He said to his people, “Behold, the people of the Children of Yisrael are greater and mightier than us... and it will be when war takes place, that they too will join with our enemies, and battle us, and go up out of the land.” (Shemos 2:23)
Who’s the Underdog?
Pharaoh delivered a national address to Egypt, as stated in the pasuk. He warned about the strength of the Jewish people and the potential danger it poses to “national security.”
We need to grasp his technique.
There are victimizers and there are the victimized. The victimizer is the bad guy. He seeks to harass, damage and even kill the victimized. The victimized is the poor, suffering underdog. He is the one whom the victimizer seeks to oppress and wrong.
How does the victimized party hold up? The very knowledge that he is victimized, the feeling that he is poor and unfortunate, gives him the strength to carry on and bear his suffering.
Let’s say Reuven lends his friend Shimon $200 and then Shimon denies ever having received the money. What does the poor lender say to himself ? Okay, I lost $200, but at least I know that I am in the right and the other guy is a thief. The very knowledge that he is a victim of injustice fortifies him with inner strength.
In the terrible Holocaust, this was one of the things that kept the Jews going. The feeling that they are the victimized ones, and the Germans are persecuting them for no reason at all. The whole time they lived with hope: the day will come when everyone will see who was in the right. The whole world will recognize that we were victimized.
Now we come to Pharaoh’s devilish plan.
Pharaoh wanted to beat down the Jewish people and grind them into the ground. He wanted to put them in a true state of physical and spiritual galus. If he just took them and started to cruelly enslave them, the galus would not have been unbearable, because the Jews would always feel victimized. They would know very well that they are in the right and the Egyptians who are oppressing them are no-good. This very knowledge would have invested in them tremendous inner strength and fortitude. They would have continued hoping for a better future.
So what did Pharaoh do? Like it says in the Haggadah: וירעו אותנו מצרים – “The Egyptians made us out to be evil.” They claimed that the Jews are wicked, malevolent people, bereft of any redeeming qualities, as the Beis Halevi explains the verse.
Pharaoh delivered an address to the Egyptian nation and said to them: You see those Jews walking around among us? They are laughing at us. They have a nefarious trick up their sleeve. Don’t trust them. They are just waiting for the day when they can kick us out of our own country. “When war takes place, they too will join with our enemies, and battle us, and go up out of the land.” Who will “go up out of the land”? Us! They are plotting to evict us from our own beloved Egypt by siding with our enemies!!
Then Pharaoh continued on with his rant, possessed by the fever of a true demagogue: We took Yosef, that Jew, out of prison, and appointed him as viceroy. And you know what he did? He collected all the money of Egypt to himself (the ultimate “Jewish banker”). Then he settled his own family on our land, in order to support them at our expense. They are persecuting us. They are taking advantage of us. One day they will grab our little children and slaughter them just because they want to use their blood for something. Watch out!!
You probably heard the story cited by Chazal about the Jewish slaves in Egypt who built a building, and it was missing a brick, and an Egyptian took a Jewish baby and put it into the wall in place of a brick.
Anyone who hears such a story is outraged. What an injustice! Because you are missing a brick, you put in a child instead? That is so barbaric!
But it didn’t look that way to the Egyptians. I wasn’t there, obviously, but according to what Chazal say, this is how I imagine the scene:
Pharaoh had said to his people: Watch out, because if they stop working for a moment, we are goners. Our children will die first. The Jews will slaughter them all. Just don’t let that happen. Don’t let a Jew stop working, no matter what, because there’s nothing more dangerous than that!
Then they noticed there was a brick missing, and it might interrupt the course of work that the Jews were engaged in. So the Egyptian foreman said to himself: Oh no, I bet they are about to start their rebellion. This is their chance. They planned it all out in advance that there will be a brick missing, and they will use the opportunity to get into position. They are going to kill me first, and then the rest of us... So he grabbed a Jewish child, and with a big, wicked grin on his face, put the child into the wall. Then he harangued the Jewish workers: Tomorrow, no more tricks. Got it?
They turned the victimized into the victimizer. They made the Jews into a people of oppressors.
Hitler Too
Hitler too. He wrote a book with a whole brilliant philosophy about how the Jewish people are actually the victimizers of the human race. So any act he did to eradicate the Jews was, in his view, an act of saving the whole world.
Let’s see how his philosophy went.
First of all, we need to know that every sin in general, and murder in particular, starts with denial of G-d. Hitler was a big proponent of the theory of evolution. And evolution denies the Divine origin of the world.
One of the main principles of evolution is that every population has its strong members and weak members. The stronger get stronger at the expense of the weak. It’s the jungle mentality. Let’s say you have a whole herd of antelope. Some are stronger than others. The herd develops by the weak ones naturally dying out due to sicknesses or because the stronger ones kill them. The process of the world’s growth and development is based on eliminating the weak and advancing the strong.
Now, who is against this approach? A moral person with a conscience. The conscience says that if someone is weak, instead of killing him, you should help him and strengthen him. If he is ill, hospitalize him, treat him, and thereby save him, so he will continue to live.
Who are the proponents of the moral, conscientious approach? You guessed. It’s the Jewish people and their Torah. So the Jews are destroying the world. They are the enemies of humanity’s betterment. Nothing is more damaging to the world than conscience.
So for this reason, Hitler built a whole system whose express purpose was the annihilation of the Jewish people. His goal was to “rescue” the world.
This is why his approach was brilliant. He made the Jews into bad guys, into victimizers. Only thanks to this did he succeed in building concentration camps and killing so many Jews. It was by declaring that they are victimizing the entire human race, and it is therefore permissible for anyone to kill such a dangerous enemy.
Why They Failed
Pharaoh did not succeed in what he set out to do, and neither did Hitler. Although they managed to convince their own people that the Jews are victimizers, the Jews themselves knew and know very well who the real victimizers are.
However, sometimes a person gets all mixed up in his own conscience and doesn’t know anymore who is the oppressor and who is the victim. This is relevant to us today.
A few weeks ago, a Jew got up and killed dozens of Arabs in Me’aras Hamachpelah, in Chevron. I am not here to express an opinion whether he was right or wrong. That’s not my subject. I just want to say that after he did what he did, from a political perspective, the whole system changed direction, it switched around completely, and this involves two subjects.
The first subject is that we all live here in Eretz Yisrael with the feeling that we have an army and police force that “protect” our lives.
I, for instance, live in Ofakim, and there are two ways to drive to Bnei Brak from Ofakim. I can go via Ashkelon, or I can go via Kiryat Gat, which takes me by the Arab city of Rahat.
Usually when I wanted to drive to Bnei Brak, I didn’t hesitate to go via Rahat. I said to myself: Even if there will be Arab disturbances and riots, there is an army and police presence there, so I don’t need to worry.
The second subject is the political aspect. A month ago, every time an Arab made a terrorist attack in which Jews were killed and wounded, or every time an Israeli soldier was taken hostage, it was like a knife in the heart for the government. Everyone said to the Prime Minister: How can you make peace with these Palestinians?! They are terrorists, murderers! In other words, politically speaking, the government wanted things to be as quiet as possible, so they can make peace with the Palestinians.
Today, after the massacre in Chevron, someone who understands what is going on can see that the situation is now completely reversed.
Maybe this is a little extreme, but today I am worried about driving via Rahat, because maybe the government doesn't really want to protect Jews, due to what happened.
Similarly, every time there is a tragedy, the Prime Minister gets up and moralizes: See what you did, you extreme Rightists? There is a person over here who is a little bit nice, one can sit down together with him and talk about peace. And you, with your violence, messed it all up. You caused the Arabs to be violent back to us.
To state the point strongly, from a political perspective, every tragedy serves the interests of the government.
What does all this mean to us?
I see it as an outcry from Heaven: For forty years, you relied on your army. Maybe now you will recognize once and for all Who is actually protecting you.
We need to realize that if Hashem doesn’t protect us, we have no protection.
אם ה' לא ישמור עיר שוא שקד שומר – “If Hashem doesn’t guard a city, the guardsman kept watch in vain.”
It’s a voice from Heaven. If only we would listen to it and get the message, because if not, who knows where it will lead.
1 Tehillim 127:1.
