Parshah Commentary

The opening chapter of our parshah—and of this new book of the Torah—succintly and chillingly details the Egyptians’ escalating oppression of the Israelites. It begins with Pharaoh warning his people that the Israelites have become “much too numerous for us” and imposing forced labor upon them; when this fails to diminish the perceived demographic threat, he imposes even harsher conditions. When these, too, fall short, he enlists midwives to secretively kill every Israelite boy they deliver. After the midwives refuse his order, he mobilizes the entire population to toss every baby boy into the Nile.

The Torah portrays this genocidal turn not as an aberration from the original xenophobic fearmongering or the subsequent system of forced servitude but rather as their logical continuation. Indeed, commentators emphasize that the later murderous measures began as propaganda portraying the Israelites as a fifth column. For example, the 17th-century scholar David HaLevi Segal, known as the Taz, explains that Pharaoh uses a singular pronoun to describe the Israelites because he’s referring to the singular entity that is the people of Israel; it is the very fact of their distinctive, shared identity that he perceives as a threat. Therefore, Segal claims, when Pharaoh says “let us deal shrewdly with it [i.e., the Israelites],” he is in fact asking: “What can we do so as to make them not a people?” The 19th-century commentator the Beit HaLevi notes that a verse from Devarim, well-known from its inclusion in the Passover Haggadah, that is traditionally translated as “the Egyptians did evil to us and oppressed us” can instead be rendered as “they portrayed us as evil, and afterwards oppressed us.” In other words, Pharaoh’s campaign of escalating violence against the Israelites had to begin by manufacturing consent—convincing the public that the Israelites’ growing presence was an existential threat demanding opposition by any means necessary.

Many commentators likewise understand Pharaoh’s imposition of harsh labor as an attempt to destroy the Israelites’ collective presence in Egypt. The 13th-century French commentator Chizkuni suggests that enslavement is a form of population control, in which people’s lives are dominated by labor to an extent that makes family life and procreation impossible. The late 15th- and early 16th-century Italian commentator Sforno, on the other hand, sees it as an attempt to provoke a mass exodus. He reads Pharaoh’s statement that the Israelites “will get up from the land” not as a warning, as is it generally understood, but as a hope: that Pharaoh can simply make life hard enough that the Israelites leave of their own accord, allowing the Egyptians to ethnically cleanse the Israelites while avoiding condemnation from surrounding nations.

But when these methods are unsuccessful, Pharaoh quickly shifts from attemping expulsion, population control, and cultural genocide to direct, systematic killing. The 13th-century commentator Nachmanides notes that his first murder plan, which uses the midwives, is more private: Pharaoh only enlists a small segment of the population to conduct the slaughter, and does so in a way where those involved can claim plausible deniability. If the midwives are clever, Nachmanides suggests, the Israelite women may simply believe their children were tragically stillborn. When the midwives furnish excuses for why this subtler plan is impossible, Pharaoh determines that the broader population has developed sufficient animus to enable mass participation in genocide. Every Egyptian is now commanded to toss Israelite boys into the river. But Nachmanides argues that this isn’t yet the final stage of creating a genocidal public: At this point, Egyptians are only commanded to kill those Israelite babies they happen upon, and courts would still pretend to pursue justice on an Israelite parent’s behalf if they demanded it. Only when Pharaoh sees that he’s gotten away with this level of violence—that the Egyptian populace are willing participants and that the surrounding kingdoms either do not notice or raise no protest—does he abandon all restraint: Egyptians are commanded to actively invade Israelite houses seeking baby boys to execute. This, he explains, is why Yocheved, Moses’s mother, needed to hide him.

Amid the drama of the liberation narrative that unfolds over the following parshiyot, it’s easy to miss a startling fact: After the first chapter of Shemot, the genocide is never mentioned again. The Israelites are still enslaved, enduring harsh labor, until the exodus, and when God later commands them to recall their time in Egypt, they are instructed to remember the enslavement, not the slaughter. However, this omission becomes slightly less jarring when we view the enslavement and the attempt to kill all baby boys not as distinct evils but as part and parcel of the same genocidal goal: to destroy a people’s existence as such.

There’s another curious element to the way the Torah recalls this time. While God reminds the people at several later points in the Torah that they were slaves in Egypt, the most commonly found mention of their centuries in Egypt is adjoined to the frequent commandment not to oppress the stranger, “because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” This admonishment doesn’t state that we suffered in Egypt, that we were enslaved in Egypt, or that we died in Egypt—merely that we were strangers. This is often presented as a call to empathy, that our history of suffering should move us to demand better conditions for other vulnerable people. But this isn’t just an insistence on ameliorating the suffering of the stranger: It’s a warning that otherness and subjugation are all too often linked. By frequently reminding us of our alienness, the Torah highlights that before we were slaves in Egypt, we were strangers. We saw the ease with which those in power can prey upon the stranger—how effortless it was for normal people to learn to hate the stranger, and for that hatred to manifest in unconscionable violence. These repetitive verses warn that the path to becoming subjugators is a deceptively simple one.

Unlike Amalek, who are immortalized as an eternal enemy, the Torah does not mythologize the Egyptians as uniquely evil; in fact, we are even commanded not to abhor them. Left-wing Jews have often noted, grimly, that we have become like Pharaoh—that in the foundational story of our oppression and liberation, we now occupy the role of oppressor. But becoming like Pharaoh doesn’t mean that we have taken after a uniquely, mythically cruel subjugator; we have become like Pharaoh in that he and the Egyptians fell into the horribly common, well-trod path of scapegoating and subjugating those who threaten their national identity. The opening chapter of our book of liberation is a chilling reminder about the nature of eliminationist violence—which is dangerous not only in its unique forms but in its terrible ordinariness. Countering such violence is thus possible only by uprooting the pervasive chauvinist, supremacist logics from which it grows.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.