The Story Behind the Story

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, May 14, 2005

I made the mistake of turning on the am radio in my car the other day. What a battlefield! I happened into a discussion of individual responsibility, with many aspersions against those who provide excuses for criminal action, as in the song Officer Krupke from West Side Story or the twinkie defense in the murder of the mayor of San Francisco years ago. If we could have toned down the rhetoric a bit, there was an important issue hidden under all the yelling and carrying on, an issue concerning societal injustice and individual wrongdoing.

This issue comes up in the section of this week’s parashah that Michael read and discussed this morning, though it takes a really careful reading of the text to find it. The words that Michael focused on “You shall have one kind of law, as well for the stranger, as for the home born” is not only a basic principal of Jewish Jurisprudence, and one incidentally that finds its way into the Israeli Declaration of Independence, it is also a criticism of the community at the time it was promulgated. Let me explain.

The incident that Michael described, the fight between the two men, one of whom had an Egtyptian father, begins with the words, “And the son of the Israelite woman went out.” The words “went out”, often are used to describe someone leaving a court proceeding. And what court proceeding did this man just come out of? Well, the answer to that question isn’t given in the text, but if we look back a few columns, we find the text dealing with the distribution of the land of Israel by tribe and family. Perhaps this young man did not receive a parcel of land, and went to a judge to make a claim. The judge, considering Moses’s instructions to distribute land by father’s houses, told this young man that there was nothing for him.

Further, consider his being identified, as “the son of an Egyptian man”. In the text that is provided as information, but in an encampment of newly freed slaves, that might have been a taunt, a teasing refrain that followed him wherever he went. Finally, the words used for Egyptian man are used for only one other character in the Torah, the Egyptian taskmaster who Moses killed as a young man. Let’s suppose that Egyptian had taken an Israelite wife. Perhaps that is even the reason for his harshness, having to prove to the other Egyptians that he is still one of them. Consider this young man’s plight. Joel Grishaver describes it in these words: “Having lost a court fight, having no father, having nowhere to turn, and having been wronged by the man who robbed him of father and people, the son of the Egyptian returns to seek his own justice. It is very “High Noon”. He is angry. He has good reason to be- but he is also clearly way out of control.” Israelite society cannot allow this out of control behavior, it is too threatening and dangerous to the good of the community. But on the other hand, the community is not off the hook. Though no place was found for this young man, a place must be found for others like him and their pleas must receive a just response. It is not just our neighbor who we are to love as ourselves, but also the stranger. “You shall have one kind of law, as well for the stranger, as for the home born”