Sermons

Shabbat Shalom

In this week’s parsha, Vaera, the battle between two men is joined. It is really a battle between the false gods of Egypt and the God of Israel. It is a battle between slavers and the enslaved. It is a battle between Egypt and the People of Israel. But most of all it is a battle between brothers. Moses and Pharoah were both raised in the palace; They are stepbrothers. Pharoah was royal born and Moses was saved from his basket by Pharoah’s sister. It is hard to tell what the relationship between them was. But it is not hard to imagine that they had a rivalry that dated back to their youth as they tried to impress their father.

My teacher and friend, Rabbi Eliezer Diamond of the Jewish Theological Seminary, notes a small quirk in the text as the story of the plagues begins. Most of the time, when Moses meets with Pharoah, they meet in the royal palace, in front of the entire royal court. But for the first plague (and the fourth) they don’t meet at the palace at all. They meet on the banks of the Nile. This is not a place where the royal court can be found. It is a private location where the two rivals can talk directly one to the other. The Rabbis of the Talmud go so far as to say that Pharoah was going to the Nile to bathe, not something one does with a lot of other people around.

Rabbi Diamond notes that the Nile means something different to the two men. Pharoah is the God of the Nile; he is responsible for the annual flooding that will make the crops of Egypt grow. The prosperity of the land depends on the Nile and the Egyptians need Pharoah to make the waters of the Nile rise. The river is the very lifeblood of the country. Without water, the land is just desert. Each year the people pray that Pharoah will make the water rise and bring prosperity to all of Egypt.

To Moses, the Nile is the river of death. Who knows how many Israelite babies were drowned in its waters by the decree of Pharoah? Without the basket and the soft heart of Pharoah’s aunt, Moses would have joined all the other babies at the bottom of the river. Pharoah may want to forget the edict of his own father who condemned the Israelite baby boys to be drowned but Moses cannot forget. Neither does God. The blood of the babies rises to the top of the water as the first of the plagues. The river reveals its secrets. It reveals what Pharoah, and the Egyptians want to forget. For the first plague, the river of life becomes a river of death. Pharoah is not bathing in a river of water; he is bathing in the blood of all the innocent children drowned. Pharoah must face the facts of his horrific edict.

Rabbi Diamond reminds us that the Nile is not the only river of death. He writes, “The Torah is describing a turn of events that victims deserve but are rarely granted—that their suffering is commemorated in a way that cannot be denied. More often, victims not only endure torture and death; they also suffer the indignity of being forgotten and their suffering denied.

Usually, but not always. In modern times, another river has been forced to give up its terrible secret. The Danube, into which countless mortally wounded Jews were thrown by the Hungarian Arrow Cross police in December of 1944 and January of 1945, quickly ran blue after the atrocities of those months. It was only in 2005 that film director Can Togay, together with sculptor Gyula Pauer, created Shoes on the Danube Promenade. In addition to cast-iron signs memorializing the victims, the installation consists of 60 pairs of 1940s-style shoes, true to life in size and detail, sculpted out of iron. Based on the fact that the victims were forced to remove their shoes before being shot—shoes were a valuable wartime commodity—the memorial uncannily evokes both the imagined presence and the physical absence of the victims.”

I traveled with groups of teenagers on the “March of the Living,” a program organized to teach High School juniors and seniors about the Holocaust. We would learn about Germany and Eastern Europe before and during World War II and then we would spend a week visiting the death camps, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. In these places of death there are memorials to those who died there, preserved are the means by which they were tortured and killed. The ashes and remains of those killed remain as a testimony to the hatred that was Nazi Germany. But these camps were not in Germany. They were in Poland. The only hope I found in the grounds of the death camps was that the Polish flag flew over the camps. The Poles who had been so quick to kill Jews, now acknowledge what happened and they respectfully remember what they have done, and they do not try to hide the atrocities that were committed. The country of Poland does not forget the people who died there. They remember the victims and mourn what was lost. Our martyrs are not forgotten.

Now, in our day, once again the land runs red with Jewish blood. Just 100 days ago, our people endured a pogrom on a scale not seen since the Holocaust. More than 1200 Jews were tortured, raped, and butchered; Men, women, and children. Many others were kidnapped and are being held hostage in Gaza, some of them being used as human shields for the man who organized and commanded the terrorists who perpetrated the atrocity. Some hostages have been released and their pictures have been removed from our Wall of Remembrance. But each day we learn of the death of another hostage. Of the pictures on our wall, almost a third have now been pronounced dead. In a final act of indignity, the bodies of those who have died have not been returned to their families. Even the bodies of the dead are being held hostage.

Once again, we will have to ask the question, will the blood spilled be absorbed into the earth and forgotten? The Torah tells us that when Cain killed Abel, though Cain tried to deny his sin, God said that “the blood of your brother cries out to Me from the earth.” The earth itself would not hide blood that was spilled by murder. The question remains for us to decide if the atrocity of October seventh will be washed away and the innocent who were killed be forgotten? Will we look away and distract ourselves with something different, so we don’t have to face what has happened to our people?

Almost every day, because of this war, there is another family in Israel who begins to sit shiva. How many graves does there have to be for those killed in the slaughter and those killed in this war? The government of our country is doing all it can to prevent this war from spilling into new and different spaces. But we live with the fear about how long it will take before more Jewish blood will be spilled here. Ever since Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, Poway, and Colleyville, the Jewish community wonders where and when the next attack will come.

Like the ten Sages who we remember on Yom Kippur, we do not let atrocities be forgotten. There are many who would deny the Holocaust. There are many who would have us forget those who died five years ago (yes it has been five years already) in Pittsburgh. But we must not forget those who have died. If we allow murder to be forgotten, it will only encourage the murderers to keep on killing. If Jewish blood is forgotten, what will hold back the terrorists of the future?

We can now see how this private meeting between two men on the banks of the Nile is so important. The issue between them is not who they have to impress or how much power they display. This is not a battle between gods, it is a personal battle, between one who needs to forget and one who can never forget. One who sees the Nile as the source of life and one who sees the Nile as a graveyard of death. The children must not be forgotten. The innocent killed cannot be ignored. The river will flow with the blood of those murdered on its shore. Iron shoes will mark the spot where they were killed. Will there ever be music again heard in the envelope that surrounds Gaza?

It will take ten plagues and the death of Egyptian children until Pharoah understands what he has inflicted on the Israelite people. It will take the instant destruction of his army at the shore of the Sea of Reeds before Pharoah will comprehend the punishment for what he and his people inflicted on the descendants of Israel, who had once saved Egypt from famine, and who now were feared and despised. The innocent cannot be forgotten. Only when our oppressors understand that there is a price for spilling innocent blood, will there be justice and there will be peace.

We pray for peace in Israel, a land that has not known peace in all of its 75 years. We pray for the day when the killing of the innocent will be mourned, and we will wonder what took humanity so long to stop the bloodshed. Even as we defend our people we still pray for peace.

May God help us turn rivers of blood into rivers of peace. May peace flow from the mountains to the sea as a mighty stream. May we learn to live with each other without hatred and killing and may God bless us and all who are innocent who cannot be forgotten as we say … Amen and Shabbat Shalom