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✴︎ to be read on August 17⎮13 Av ✴︎

Parashat Vaetchanan ("I Pleaded") opens with Moses pleading with God to be permitted to enter the Holy Land. God refuses and instead instructs Moses to climb to a height so that he may glimpse Israel but from a distance. Moses then reminds the Israelites of the feats that have been accomplished on their behalf and enjoins them to the task of transgenerational transmission such that each new generation will know the story of what God has done for them. Moses further warns the Israelites from idolatry and predicts their corruption, dispersal, and submission to gods not their own. He repeats the 10 commandments and utters both the Shema and the Ve’ahavta.

Rachel Farbiarz makes the startling claim that this Torah portion provides the "experiential foundation for the Torah's core injunction against the oppression of strangers." Her argument rests on the observation of a peculiar but subtle feature of Moses' final oration to the Israelites. In his speech, Moses insists that those to whom he speaks were firsthand witnesses to the miracles of Exodus, hence bear the truth and power of those events within themselves. Yet this is patently false. Moses' audience were (for the most part) those born in the desert, subsequent to the miracles in question. What then is Moses up to? According to Farbiarz, we might regard Moses' insistence on this fiction as an inducement to engage in a process of self-fabrication - an enjoinment that the Israelites come to occupy or identify with a position that was not, strictly speaking, their own.

Farbiarz points out that this same project can be detected in Torah's relationship to its contemporary readers and its "axiomatic claim that we were strangers in Egypt." For, of course, this too is a fiction. We were never slaves in Egypt and yet we are exhorted no fewer than 36 times to "take on the existential reality of enslaved ancestors" Here, for Farbiarz, lies a deep wisdom of Torah: the Torah knows that it cannot simply rely upon its axiomatic claim as if that were a guarantee that contemporary Jews will empathize with those who are oppressed. The enjoinment to identify with the stranger must be issued again and again because accessing empathy isn't something that is easily or even automatically accomplished. Jews qua Jews do not get to claim some primal knowledge of victimhood or oppression. Rather, empathy for the victims of political violence and oppression (then and now) requires hard work - on an affective, imaginative, and epistemic level. Torah requires us to empathize with those who are utterly different from us - whose positions are (at times, as with our ancestors) historically unavailable to us; absolute in their alterity.

The cyclical reading of the Torah provides one vehicle for doing this technically impossible work of occupying a position not our own. With Torah, we insert ourselves, again and again, into the position of our enslaved ancestors, experiencing their strangeness from us and yet being told that we were these very same strangers in the land of Egypt. In experiencing the strangeness and fictionality of this insistence, we see that whatever truth exists in this claim is one that is "in need of tending," i.e., that empathy is not automatic, but an endeavor in which we must engage, hence justice requires our affective, imaginative, and epistemic engagement with those who are unlike us in many ways. Torah is not the only nor a sufficient vehicle for doing this work now, but we might seek out the literature, art, and testimony of those who are other to us and who are in need of allies in pursuit of their liberation.