing the midwives in the sequel. The Tower of Babel narrative is also short and contained:
“Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard.’—Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar.— And they said, ‘Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.’ יהוה came down to look at the city and tower that humanity had built, and יהוה said, ‘If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.’ Thus יהוה scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel, because there יהוה confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there יהוה scattered them over the face of the whole earth.” [Bereshit 11:1-9].
These two stories don’t immediately seem to have an obvious connection. Klitsner notes the points of contact. These are more obvious if we compare the story of the Tower of Babel to the situation of the Israelites in Egypt and the work that they have been put to. Within those two narratives the story of the midwives can be used to reveal what it was that so angered God in the building of the Tower of Babel. The midwives’ actions, in light of the Tower narrative, also help us understand the state of degradation to which the Israelites have sunk. She tells us, “Both stories center on the building of cities and both specify the same building materials. Both feature fear-inducing orations, and both display an unusual emphasis on the presence and disappearance of names.”
The building materials are described in both cases as, “homer u-leveinim,” bricks and mortar. In the case of the Tower, she cites a classic midrash. It tells of the case when a worker carry bricks up the tower fell from the Tower. The reaction of the workers was not to mourn the loss of their fellow worker. Rather they would mourn the loss of the bricks. Bricks are a good model for the workers. They are uniform, or at least intended to be. Klitsner brings commentary from Rashi and the Netziv; The Netziv (Naphtali Zvi Yehuda Berlin) points out the problem with the actions of the buildings is not just their attempts to supplant God by building a structure high enough to reach heaven, but their excessive unity. Their suppression of individuality into one unified cause is the reason why the confounding of speech and the creation of linguistic diversity is the appropriate punishment for/reaction to their actions.
Klitzner also emphasizes the lack of names. Throughout the Tower story there are no names. Only when their story has ended does the history that left off with Noah and his sons return. “This is the line of Shem. Shem was 100 years old when he begot Arpachshad, two years after the Flood.” [Genesis 11:10]. Shem’s name is the word name.
Torah is not opposed to a group pursuing united actions. This is God’s desire for the people of Israel in the desert, but at the same time, Torah also brings us iconoclasts like Abraham. The problem is in extremes. In Egypt, names are also suppressed. We learn that the Israelites are descended from the twelve tribal heads, but we don’t have the genealogies that let us know who the leaders or people are in the later generations.
Pharaoh seeks to dehumanize them so that he can mistreat them, but even the Torah text recognizes that they have had some part in debasing themselves. In describing the way they have multiplied it uses the root verb, sh’r’ts which is the word for a crawling insect. That word only appears in the story of creation when it describes the creation of the insects. Their names disappear and no names come up until we hear about the midwives. There are two of them and they act in concert. And yet, their unity is in their resistance to Pharaoh’s plan for all of Egypt. They are in the space between the extremes, able to act with integrity, but without acting out of a trust that is only in themselves. They are the ones that Torah wants us to be. This is the message that the story of the midwives is meant to teach us as a subversive sequel.
There is an ambiguity in the phrase “Hebrew midwives.” It is unclear whether they are Israelite midwives or Egyptian midwives who served the Israelite women. By calling them Hebrew we expect them to be Israelites, but when the midwives refer to the Israelite women them seem to separate themselves from them. Regardless, we are told, “[God] established households for the midwives, because they feared God,” which is the same thing that is promised to Abraham. And this is the place where God first appears in the Exodus story. It is only after work of the midwives that God is able to hear the inchoate moans of the suffering Israelites themselves.
In our prayers we often raise the issue that we are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and that our connection to them makes us worthy of having God listen to our prayers. There is the idea that social justice work is practice enjoined upon us by the prophets, but the story of the midwives questions that. While the promises that God made to our forefathers and mothers make us of concern to God, only in the presence of righteousness is God prepared to act for us. This makes the story of the midwives a subversive prequel as well as a sequel.
Klitsner makes her case in much more detail, but hopefully you can understand her method better this week than last.
