By Hannah Weintraub

This week we read the parsha, “Vayera,” the dramatic tale of Moses asking Pharoh to free the Jews from Egypt and G-d sending down those classic plagues. When we tell this story during our Pesach seders, we are told to think of this story as not what G-d did for our ancestors but what G-d did for us. This brings up this Parsha’s classic question: What is our Egypt today? Who is our Pharoh? Who will be our Moses and Aaron?

Egypt is consistently a metaphor for whatever oppressive situation Jews are in at the time. So, what oppressive situation are Jews facing today? I have been struggling with this question for a while. After examining the current climate surrounding the Jewish community, I have come to believe that the greatest threat to Jews is ourselves.

This is not a d’var on being a self-hating Jew. Rather this is a d’var calling us to look honestly at the Jewish community and Habonim Dror. We cannot live behind rose-colored glasses nor tied to the shackles of the eternal victim. We must see the danger we have put ourselves into. Concurrently, we must see that we are able to save ourselves from this danger.

To delve into this assertion, I want to first pause on the concept of shame. Given that so many Jews today feel ashamed to call themselves Jewish, I want to know why. What is going wrong?

In the past, our shame came from the existential fear that someone outside of the Jewish community would persecute us based on their own illegitimate presumptions about Jews (does anyone really think that Jews would want to eat the blood of Christian children?). Today, Jewish-Americans do fear an amount of retribution from those outside of the Jewish community but, unlike in the past, more of this retribution is based on sound reasoning.

I want to focus on America for now because I cannot speak about the origin of criticism over Jewish communities in places like France. In America, most of the criticism of the Jewish community I have heard surrounds Jewish people’s role as oppressors in Israel and our displays of opulent wealth in America. Both of these critiques have legitimacy and, in most situations, clear evidence to back them up. Of course, there are instances when legit (or fabricated) criticism turns into anti-Semitism. But most of us who are afraid to tell someone we are Jewish are not afraid of anti-Semetic ignorance. We are afraid of being called out for the real injustices Jews are committing.

We as Jews cannot blame anyone outside of ourselves for creating these points of tensions between the Jewish community, the community at large and ourselves. These are our pyramids; this is the foundation of the Egypt we have built.

To keep this metaphor going (aren’t extended metaphor’s great?) let’s examine all of the players here. Who is the Pharaoh? Who are the slaves? Who are Moses and Aaron?

Let’s start with Pharaoh. Pharaoh orchestrates the building of Egypt and the enslavement of the Jewish people. He is deaf to Moses and Aaron’s pleads to let the Jews go. He is described as having a “hard heart,” or being resistant to change.

We can find Pharaoh’s three main character traits - oppressor, unwilling to listen, unchanging – among many leaders and lay-people within the Jewish community. On both sides of the debate over Israel, there are people who are unwilling to listen to anyone outside of their own party and organization and who are unwilling to change their minds.

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