[I originally gave a version of this dəvar at Kolot Chayeinu on 25 January, 2025.]

There is a theological conundrum at the heart of this week’s Torah portion. Which: I am not going to solve today, but here it is. G-d is sending terrible, destructive plagues against Mitzráyim to force Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, but repeatedly, we read that Pharaoh’s heart is hardened and he refuses. After multiple plagues, in fact, we read that G-d hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and the conundrum is, of course, why G-d does that. Doesn’t G-d want Pharaoh to let the Israelites go? Why keep stopping Pharaoh from doing that? What are the implications here for free will and moral accountability? Again, I’m not going to answer any of those questions today, but I invite you to sit with them as you spend time with this week’s parashah.

Instead, I want to really hone in on the language used here. I said that Pharaoh’s heart gets “hardened”, and that’s often how it’s translated — tho I think the ḥumashim in the back mostly give “stiffened” instead (perhaps foreshadowing the “stiff necks” of the Israelites in the wilderness?). But if you look at the Hebrew, you’ll find numerous occasions where the verb used comes from the root חזק | ḤZQ. So in Shəmot 9:35, for example, we read וַיֶּחֱזַק לֵב פַּרְעֹה | vayeḥezaq leiv Par’oh} | “and Pharaoh’s heart ḥazaq-ed”. Ḥazaq may be familiar to you: It’s the same word we say after finishing a book of Torah, and it means strength — חֲזַק חֲזַק וְנִתְחַזֵּק | ḥazaq ḥazaq vənitḥazeiq | “be strong, be strong, and we will be strengthened!”. So this verse is less about Pharaoh being hard hearted (as in cruel, unfeeling, callous towards others) and more about Pharaoh being strong hearted (as in resolute, determined, full of conviction to carry out his plans). We could read this as G-d strengthening the essence of Pharaoh, making him more himself.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hearing a lot about strength, lately. It’s all over our political discourse generally, but it also shows up in Jewish spaces too, especially in connection with the State of Israel: We need to have strong ties to the State of Israel; we need Israel itself to be strong, to be mighty, to ensure the safety of Jews around the world. This valorization of strength is often paired with a contempt for weakness, real or perceived. You can see this juxtaposition expressed succinctly and clearly in a speech given by Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the ADL, on May 6, 2024, on the occasion of the release of a new report about antisemitism. As he builds towards his conclusion, he says, “We are not the Jews with trembling knees. We will not flee; we will fight, we will press on, and we will win.” [a]. In other words: We will not be weak; we will be strong.

[a] You can watch the whole video on the ADL’s official YouTube channel. This quote comes a few sentences before the end.

Trembling knees are a stock sign of cowardice, of course, but the specific figure of the Jew with trembling knees is itself a standard trope with a specific origin. The figure is codified about 120 years ago in a poem by Hayim Nahman Bialik called “In the City of Slaughter”. Written in 1904, it’s a poem about the Kishinev Pogrom, and it describes in graphic detail the torture and slaughter of Jews in a town that was then part of the Russian Empire. As you might expect, it is a poem full of condemnation, but what you might not expect is that this condemnation is directed primarily at the victims of the pogrom, not its perpetrators. He calls the Jews of Kishinev dogs, mice, and roaches, and says that their suffering shouldn’t be mourned. “Pity them not”, he writes about the survivors bewailing their losses, “They are too wretched to evoke thy scorn. They are too lost thy pity to evoke.” [b] Why this contempt? It’s because the Jews Bialik imagines for his poem — contrary to fact — were too cowardly to offer any resistance to the violent mob.

[b] I am quoting from this translation of the poem.

Unlike the survivors of Kishinev who communally mourn their losses, Bialik exhorts his audience to turn their emotions towards violence. “Build . . . with deadly hate thy fury and thy rage . . . so in thy heart it shall remain confined, a serpent in its nest . . . until it shall find a breaking of its bond. Then it shall rear its venomous head, its poisoned fangs, and wait to strike.” His demand is not for justice, nor for Jewish safety or liberation, but, explicitly, for “retribution”.

It is in this context that Bialik invokes the famous trembling knees: “Come now and I will bring thee to . . . where the heirs of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees, concealed and cowering — the heirs of the Maccabees!” Unlike the strong military heroes of legend, he condemns the Jews of his own time as so weak as to be beneath scorn.

“In the City of Slaughter” caused a sensation when it was published, especially in the early Zionist circles that Bialik moved in. The early 1900s were a time of intense discussion about what it meant to be a Jew in the twentieth century amid a rising tide of European ethnonationalism, and Bialik is not the only one to contrast the undesirable contemporary Jew against a hypothetical revival of heroic models of old. The antinomy is also very clearly present in an obituary Ze’ev Jabotinsky [c] wrote for Theodore Herzl in 1905:

Only by removing the dust of two thousand years of exile . . . will the true, authentic Hebrew character reveal its glorious head. Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite. . . . Because the Yid is ugly, sickly . . . we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is . . . easily frightened, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent. . . . The Yid has accepted submission and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to learn to command. [d]

[c] Jabotinsky is, in some ways, low-hanging fruit here given his overall politics and reputation at the time. My point is not that this was the only approach to Jewishness and Zionism in the early twentieth century, merely that it was part of that milieu, expressed in different ways by multiple different influential thinkers. People have written entire books on this intellectual moment, and there’s only so much that can fit in one eight-minute talk.
[d] My source for this quote is this archived New York Times book review. I have been unable to find a full copy of this obituary in any language online, tho I am fairly confident (thanks in part to my husband’s excellent research skills) that the full Hebrew text is contained in the first volume of Jabotinsky’s complete works published in the 1940s. My husband and I were unable to find a digitized version of this anywhere, tho we did find a hard copy of the full set of books for $200 on eBay, which we declined to buy.

I trace this history at such length because I think it helps illuminate some seeming contradictions of the present moment. I think there is sometimes a tendency to view Zionism — the project of building and maintaining a state where Jews are a permanent demographic majority and control the apparatus of government [e] — as a good idea gone awry, localizing the fault in the party of Likud, or even the person of Benjamin Netanyahu himself. But right at the start of Zionist organizing, we see numerous threads — contempt for the weak, a focus on the mythic past, a preoccupation with virility and machismo, a sense that group victimhood justifies any action taken against enemies, a feeling that a chosen people have the right to dominate others without restraint [f] — that are hallmarks of fascist thought [g] Right from the jump, threads of fascism have been woven into the Zionist tapestry. There is, simply, no good version of ethnonationalism.

[e] I think this is a minimal, defensible definition of Zionism, tho obviously it is not necessarily one that all self-described Zionists would offer or agree to. There’s a delicate balance here between descriptivist evaporation and proscriptivist no-true-Scottsmaning. On the one hand, I’ve known Jews who use “Zionism” to mean “feeling proud about being Jewish” or “believing that Jews have a historical connection to the land around Jerusalem”; a definition of the word that encompasses everything everyone has ever used it to mean would be a definition so broad as to point to nothing. On the other hand, defining it too narrowly risks waging rhetorical war on a scarecrow by defining any possible counterexamples out of existence. Compounding the problem, many people simply haven’t thought thru all the logical implications of all their beliefs (which is fair! It’s fiendishly difficult to do, and I certainly wouldn’t claim to have done it for everything I believe), meaning they might claim the label without really worrying about the specifics of what it means in practice. (Hence the phenomenon I’ve seen many times where a self-professed Zionist and a self-professed anti-Zionist will describe essentially the same political reality as being the ideal outcome of their politics.) The semantic situation is, frankly, bad, and this is why I normally prefer talking about “Jewish ethnonationalism” instead of “Zionism”, but here there just didn’t seem to be any way around it.
[f] This list is a mixture of traits drawn from both Umberto Eco’s “Ur Fascism” and Robert O Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism.
[g] Again, space doesn’t permit the fullest exploration of this argument; the book-length version would need to treat a whole slew of other concerns, ranging from the Irgun to the repudiation of anti-Zionist Jews as traitors to their own people.

So we shouldn’t be surprised to find ardent Zionists cozying up to fascists, whether that’s Jabotinsky to Mussolini in the 30s or the ADL to Elon Musk today. They want to have strength; small wonder they cluster around the strong. We shouldn’t be surprised to find Israeli soldiers repeatedly filming themselves tormenting Palestinian prisoners of war. To be captured is to be weak and to be weak is to be beneath contempt. We shouldn’t be surprised to find so many people tweeting the despicable line that there are no children in Palestine, only future terrorists — “Let us deal shrewdly with them, lest in a war they side with our enemies and rise up from the ground.” (Shəmot 1:10) We shouldn’t be surprised to find this ends with children slaughtered in their homes.

For my part, I don’t pray to G-d for strength. Better, it seems to me, than asking G-d to strengthen my heart is to ask G-d to batter it. To break, blow, burn, and overthrow me. I pray for G-d, who knits together the wounds of those with shattered hearts, to splinter me. If this is what comes from strength, let me be weak. Let my knees tremble. Let everything pierce me, flow thru me, overwhelm me. Let me be not Pharaoh, but a Jew.

Shabbat Shalom.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the rest of the series so far here.]