Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Tuesday
As Jewish families and communities come together this week to relive the escape from Egyptian slavery, I am struck by how Trump’s America is reenacting the Joseph story. Just as Joseph’s deeply resentful brothers sold him into bondage, so “Mass Deportation Now” Republicans are celebrating as innocent immigrants are deported to foreign dungeons.
Nobel laureate Issac Bashevis Singer has ranked “the sublime scribe of the Joseph story” with Chekhov and Maupassant as masters of the short story form. One can read these authors “over and over again and never get bored,” Singer says. Here’s the part of the story that aligns with ICE kidnapping Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and other immigrants:
Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made an ornate robe for him. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.
Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had: We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.”
His brothers said to him, “Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?” And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said….
So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. But they saw him in the distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him.
“Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams”….
So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the ornate robe he was wearing— and they took him and threw him into the cistern. The cistern was empty; there was no water in it.
As they sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt.
Judah said to his brothers, “What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Come, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood.” His brothers agreed.
So when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for twenty shekelsof silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt.
Modern day Ishmaelites—in this case, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele—are getting both the slave and the money ($20,000 a year for each prisoner sent).
The resentment that Donald Trump has stoked against immigrants is all there in the story. Many white Americans are convinced that immigrants are getting preferential treatment and that they operate with a Josephian sense of entitlement. (Following last week’s Hands Off demonstration I encountered a woman who told me that immigrants don’t have to pay taxes for their first six years.) In their fear and anger, they are more than willing to see them carted off to inhumane conditions.
In the post I wrote following that demonstration, I reported on how the Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers of the 1950s and 1960s–which feature kindly cops, Boy Scouts, shy teachers, solicitous soldiers, kindly Santas, etc.–assured my childhood self that Americans are fundamentally decent people. It is a foundational belief of many liberals that our better angels (to borrow from Lincoln) will ultimately prevail. But what if this belief is wrong? I didn’t mention that virtually all the figures in Rockwell’s paintings of small town life—from 1916 until 1964—are white. Only when his own assumptions about Americans were shaken to the core by southern racist violence did Rockwell change. (His famous The Problem We All Live With shows six-year-old Ruby Bridges going to school flanked by four U.S. marshals.)
Because of bipartisan support of civil rights in the 1960s (if one excludes the south), liberals felt that we could in fact step into our better selves. But instead of northern liberals changing the south, it now appears that southern intolerance has infected a significant sector of the north, with Confederate flags now a not uncommon sign in former Union states. Political scientist John Stoehr writes that, just as liberals “grossly underestimate the power of corruption, greed, arrogance and stupidity,” so do they “grossly overestimate the inherent goodness of the American people”:
White liberals seem naive about the current character of the American people, because most are living in the past. In the postwar era, there was a consensus about the government, that it should serve everyone, and from that arose all the rights movements. After four decades of rightwing propaganda, that consensus is gone.
And yet, Stoehr concludes, liberals keep clinging to their naiveté.
To be sure, not everyone has had our illusions about this “inherent goodness.” I’m currently on a Louise Erdrich kick, and there are few novels where the Chippewa author doesn’t mention past White atrocities, whether in the form of bounties for Indian scalps, massacres, land grabs, and the like. But with the rise of rights movements of the 1970s, there was reason to hope that the worst was behind us.
Now that faith has been shaken.
So where does that leave us now? It is up to us to resist Trumpian intolerance in whatever forms it takes. “Hope never never came from people who succumbed to evil,” Stoehr writes. “It comes from people who can face evil squarely in the face and then act accordingly.”
Passover is a time to face up to evil and then remind ourselves that hope has triumphed in the past and can do so again. Back in 2011 I shared Primo Levi’s “Passover,” which is so beloved that it has been incorporated into many people’s seder rituals. As an Auschwitz survivor, Levi knew at a deep, deep level what it means to become a demonized Other.
Each of us has been a slave in Egypt,
Soaked straw and clay with sweat,
And crossed the sea dry-footed.
You too, stranger.
And then there’s the Adam Zagajewski Passover poem I shared in 2023, which alerts us to the plight of the world’s refugees:
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
I fear for the souls of those who sign on to Trump’s bigotry and rejoice over his cruelties. All those politicians, spokespeople, Cabinet officials, lawyers, ICE members, bureaucrats, and other supporters are being hollowed out by the hate. While Passover cannot change the world’s injustices, it gives us a chance to ground ourselves in what is right and true.
Or as Levi concludes his poem,
This year in fear and shame,
Next year in virtue and in justice.Or as Jesus put it, channeling social justice prophets Amos, Isaiah, Micah, and Jeremiah,
