Parshat Vayigash

In Parshat Vayigash, Yosef and his brothers are reunited. Yosef instructs his siblings to bring their father Yaakov down to Egypt, along with the rest of the family. He tells his brothers to tell Yaakov (45:9-11)

“And you shall dwell in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near to me, you and your children and your grandchildren, and your flocks and your cattle and all that is yours.”

Later in the Parsha Yosef instructs his brothers to tell Pharaoh that their family business in shepherding. Yosef explains why he is so insistent that the brothers share this information (46: 34):

“You shall say, 'Your servants have been owners of livestock from our youth until now, both we and our ancestors,' so that you may dwell in the land of Goshen, because all shepherds are abhorrent to the Egyptians."

One of the effects of living in Goshen that Yosef anticipated would be that Yaakov’s family would be able to maintain their distance from the rest of Egyptian culture. They would be able to maintain their unique culture, practices and identity. As Robert Frost put it, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Goshen could serve as a Jewish enclave in Egypt where Yaakov’s clan could live their lives in peace, without antagonism from the majority Egyptian society.

Although this may have worked while Yosef was alive, this situation was short-lived. In Parshat Shemot we learn that the Egyptians began to oppress the Jewish People within Goshen itself. Ramses was a major city in Goshen and the Egyptians enslaved the Jews to work in that city. We also learn that the Jews began to leave the confines of Goshen as the community grew. This is alluded to in Shemot 1:7:

“The children of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and increased and became very, very strong, and the land became filled with them.”

The Jewish community may have left the confines of Goshen out of necessity: Perhaps there was no more room for housing, perhaps housing prices made Goshen no longer affordable. Leaving Goshen for other parts of Egypt may have also been a way that Jews sought to avoid Egyptian persecution. It could be that some of the Jews in Goshen thought that they were targets because they were living a separate, cloistered life that raised the ire of other Egyptians. If only they would live across the country, then Egyptian-Jewish relations would improve. The Torah tells us that this did not happen.

“But as much as they would afflict them, so did they multiply and so did they gain strength, and the Egyptians were disgusted because of the children of Israel.”

When the Jews were isolated in Goshen, the Egyptians hated them. And when the Jews spread out across the land, the Egyptians also hated them.

I think about these lessons in light of this month’s two most horrific attacks against Jews. On December 10, three people were murdered in a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, NJ. The Mayor of Jersey City identified the attack as a hate crime against Jews, and said that there’s a high probability that the shooters intended to harm the Jewish day school next door to the grocery, which teaches more than 50 Jewish children. This past Saturday night, the 7^th Day of Chanukah, a man entered the home of a Chasidic Rebbe in Monsey and stabbed multiple people with a machete, leaving two with critical injuries. Monsey is a town in Rockland County, where 31 percent of the total population is comprised of Orthodox Jews. In much of Monsey the percentage of Jews is even greater. Jersey City, NJ has a population of about 250,000. Over the last decade, about 100 Chasidic families have moved into Jersey City in search of more affordable housing and a better quality of life.  What these two anti-Semitic attacks remind us is that there is violent Jew-hatred today in America, both in locations comprised of predominantly Jewish enclaves, as well as in areas where Jews live as a small minority among our non-Jewish neighbors. The first step in addressing this latest wave of violent anti-Semitism is to recognize that this hatred exists due to the existence of Jews in the world, and is independent of where Jews live.