The Context of Disobedience

Rabbi Melanie Aron

January 20, 2001

When I was preparing for my own Bat Mitzvah, one of my favorite books was Wrinkle in Time. What I especially liked was that the main character, a girl named Meg, discovered that all the things that she had considered her bad traits and faults turned out to be positive qualities. The things that she hated about herself, that made her different from the other kids, even her stubbornness, turned out to be necessary to rescuing her father from the forces of evil.

A member of the congregation who works in HR once said to me in the course of a search committee meeting: the thing that makes someone attractive to you, may in the long run drive you crazy, and the thing that is their identified weakness may turn out to be the source of their strength.

The rabbis noticed that both the books of Genesis and of Exodus begin with woman's disobedience. In Genesis, the woman is Eve. She disobeys God, by eating the fruit of the tree that Adam had been commanded not to eat. She offers a lousy excuse for her action: "the snake tricked me and I ate", and she is punished.

Jewish tradition is not as hard on Eve as Christian tradition. The rabbis see Adam as partially responsible for what happens. God tells Adam not to eat of the tree, lest he die, but Eve tells the snake, that she has been told, presumably by Adam, neither to eat of the tree nor to touch it. The snake then pushes Eve so that she touches the tree, and when nothing happens to her as a result, she begins to doubt whether Adam was correct in telling her not to eat of it as well. Still Eve's disobedience is hardly a virtue.

The book of Exodus also begins with disobedience, but in this case the disobedient women are the two midwives to the Israelites, two Egyptian women, Shifrah and Puah. They are told by the Pharoah to kill the Israelite's baby boys but they refuse. When questioned about their disobedience, they, like Eve, offer a lame excuse: "The Israelite women give birth so fast, we can't get there in time". But interestingly this time, their disobedience is rewarded by God and we are told, that God blessed the midwives and established their households.

A spark of independence, of spunk may under certain circumstances be a difficult trait and create problems, but in another situation that spark of defiance may be vital.

If we had been given the choice many of us might have chosen to be different than we are: taller or shorter, slenderer or lighter haired, or we might have wished perhaps not to have had some quality or characteristic that has made our lives challenging. Yet we are shaped exactly by these factors, and become who were are because of the challenges we have to overcome.

This week at Confirmation we had a panel of Jews across a span of ages, who were gay or lesbian and were active in the Jewish community. One of the students asked the panelists, if you were going to be born all over again and could chose, would you chose to be straight? One panelist, a man in his 50's struggled with the answer. He had been raised at a time when issues like sexual preference were not discussed. His father had been career military, with the attitudes we conventionally associate with that life path. Certainly his life would have been simpler and less painful had he been straight. Yet, he felt he had learned a lot through his experiences about compassion and being the outsider, and he had gotten to know many wonderful people. He wondered if he would really trade that for an easier life.

Our tradition teaches us that it was because of righteous women that the Israelites were delivered from Egyptian slavery. Which women? Some of the rabbis say, it was the Israelite women, who kept faith in the future, even in the most difficult times. They continued to marry and bear children despite the hardships of slavery.

Other rabbis say the women that were meant here are the Egyptian midwives, Shifrah and Puah. On the most concrete level it was their act of civil disobedience that allowed Moses to survive, to live to grow up and deliver the people. But more importantly, on a spiritual level, it was their defiance of Pharoah that allowed the Israelites to imagine that he could be overcome. That problematic spark of independence that Eve exhibited early on, turned out to be a very good thing many generations later.