In a Place Where There Are No Men

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, January 17, 2009

This Wednesday I spent an hour, as part of my involvement with the local Interfaith Council, meeting with workers at O’Connor hospital. O’Connor is a Catholic hospital, though it is not run by the local diocese, but by an independent order of nuns. The workers we met with were med tech’s, operating room tech’s, admitting staff, and other support staff, those who are not physicians or nurses, but who help make a hospital run and provide service to patients, directly and indirectly. They hoped that a statement from local religious leaders about their grievances would carry some weight. They have gone months without a contract and their concerns were primarily related to health care coverage for themselves and their families and working conditions.

The workers were being urged to do more to improve customer satisfaction, but at the same time their staffing levels were being reduced significantly. The people we met with were shop stewards and other low level supervisors who felt stressed by the demands of the supervisors above them and the situation of the workers for whom they were responsible. They sounded to me a little bit like the Israelite foremen at the end of our portion. These foreman were required by their Egyptian taskmasters to produce the same quota of bricks, but with the added time consuming burden of having to make the workers collect the straw themselves.

Moses is of course the hero of this week’s Torah portion, as he is the hero of the entire book of Exodus and the greatest prophet of the Torah. But along the way we are also introduced to other heroes. Shifrah and Puah, the righteous midwives, heroes of civil disobedience, Moses’s family acting heroically in saving their baby, and Miriam, in particular, in watching over Moses when he is rescued by Pharoah’s daughter. But to me one of the most interesting heroes of this week’s portion are the Israelite foremen, whose situation is described in the section of the parshah that David read for us this morning.

From archeological evidence we know a little bit about the Egyptian corvee labor system. The typical organization was a team of workers headed by a foreman from among their own people. It was these foremen who were then responsible to the Egyptian taskmasters. The foremen were required to keep logs on the workers and their output, and we have some of these logs from the time of the Pharaoh Ramses II, the time some scholars identify as the time period setting for this story. Interestingly the Hebrew word used in the Bible for the foremen, shoter, according to Biblical scholar Nahum Sarna, comes from the root to write, suggesting perhaps that keeping logs was a part of their duties.

In Chapter 5 of Exodus, we are told that when the workload of the Israelites was made heavier, the foremen were beaten. Commentators ask, why does the text tell us that the foremen were beaten and not the workers? From this, the midrash concludes that the foremen took pity on the Israelites slaves and bore the brunt of the taskmasters anger (Exodus Rabbah 5:23). Rashi goes further and concludes from the use of this same word shoter, for the leaders of the Israelites in the desert, that these foremen were rewarded by God for protecting their people, being the 70 upon whom God’s spirit rests in Numbers chapter 11.

It is not always the case that those who are put in charge by cruel authorities, rise to the occasion. From the Nazi period, the record of the Jewish kapos, individuals put into authority over other prisoners, and the Jewish councils set up by the Nazis, the Judenrats, were very mixed. Some were brave and helped their fellow Jews, others became collaborators, so concerned with their own survival that they lost sight of their responsibilities to their people. After the war, there were informal trials in the displaced persons camps where individuals were excommunicated, shunned by the survivor community. There were also formal trials in Israel in the 1950’s where Jewish kapo’s and Judenrat members were prosecuted as war criminals.

When I was serving as a rabbi in Brooklyn, there was a very sad situation with a member of a nearby Conservative synagogue. A longtime member of the congregation, an elderly Jewish man, Jacob Tannenbaum, had been active and supportive of the community. He had even been called forward at the community’s Yom HaShoah celebration to light the candle as a representative of his congregation. In 1987 he was accused by the United States government of wartime atrocities. At that time there had been only 3 such cases in the United States and in only one of them was the individual expelled from the United States. The community was divided: was he a victim of the Nazi’s or a victimizer of his fellow Jews. Some came forward, remembering him as a kapo and accused him of beating, whipping and kicking other prisoners. Others remembered how he had sheltered them when they were sick, destroyed lists of prisoners to be sent to their deaths, and allowed them to pray against Nazi regulations. Had he lived up to the standard of Jewish tradition, Hillel’s teaching, “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man”?

We pray that none of us will find ourselves in the extreme situation of Mr. Tannenbaum, yet in more modest ways, we may find ourselves, particularly in these difficult economic times, in the middle between those to whom we report and those for whom we are responsible. The Israelite foremen set a high standard of integrity, in not using their position to shield themselves, but instead to protect those for whom they were responsible. May we too rise to fulfill Hillel’s admonition- bamakom sh-eyn anashim hishtadel lehiyot ish, in the place where there is no one acting as a mensch, strive to be a mensch.