Egyptian Slavery, Desensitization and the Holocaust

Advertisements
Advertisements
FacebookTwitterLinkedInPrintFriendlyShare

Like Pharaoh, Hitler didn’t just start killing Jews; he used the process of desensitization by gradually worsening the persecution.

My uncle grew up as a teenager in Austria in the 1930s and was beaten up every day in school simply because he was Jewish. My mother, who was younger, just wanted to fit in. She remembers wanting to join the Nazi youth because that’s what all of the kids were doing.

My mother and uncles with my grandparents in the 1930s

When my grandfather was forced to sell the family business, a clothing department store, my grandmother said to him, “Let’s just pack up the car and leave.”

My grandfather refused. He told her, “I fought for the Kaiser in WWI, and we are Austrian too.”

It wasn’t until he was taken away to Dachau on Kristallnacht that he finally realized how dire things were and that they had to flee for their lives. His non-Jewish comrade from the army helped get him out through his connections and they finally fled.

People often wonder, didn’t people in Germany and Austria see the handwriting on the wall? Didn’t they realize that German and Austrian Jewish life had been stripped away? How do we understand that they seemed to tolerate it when things got worse and worse?

Nahmanides in his masterful commentary on the Torah sets down a principle that the Torah is a blueprint of future Jewish history. The events in the Torah are a template through which future events in the unfolding of the saga of the Jewish people are reproduced. In the beginning of the Book of Exodus the beginning of Jewish history was a cycle of great prosperity and leadership, with Joseph being the viceroy of Egypt. However this secure environment quickly changes into a cycle of persecution. A “new king” arises, a new regime and things start to turn bad.

Pharaoh implements a gradual program of oppression. First we are told that they appointed tax collectors in order to cause them to suffer (Exodus 1:11). The commentary Seforno explains that the Egyptians imposed a public works conscription program in which the Jews at first willingly participated. Then the Egyptians oppressed the Jews and enslaved them against their will (ibid v. 13). Then they embittered their lives with even more difficult work. (ibid. v. 14). Pharaoh eventually began a program of genocide by ordering the male babies to be thrown into the river.

Pharaoh gradually worsened the forced labor, so that the Jews, and perhaps the Egyptians as well, would come to accept each step which was more severe, something they might not have done had it been introduced from the beginning. Human nature is such that people learn to accept and accommodate themselves to circumstances and also to behaviors when they increase gradually over time. This process is known in psychology as desensitization, and was developed by Mary Cover Jones as a way to get people to overcome their phobias.

Like Pharaoh, Hitler did not just start killing Jews; he used the process of desensitization by gradually worsening the persecution. In her book “Jewish Women in Nazi Germany: Daily Life, Daily Struggles, 1933-1939”, author Marion Kaplan documents the gradual alienation, stigmatization and eventual persecution of German Jews in the 1930’s. What is fascinating about the book is that we see how the Jews of Germany, and the Germans, gradually accommodated themselves and then came to accept degrees of persecution which would have seemed shocking and unacceptable at the beginning.

The Zohar tells us that Pharaoh is the symbol of the Yetzer Hara, the negative voice within us which allows our pejorative behaviors, habits and sometimes addictions to enslave us. How does the negativity accomplish this? With a gradual program that inures us to behaviors which at first seem unacceptable.

But the book of Exodus tells us that we are not to despair, for over the coming weeks we will see that with trust in the Almighty, we can free ourselves from even the worst oppression, whether it occurs on a political level from the outside, or a personal level within.

Click here to comment on this article
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
EXPLORE
LEARN
MORE
Explore
Learn
Resources
Next Steps
About
Donate
Menu
Languages
Menu
Social
.