Are you a prince or a peasant?

When President Dwight Eisenhower met with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, the American president said: “It is very hard to be the president of 170 million people.” Ben-Gurion responded: “It’s harder to be the prime minister of 2 million prime ministers.”

It is one of the great questions about the most impactful Jewish teacher. Why did Providence have it that our first and greatest leader be raised among non-Jews, and even worse, in the home of their archenemy, Pharaoh? “It takes a village to raise a child,” the old saying goes. No man is an island. We all grow up within a community and are molded by our environment. Nurture, not only nature, craft our identities.

It certainly “takes a village to raise a Jewish child.” Judaism is a family and community faith. We all have memories of Passover with our parents, grandparents, and extended family.

Yet the first Jewish leader, who molded us into a people, our greatest prophet and teacher, the transmitter of Torah, grew up without Jewish parents, without a Jewish family, without a Jewish environment, without a community of Jews. What is even stranger is that he grew up in the palace of Pharaoh, the monarch of the superpower of the time, the tyrant who had been systematically exterminating the Jewish people. We know the technicalities of the story. Pharaoh’s daughter, Batya, went to bathe in the Nile River and found a baby floating in a basket on the Nile. She retrieved the basket, rescued the child, and took him in as a son. G-d’s imagination is fertile. He could have arranged for another Egyptian, not Pharaoh’s daughter, to take in the child. Or, better yet, that somehow Moses would remain among his family and his people, absorbing the energy and ideology of the Jewish people?  You all recall the controversy around the status of President Obama, triggered by President Donald Trump. The American Constitution places certain restrictions on those who may be eligible for the Office of the President of the United States.

"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."

There is logic to this law. To serve as an adequate leader, you need to be a “homegrown potato.” You need to have been raised "among the people, by the people, with the people,” so that you can truly understand “the people.” To be sure, some of the great Jewish scholars and leaders were converts: Shmaya and Avtalyon, Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Akiva, Onkelus the Translator, and yet, at least the father and progenitor of all Jewish leaders should have received some hands-on experience from Jews.

The question has been raised by one of the most important Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages, Rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra, who lived in the 12th century in Spain.

G-d’s thoughts are deep and mysterious, who can grasp His secret? Only He comprehends His schemes! You just got Judaism 101. The first answer Jews always give is: We don’t understand. We don’t get it. Why did Moses have to grow up in the bosom of Pharaoh? Answer: I don’t know. So the Lord desired. But, of course, we never stop there. Ibn Ezra goes on to give two powerful speculations about why G-d desired this pattern.

The first answer is a somewhat satirical comment about Jewish culture, and it holds to this day. Had Moses grown up among Jews, he would have never garnered the respect and awe he needed to lead them to redemption and mold them into greatness.

Perhaps G-d caused Moses to grow up in the home of royalty so that his soul would be accustomed to a higher sense of learning and behavior, and he would not feel lowly and accustomed to dwelling in a house of slavery. Indeed, you see that he killed an Egyptian who did a criminal act, and he saved the Midianite girls from the criminal shepherds who were irrigating their flock from the water the girls had drawn.

The curse of the Egyptian exile consisted not only of the physical slave labor, and the horrible oppression of the Hebrews. It also inculcated within the Hebrews an exile-like mentality.

Many of them learned to see their misery as an inherent reality. When you are abused as a slave for so many years, you sometimes become accustomed to the darkness and cease to sense the extraordinary degradation of your situation.  You might remember the old anecdote. Two Jewish men in Tsarist Russia were being led out to a firing squad: one, a humble tailor, the other a wild anarchist. As the Tsarist officer in charge of the firing squad tried to put a blindfold on the condemned anarchist, the young Jew fought back. He would face death unblinkingly, he said bravely. Alarmed, his fellow Jew interceded: "Please, don't make trouble!"

 This is why the redeemer of Israel needed to grow up in the Egyptian palace, not among his people. Had Moses grown up among the Hebrew slaves, he too would have suffered from a slave paradigm, lacking the courage to fight injustice and devoid of the ability to mold an enslaved tribe into a great people with a vision of transforming the world.

There was a time in the nineteen forties when Molotov was the Soviet foreign minister. He was a shrewd man and a hard bargainer but worked for Joseph Stalin, who was The Boss. He was once overheard talking to Stalin by trans-Atlantic telephone during some very intricate negotiations with the West. He said, "Yes, Comrade Stalin," in quiet tones, then again, "Yes, Comrade Stalin, and then, after a considerable wait, "Certainly, Comrade Stalin." Suddenly he was galvanized into emotion. "No, Comrade Stalin," he barked, "No. That's, Definitely, no.!"  After a while, he quieted and it was "Yes, Comrade Stalin," again. The reporter who overheard this was probably never so excited in his life. Molotov dared to oppose the dictator on at least one point, and it would surely be important to the West to know what that point might be. The reporter approached Molotov and said as calmly as possible, Secretary Molotov, I could not help but hear you say at one point, "No, Comrade Stalin."

Molotov turned his cold eyes on the reporter and said, "What of it?" "May I ask," said the reporter, cautiously, "What the subject under discussion was at that time?" "You may," said Molotov. "Comrade Stalin asked me if there was anything which he had said with which I disagreed."

This is true for each of our lives.

Many of us, after being subjected to dysfunctional conditions for a time, learn to somehow tolerate it and accept it as the innate condition of our lives. This can be worse than the condition itself since it guarantees no way out. We must cultivate in ourselves and in our loved ones the feeling of royalty. “The greatest tragedy,” said the Chassidic master Rabbi Aaron of Karlin, “is when the prince believes he is a peasant,” when you settle for less because you think you are destined to slavery. You don’t see yourself as a prince, as a child of G-d, and hence lack that feeling that you can rewrite your future and achieve your ultimate potential.

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky