Drash Vayechi 5766 - Who is a Jew?

Seventeen years after Jacob moved to Egypt, he becomes ill and close to death. He first blesses Ephraim and Manasseh as his own sons, though oddly changing the birth order around. Later, he blesses, if not prophesizes about all of his sons not of their birth order but on their merit. Jacob dies, is carried back to Canaan, and then the brothers fret Joseph will finally exact revenge, But Joseph tells them once again it was God who did all this and there is nothing to worry about. Fifty four years later, Joseph makes his brother promise that when they or their descendants leave Egypt they will take his bones with them. Joseph lives to see three generations and then at 110, dies ending the book of Genesis.

I don’t normally do requests, but I can’t break the mitzvah of Ex. 20:12, and it just so happens this one fits so well with one of my favorite passages in this portion that I decided to follow it up. This week, seventeen years after Jacob is in Egypt, there is an interesting exchange between Joseph and Jacob (Genesis 48:5-12)

8. And Israel saw Joseph’s sons, and said, Who are these? 9. And Joseph said to his father, They are my sons, whom God has given me in this place. And he said, Bring them, I beg you, to me, and I will bless them. 10. Now the eyes of Israel were dim from age, so that he could not see. And he brought them near to him; and he kissed them, and embraced them. 11. And Israel said to Joseph, I had not thought to see your face; and, lo, God has shown me also your seed.

In a scene quite similar to Isaac and Jacob, we have the granting of privileges on two who were part of the next generation, as though they are of the previous generation. Jacob, like his father, is unable to see clearly, and most believe his question “who are these?” is merely for Joseph to verify these are Joseph’s kids, even though Jacob must have seen them on occasion as they grew up from their very early years. Both were born during the seven years of plenty. At a maximum, the oldest, Manasseh was eight at the time Jacob came to Egypt, and his grandpa had seen him grown till a maximum possible age of twenty five. Ephraim would of course be younger than that. He knew them, knew their voices, and their shape. That may not have been the Issue.

Several midrash note that Manasseh and Ephraim wore Egyptian clothes - they did not dress in traditional Canaanite grab, and that would eventually be reflected in the look of their standards during the Exodus from Egypt. Part of this might be assimilation. Yet some Targums such as Pseudo Jonathan change the question to “whose are these?” questioning their heritage. More likely the pashat, the simple plain version is true for those reading or hearing this story during most of Biblical times up to the construction of the second Temple and Ezra.

However, it is the commentators after this time, the Rabbis, who ran into problems due to issues in their own times. They have a real problem in Joseph’s wife, Asnat, daughter of the Egyptian priest of On, Potiphera. Reflected in those Aramaic targums, they have Jacob ask of their heritage. Because Asnat is the mother, are Ephraim and Manasseh Jewish? Throughout history, there has been the question of who is and is not included in the covenant, in short who is a Jew. By rabbinic times, there was an institution in place know as Matrilineal decent to deal with this issue. Essentially, being Jewish is inherited by the mother. Its most concise discussion of this issue comes in the issue of permissibility to marry a gentile in Mishnah Kiddushin.
And whatever [woman] who can not contract kiddushin with that particular person or with others, the issue follows her status; this is the case with the issue of a bondmaid or a gentile woman.

The rabbis seem to be more concerned here with the negative case, when a woman is not Jewish, her children are not Jewish. This statement gets explained in B. Kiddushin 68a-b.

How do we know [it of a freeborn] Gentile woman? — Scripture says, neither shall you make marriages with them. (Deut 7:3) How do we know that her issue bears her status? — R. Johanan said on the authority of R. Simeon b. Yohai, Because Scripture says, For he will turn away your son from following me: (Deut. 7:4) ‘thy son’ by an Israelite woman is called ‘thy son’, but ‘thy son’ by a heathen is not called ‘thy son’. Rabina said: This proves that thy daughter's son by a heathen is called thy son. Shall we say that Rabina holds that if a heathen or a [non-Jewish] slave cohabits with a Jewess the issue is mamzer? — [No.] Granted that he is not [regarded as] fit, he is not mamzer either, but merely stigmatized as unfit (to marry into the priesthood).

Exodus 21:4 talks about keeping the wife and children of a freed slave, when the freed slave had married another slave and had the children under his term of indenture. The rabbis believe this means that children issued from the wife are part of the wife, and thus their status is transmitted via the mother. The rabbis then connect that with the prohibition in Deuteronomy 7:3 of marrying into Canaanite populations inhabiting Israel, to note that this applies to free women as well. Here the rabbis, going back to a teaching from the 2nd century CE scholar Shimon b. Yochai comments on the grammar of Deut. 7:4. The text says he will turn your son. Because it is in the masculine singular, the “he” must be the husband in intermarriage. Had it been gentiles in general, both male and female, the pronoun would have been “they.” R. Shimon then notes “your son” means that this child is Jewish, since the child would not be part of the “your” Moses is speaking to if he was a gentile. Hence if the father is not Jewish, but the child is Jewish, then the mother must be Jewish. One of the compilers of the Babylonian Talmud, Rabina, then concludes with the formula we know today, a child is Jewish if the mother is Jewish.

But to make this whole thing more complex for poor Jacob on his deathbed, there are more specific prohibitions about conversion, based on the following verses of Deuteronomy 23:

4. An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the Lord forever; 5. Because they met you not with bread and with water in the way, when you came out of Egypt; and because they hired against you Balaam the son of Beor of Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse you….8. You shall not loathe an Edomite; for he is your brother; you shall not loathe an Egyptian; because you were a stranger in his land. 9. The children who are fathered by them shall enter into the congregation of the Lord in their third generation.

One problem with this passage is Ruth, who was a Moabite, but also the ancestor of David. But Ruth cannot convert according to the Deuteronomy passage. If Ruth cannot be Jewish according to Torah, then is David, or for that matter the Messiah, Jewish? That’s a big problem. The rabbis then notice 23:9, that for Edomites and Egyptians, only if the children are fathered by an Edomite or Egyptian, would there be a restriction of three generations. But here is it specifically fathered, not mothered. Therefore Egyptian women are excluded from the prohibition. By the logic of the early rabbis, if that is true of the Egyptian woman such would also be true of the women of Moab. While The Mishnah for Yevamot simply spells this out with only a little argumentation, the Gemara continues to argue this point for several folios, (76b-78b) However, the conclusion is kept. The prohibition does not extend to women; hence Ruth can legally convert, marry Boaz and be the legitimate ancestor of King David.

But in this discussion, we encounter still more problems. Most notably is this “third generation” concept for Egyptians. Who do you count the generations by, mother or father? Given this fathered phrase and the already decided matrilineal decent, the rabbis are not clear here, and debate back and forth between mother and father, never really reaching a conclusion. It is here that Asnat runs into Ambiguites. Given the rabbinic assumption that Torah extends to deeds of the Patriarchs before Sinai, then Ephraim and Manasseh, heads of two tribes from marriage of a Jew and an Egyptian, might not be legitimately part of the assembly. There were several ways of getting around this problem however. The Targum Pseudo Jonathan, an Aramaic translation of the Torah, and the Aggadic commentary Perkei d’Rabbi Eliezer adds that Asnat was the adopted daughter of Potiphar. Her real parents were Dinah and Shechem, the daughter from Dinah’s rape. As Dinah is a daughter of Jacob and Leah, she definitely is part of the assembly. Hence her daughter would be too, making Asnat part of the congregation, and thus matrilineal decent removes all problems. On the other hand Numbers Rabbah and Ecclesiastes Rabbah have her as a convert. This still leaves the problem of the third generation of an Egyptian of course, but we also read in Gen 50:23

23. And Joseph saw Ephraim’s children of the third generation; the children also of Machir the son of Manasseh were brought up upon Joseph’s knees.

Joseph lived long enough to see the generation who was allowed in the assembly. From these rabbinic interpretations we can see that Jacob’s question in the Rabbis’ mind was one not of personal but national identity - was the two grandsons he was about to bless as his sons really Jewish? The Rabbis, boxed into a corner by their own legal opinions, found ways to make sure they were.

While the Talmudic Rabbis were busy writing all these legal opinions, what is now known as matrilineal decent, as is often the case, they do not give us good reasons why they were dealing with the issue in the first place. These reasons or ta’amei mitzvot, really began to show up during the middle ages. Probably the best known of these is of course Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. But there were others that attempted to determine what were the reasons we did what we did. The status of Ruth’s and Dinah’s children illustrates the two major rationalizations. The case of Ruth, following the context of the Talmudic arguments in Kiddushin, is the status of children of intermarriage. Then there is the case of Dinah, obliquely mentioned in a few commentaries, the status of the child of rape. Historically, the time of Shimon bar Yochai was the period just after the Bar Kokbah rebellions and there were more than few Roman soldiers around. While there are estimates of up to 600,000 killed in retribution for the rebellion, it is not unlikely that Roman soldiers did other things as well and hence the concern. So today we hear rationalizations about the rabbis did this to handle the issues of jewish identity from intermarriage issues and from rape.

The Matrilineal decent standard in modern times has been questioned from the more liberal parts of Judaism, which has tried to address this all in the context of the current intermarriage issues. Reform and Reconstructionism have moved to a Patrilineal decent, or ‘either parent is Jewish’ model, stipulating that the child and parents must do, in the words of the CCAR, “appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and people. The performance of these mitzvot serves to commit those who participate in them, both parent and child, to Jewish life. ” In some aspects, Reform Jews now hold Jewish children and parents to a higher standard than the Orthodox in determining Jewish identity. Another challenge, one which might be more serious, to the question “Who is a Jew?” and matrilineal decent is court cases such as Doswell vs. Smith in the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1988, where an inmate in prison who have no Jewish parents nor gone through conversion declare themselves Orthodox Jews in order to get the better quality kosher meals than standard prison fare. If such challenges continue, Who is a Jew might be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court that Jewish identity must be decided only on the declaration of a person that they are Jewish. Jacob back in Genesis, straining to see his grandsons, first asked the question, and we still ask the question, time and time again.