The heroes of the beginning of Exodus are not Moses or Miriam or anyone in their family. The heroes are not even part of the Jewish people. The heroes of Parashat Shemot are two women, Shiphrah and Puah, who when commanded by Pharaoh to kill Hebrew boy babies, they simply said no. While they could not stop Pharaoh from his genocidal course, they had the courage to stand up to him and say what he was doing was wrong. To confront our oppressors from the outside is hard, but to do so from the inside is perhaps even harder.
Shiphrah and Puah represent a long line of heroic individuals who risked their lives to save Jews from persecution. At Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, we call these individuals righteous gentiles, and plant trees in their honor. There are over 26,000 such people honored in the museum grounds, so many names we have run out of spaces to plant trees for them.
Recently, another English term has emerged to describe people who risk their own lives to save others. We call them upstanders. The former American ambassador to the UN, Samantha Powers, is credited in creating the word in 2014 and it has quickly become a phenomenon in the Jewish community and beyond. So much so that our Buffalo Jewish community is in the process of creating a museum or center dedicated to upstanders. Locally, we have a proud legacy of people who have fought for women’s rights, racial equity, and general fairness. A dictator can destroy our faith in life, only an upstander can restore it.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy New Year,
Rabbi Alex