DRASH MATOT-MASEI

Rabbi Dean Shapiro

Beth Shalom, Auckland, New Zealand

A verse jumped out at me from this week’s Torah portions, as often happens. It has been stuck in my mind and my heart ever since. The text recounts the complete journey from Nile to Jordan. It begins like this:

“They set out from Rameses in the first month, on the fifteenth day of the first month. It was on the morrow of the Passover offering that the Israelites started out defiantly, in plain view of all the Egyptians. The Egyptians meanwhile were burying those among them whom the Eternal had struck down, every [male] first-born” (Numbers 33:3-4).  

The Egyptians were burying their dead.  It sent me back to the original account, in the Book of Exodus. That account is all rush and hush, mentioning only the Hebrews’ hurried preparations. There is no reference there to the Egyptian dead, other than that they had died. There is no mention of Egyptian grief. There is no mention of Egyptian loss. It is a lacuna, a present absence. The Egyptians feature there only to “urge the people on, impatient to have them leave the country” (Exodus 33:12). It is as if the Israelites, in their triumph, shock, and pain, walked by their captors literally blind to Egyptian suffering.

I imagine long lines of Israelites as they begin their trek.  They march past Egyptians who kneel in the dirt, digging mass graves and farewelling their loved ones. The Egyptians look up, expecting a nod, a tear, a wave. They wail, but the Israelites hear only the wind. It is a meeting of the dead and deadened hearts.

But this week, in Parashat Mas’ei, when the story is re-told, the darkness is lifted somehow. The Israelites see for the first time what went unseen before: the Egyptians burying their dead, grieving their loss. Suddenly, they recognise the pain of their oppressors. What was absent suddenly appears like a gapping pit when the cover is removed.

More astounding, perhaps, than the original blindness, is the eventual seeing. Now, forty years and many kilometres later, the children of slaves can appreciate that theirs isn’t the only tale of woe. Their captors, too, experienced loss. No one got out unscathed.

We would have understood, had the fleeing Hebrews never noticed, or even ignored, Egyptian pain. But what’s extraordinary is the radical empathy they eventually show—the ability they acquire to feel the feelings of their captors, to remember what their parents had missed.

Empathy is the experience of other people’s emotions as if they were our own. Empathy is more than knowing what someone else is going through. It is feeling what someone else is going through, in your own body, your own kishkes. Radical Empathy, then, at least for me, is the ability to empathise with the enemy, the oppressor, the victor. It’s the capacity to imagine their feelings despite our own pained and battered state. It is an extraordinary, even revolutionary act. It means that the victim retained his full humanity, his ability to move beyond himself, regardless of the crime perpetrated against him. Through radical empathy, someone who has been made an object reclaims her standing as a subject.

The midrash teaches radical empathy when the sea slams shut over the pursuing Egyptian soldiers. What happened in heaven then? God chastises the angels: “How can you rejoice when my children are drowning!”

Can we see the suffering of our enemies? Even if we disagree with their ideology, their message, their narratives, can we at least recognise their pain? When we do, we acknowledge our shared humanity and allow a better story to emerge.

We Jews are the inheritors of a tradition that acknowledges the humanity and suffering of everyone, even the oppressor. Our tradition invites us to share God’s perception, the ultimate bird’s eye view, the infinite reality that grieves and rejoices at once, that gathers up the pain of the victim, and soaks up the pain of the perpetrator and, in a move that’s so often beyond our human capacity, holds them both. God cradles them and rocks them, gently gently, to sleep.