Photo Credit:
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

When G-d tells Moses to say to Pharaoh, “My son, my firstborn, Israel,” He is announcing to the most powerful ruler of the ancient world that these people may be your slaves but they are My children. The story of the Exodus is as much political as theological. Theologically, the plagues showed that the Creator of nature is supreme over the forces of nature. Politically it declared that over every human power stands the sovereignty of G-d, defender and guarantor of the rights of mankind.

In such a worldview, the idea of civil disobedience is not unthinkable but self-evident. The very notion of authority is defined by the transcendence of right over might, morality over power. In one of history’s world-changing moments, social criticism was born in Israel simultaneously with institutionalization of power. No sooner were there kings in Israel, than there were prophets mandated by G-d to criticize them when they abused their power. As the Talmud puts it: “If there is a conflict between the words of the master and the words of the disciple, whose words should one obey?” No human order overrides the commands of G-d.

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How moving it is, therefore, that the first recorded instance of civil disobedience – predating Thoreau by more than three millennia – is the story of Shifra and Puah, two ordinary women defying Pharaoh in the name of simple humanity. All we know about them is that they “feared G-d and did not do what the Egyptian king had commanded.” In those words, a precedent was set that eventually became the basis of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Shifra and Puah, by refusing to obey an immoral order, redefined the moral imagination of the world.

A final note is in order. Though Greek literature does not know of the concept of civil disobedience, it does contain one famous case where an individual defies the king – Sophocles’s Antigone, who buries her brother in defiance of King Creon’s order that he stay unburied as a traitor. The contrast between Sophocles and the Bible is fascinating. Antigone is a tragedy: the eponymous heroine pays for her defiance with her life. The story of Shifra and Puah is not a tragedy. It ends with a curious phrase: G-d “made them houses.”

What does this mean? The Italian commentator Samuel David Luzzatto offered an insightful interpretation. Sometimes women become midwives when they are unable to have children of their own. That, he suggests, was the case with Shifra and Puah. Because they saved children’s lives, G-d rewarded them – measure for measure – with children of their own (“houses” = families). In Judaism the moral life is not inescapably tragic, because neither the universe nor fate is blind. “In reward for the righteous women of that generation, our ancestors were redeemed from Egypt.” Shifra and Puah were two of those women: heroines of the spirit, giants in the story of mankind.

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Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks was the former chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth and the author and editor of 40 books on Jewish thought. He died earlier this month.