When you were a child, did you ever get into a dangerous situation, like being cornered by a neighbor’s dog or falling through thin ice? Did you ever need your parents to rescue you?
I’m a Gen-Xer, and let me tell you, our parents let us roam around the neighborhood to let God-knows-what happen to us. We drank warm water straight from the hose and put iodine on our cuts. We’d ride bikes over hills of dirt and down into culverts and, well, anywhere you could almost ride a bike! The key word there is “almost”.
In the New York/New Jersey area, if you were watching Channel 5, WNEW, at 10:00 pm, you’d hear the voice of Mel Epstein reminding you — say it with me if you remember — “It’s 10 PM. Do you know where YOUR children are?” They started doing that in 1967, and they still do it every night to this day!
This seems unbelievable to kids today. Mine were like, “Wait, you could just go…wherever? Like…whenever?” Within reason, yes, but even so, we had remarkable freedom to wander around and get in trouble. But I don’t blame them for disbelief. Like many parents, I have an app on my phone called Life360 that tells me where my children are at any given moment. Well, it tells me where their phones are at any given moment, but they’re always on their phones, so…
These days, our children are hyper-monitored and protected. Some things are useful, like location apps, and others are maybe too much. Some think that this “safety-ism” could actually hurt our kids, and keep them from developing street smarts. There’s a counter-movement, “Free Range Kids,” founded by a mom named Lenore Skenazy. You might remember, she was vilified for letting her nine year old ride the New York subway alone. I’ve known plenty of kids for whom that was just part of growing up in New York City. Skenazy believes that excessive supervision is damaging our children’s mental health and development, and she has some plausible science to back her up. Some say that situations like this are how we learn to handle them ourselves.
How do we know the line between too much and not enough?
Now, if there is one group of overprotective mothers…you know where I’m going with this, right? “Come, eat!” “Wear a coat.” “You should eat.” “Bring an umbrella!” “Don’t forget to eat!” That’s the stereotype of Jewish mothers, but every cliche starts from a grain of truth.
Think about it. We have good reason to be neurotic. There are thousands of years of exile and persecution in our ancestral DNA. For millennia, at any moment, a Jewish mother had to be ready to grab her babies and run to safety. And as we know — as we will learn this week at the Symposium — sometimes they couldn’t run fast enough.
When I think of rescue, I think of baby Moses, who in Hebrew we call Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our Teacher. His mother, Yocheved, knew that Pharaoh’s decree meant certain death for her beloved son. So she placed him in a reed basket covered in pitch and sent him down the Nile, his fate unknown. It sounds counterintuitive — seeking his safety by floating him down a river, but remember, the Nile was a busy place. Women lined its shores bathing and washing clothes, so it’s likely she could guess some Egyptian woman would find the basket and save her son in short order. It was reasonable to assume it would be a woman doing menial labor, one who could hide him in a dusty village safely out of sight.
We all know how that worked out, right? God had other plans.
In Exodus 2: 5-6 we read:
Pharaoh’s daughter went down to bathe at the Nile, and her girls were walking along the Nile. She saw the little-ark among the reeds and sent her maid, and she took it. She opened [it] and saw him, the child — now here, a boy weeping! She pitied him, and she said: One of the Hebrews’ children is this!
In just a few lines, we learn so much.
God draws straight with crooked lines. He determined that Moses would be found not by a peasant woman, but by the daughter of the very man who sought to kill him.
This meant that in order for Moses to live, God had to find a woman who would stand up to the most powerful man in Egypt, a man whose word was law, a man seen as a god himself.
In Jewish tradition, her name was Basya — Daughter of God — and she was a convert to Judaism who eventually married Caleb. Rabbis understand her bathing at the Nile to be nothing less than a mikvah immersion, a ritual act of purity undertaken by Jewish women each month.
In these few lines, we see that she intuited right away that this child was an Israelite. She knew full well the consequences. She weighed the baby’s vulnerability and her father’s cruelty and chose to face them head on.
It was a defining moment in history. She knew that saving his life would mean her certain death. Still, she had the moral conviction to know that killing an Israelite baby was wrong and had to be stopped. She was what we now call an “upstander.”
In subsequent verses, when Miriam appears in the reeds, Basya gives the baby to her so that he may be nursed by his own mother, whom Basya would pay for her “work.” She reverses the slave-status of the Israelite woman herself, giving her dignity and purpose. She is the inverse of her father, who enslaves and murders.
But what of her maidservants? Would they all go along with her righteous deed? The midrash, or commentaries, say that they were ready to inform on her, and therefore all but the one who brought her Moses was killed by the Holy One in order to protect the baby through her act of kindness.
Without Basya’s courage, there is no Moses. Without Moses, there is no Exodus. Without an Exodus, there is no Sinai, no Promised Land, no Temple, no Judaism.
I stand here today because of the bravery of Basya.
In the symposium, we will hear about those who saved and resisted, including the miraculous rescue of 98% of Denmark’s Jews through a remarkable series of events and a critical upstander who made it possible — Nazi Maritime Attache Georg Duckwitz.
It was Duckwitz who tipped off the Danes about the Nazis imminent deportation order which was going to be on Shabbat Shuvah 1943, the Saturday between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Like Hamas, the Nazis took special pleasure in torturing Jews on their holy days.
Because of this brave act, as well as putting all German ships into dock for “repairs” while Denmark’s Jews escaped by small boats over the sea into Sweden, he was recognized in 1971 by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous of the Nations.
The Danes rose up as a people and refused to surrender their Jews to certain death. Even today, they stand as a rebuke to those countries where police and local citizens were co-opted and eagerly rounded up their neighbors.
The Holocaust was not inevitable. It was a choice by millions to accede to mass murder. And as miraculous as the rescues were, the lesson of the Holocaust is that there were too few upstanders, too few Basyas, too few Duckwitzes. Even in Berlin under the Nazis’ very noses, a few Jews were saved. And so, a difficult question for today. Where are the upstanders, the rescuers in Gaza?
Elie Wiesel told this story in the Teachers’ Study Guide for his book, Jewish Legends:
“One day the evil spirit came to God and said, ‘Master of the Universe, what is the difference between this group of people who are pure and these who are impure?’ And God answered, ‘They, the pure ones, protested. The others did not protest.’ ‘So,’ said the evil spirit, ‘had they protested, would You have listened to them?’ And God said, ‘No.’ ‘Did they know that?’ asked the evil spirit. And God said, ‘No, they didn’t know it; therefore they should have protested — protested against Me, against man, against everything wrong — because protest in itself contains a spark of truth, a spark of holiness, a spark of God.’
“Therefore, little does it matter whether our protest is heard or not. Protest we must to show that we care, that we listen, that we feel.”
Now. It’s 2025. Do we know?
Shabbat Shalom.
Click to watch this sermon on YouTube.