Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah, Miketz, records the Egyptian Pharaoh’s experience of two mysterious dreams: In the first, seven “handsome and sturdy” cows on the bank of the Nile are suddenly consumed by seven “ugly and gaunt” ones; in the second, seven healthy ears of grain are swallowed by seven “thin and scorched” ones. While Joseph famously interprets these dreams as a prediction about the near future—there will be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine—Rabbi Moshe Amiel, a 20th-century critic of war and nationalism, argues that Pharaoh’s dreams also illuminate an eternal truth. “Behold,” he writes, “we are witness to many beautiful and healthy nations, ‘healthy and full ears of wheat’ that have passed on.” All seemingly stable powers eventually collapse, he explains, because throughout history, “the weak overcome the strong.” All mighty nations—“Babylonia, Persia, Greece”—have ultimately crumbled at the hands of the weak, and today’s powers will likewise fall to “the pursued, . . . the oppressed, and the broken.”

But if the strong are inevitably devoured by the weak, why do we still live in such a brutal world? “Once [the weak] are victorious, they too become pursuers,” argues Rabbi Amiel. “And, once more, other ‘ugly and gaunt cows’ swallow them.” How, then, do we exit this endless cycle of victim-turned-oppressor? In words that now sound hopelessly naive, Rabbi Amiel contends that this is the task of the Jewish people, informed both by Judaism’s moral insight—which, he argues, entails understanding that “we cannot fight the violence of the world with our own violence, or aggressiveness with our own aggressiveness, or injustice with our own injustice”—and by Jews’ particular historical experience. Only the Jewish people, he claims, “has never once been a pursuer, and has remained ‘ugly and gaunt.’” Uncorrupted by the experience of power and guided by the Torah, Jews would lead the way to liberation.

Rabbi Amiel was far from alone among religious radicals of his day in this hope that Jewish morality and history would position Jews as the vanguard of a redeemed world. Rabbi Aharon Shmuel Tamares claimed that Jews would carry forth his vision of religious anarcho-pacifism because “the image of the awful cruelty that tyrannical rulers inflicted upon them is fixed too firmly before their gaze for them to desire to be tyrants themselves.” And Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag believed that Jews were uniquely suited to bear the message of Kabbalistic communism “not because we are more talented than [others], but because we have suffered the most from tyranny.”

When I first learned about these rabbis years ago, they offered me a way of intertwining my political commitments with my dedication to Jewish learning and practice in a way that felt deeper than simply invoking the oft-repeated verse, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” And yet, the more I’ve studied them, the more I’ve wrestled with the tragic fact that their radical visions of Judaism in particular and of the future more broadly were largely premised on faith in the collective moral status of the Jewish people. Such faith now seems woefully misplaced: Zionism, the most successful Jewish political movement in history, has been as banally brutal as the oppressive systems those rabbis sought to overthrow. Given that, what do Rabbi Amiel and his contemporaries’ political theologies still have to offer?

There is no easy answer. Certainly, at the very least, their writing proves that there were other roads that could have been taken, that visions other than chauvinistic nationalism could have won out as the proposed solution to antisemitism. Now, though, the material conditions that might have made their visions possible—masses of oppressed Jews who had not yet themselves participated in the oppression of another nation—no longer exist, and imagining that we could simply revive those visions risks obscuring the ways in which we’re presently implicated in the oppression of Palestinians. And yet, despite my misgivings, I’ve found myself coming back to Rabbis Amiel, Tamares, and Ashlag again and again over the past year and a half. Their vision of a world beyond cycles of violence, predicated upon the utmost reverence for the dignity of every single person, seems more distant than ever. But perhaps their teachings, even as flawed as they now seem, can still help guide those of us committed to bringing forth a future without domination, not by offering a roadmap but by urging us toward the destination.

Aron Wander is rabbinical student, organizer, and writer.