Vayigash / ויגש

This is a weekly series of frum, trans, anarchist parsha dvarim [commentaries]. It's crucial in these times that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns or, worse, is Judaism. Our texts are rich—sometimes opaque, but absolutely teeming with wisdom and fierce debate. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance. I aim to offer comment which is true to the source material (i.e. doesn't invert or invent meaning to make it more comfortable for us) and uses Torah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

Content note: famine and starvation in Gaza (donate if you can)

Hasidus posits that the stories we read in the parsha are not only historical(if they happened historically at all, which Hasidus assumes they did) but they're spiritually happening now, again/still, as we read them, at the same time every year. Every moment that passes is etched forever in time. There is famine across the land. Yosef is weeping with his brothers right now, as they betray him, as he forgives them, as the whole Jewish people move from Kna'an into Mitsrayim. Hashem is speaking to Yakov right now, telling him to worry not, that in Mitsrayim He will make us into a great nation. We are also always enslaved in Mitsrayim, and always leaving it, and always remembering to always remember it.

Time is a spiral. Every moment is pregnant with the possibility for moshiakh, for redemption (Walter Benjamin). But moshiakh will not come before we merit him. He won't come when we need him; he will only come after we have already/still built/brought redemption ourselves.

The parsha offers a simple lesson: forgive the people who hurt us, and go beyond forgiveness to give them the best that we have to offer. But rather than simply turning the other cheek with no regard to context and becoming Christian (חס־ושלום) we should look at forgiveness and generosity in terms of power dynamics. Yosef's brothers betrayed him when they had power to do so; when Yosef has power, he doesn't hurt his brothers but פּונקט פֿאַרקערט saves them from famine and offers them all the finery in Mitsrayim. However, If Yosef remained in the same position of relative powerlessness to his brothers during the famine, he could not be expected to save them. We cannot expect people to give more than they have to offer, especially not to people who hurt them.

I've spent the majority of my time this week fundraising for people in Gaza. My friends here and I raised enough for Manal to appease her malicious war-profiteer landlord in south Gaza where she fled after evacuating her home; to pay for medical treatment for Mahmoud's kid in North Gaza; and to send some money to Areej in the Nuseirat IDP camp. Areej's tent is still flooded, which means her and her family have no where to sleep right now. If you're able to send them a little money—even $5—it adds up and makes a very material difference in their lives.

Thank you for sticking with me as I continue to make these appeals; I know that it's hard to face the reality of others' deprivation day in and day out, especially when we have our own struggles at home. But I keep thinking about what it must have been like in the ghettos during The War (the last The War, the war where the Jews perished, not the ongoing The War where the Jews kill. I know it's more accurate, more specific to refer to both as genocides rather than wars, but The War was such a common euphemism for the Khurbn/Shoah/Holocaust that it holds more weight for me than "genocide"). I have spent a lot of time thinking—fantasizing?—about what I would do if I'd been alive during The War: always from the vantage of the Jew, because I am a Jew.

The War now is the same. The parallels in Gaza are obvious to anyone who cares to look. But The War now is different. Who has power? I hold the intergenerational trauma of The War and the ghettos and the camps; it lives in my body and my psyche, and comes out in my nightmares and therapy sessions and psilocybin trips. I carry something like a memory of it, absorbed through reading and oral histories and archival footage, and I reflect back on it as if those truly were my experiences. The War is happening again, but this time I'm on the outside, smuggling money in so people can buy food at inflated prices. I'm not a sick and scrawny prisoner but a lifeline, a narrow bridge between people who have money and people who need it. Because I've been moderately successful, more people in Gaza have contacted me asking for help. I'm co-running five campaigns now, and this week three more people have messaged me. In this The War, we are not the oppressed Jew; we are the righteous gentile. I never fantasized about this. It is a far easier, if less sexy, position than that of the resistance fighter or the partisan, but that doesn't preclude it from being life-saving. How many of our families were saved by the generosity of goyim who sent money, arranged visas, did boring and difficult and risky admin work to slow fascism's death machine and get people out? The War was a defining moment of the last century. The War is a defining moment in our generation. Collectively and individually, what are we doing to stop The War? What are we doing to preserve life? There is famine in Knaan, in the ghettos, in Gaza. Time is a spiral. Moshiakh could arrive at any moment. What are we doing to merit him?