Pharoah - Yes!; Pharaoh - No

Parshat Shlach

 by Rabbi Avi Billet

 Last weekend earned some off-the-track Jewish attention. On Thursday of last week, Mexican jockey Victor Espinoza made his way to the Chabad Ohel and the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The spiritual man was looking for some divine intervention to help him win the Triple Crown.

 On Saturday, the “Jewish horse,” the ironically named American Pharoah, owned by the Jewish Egyptian-American Zayat family, running under the aforementioned jockey, did indeed make history, being the first horse to win the coveted horse-racing title in 37 years.

 The CBS report on Espinoza’s visit to the Rebbe noted that it was probably the first time anyone prayed for a pharaoh at the Ohel. But I suppose that the horse’s purposely misspelled name makes it alright.

 Watching Ahmed Zayat explain how God comes first for his family, and hearing of their plans to camp out in Belmont for Shabbos in order to be present for the race, one can’t help but think that while their horse’s name might include a nod to their Egyptian origins, they have no intent to ever return there. Not that this is surprising. Why would anyone who had suffered or been oppressed by Egypt ever want to return there?

 This is precisely the dilemma we are faced with when we read Bamidbar 14:2-4: “The entire community was saying, 'We wish we had died in Egypt! We should have died in this desert! Why is God bringing us to this land to die by the sword? Our wives and children will be captives! It would be best to go back to Egypt!' The people started saying to one another, 'Let's appoint a [new] leader and go back to Egypt.'”

 Having been the victims of slavery and oppression, we wonder how the Israelites could possibly contemplate returning to Egypt, even when faced with what seems to be the dangerous nature of the Canaanites. Even if Canaan seems to be a less than favorable option, having seen that they can survive in the wilderness, wouldn’t no-man’s-land be a suitable alternative over a return to bondage?

 The simplest answer is the most obvious one. They may not have preferred Egypt, but at least they were familiar with Egypt. They knew what to expect.

 And the Chizkuni interprets along these lines when he suggests the Israelites were saying, “When we were in Egypt, when someone died he would leave his belongings to his relatives or neighbors. But now, anything a person “leaves behind” is lost.”

 Think about the negative episode of Korach, in which those swallowed by the ground lost everything, leaving nothing for whatever surviving children they may have had.

 Tzlafchad, who is much more positively portrayed in the Torah, also leaves nothing to his daughters upon his death (a controversial reality until the law is clarified).

 In this light, the desire to return to Egypt is really to return to a life that is relatively routine, when a nation is not living out of suitcases, and when they can settle in a reality that is, at least to their knowledge and experience, normal.

 The Alshikh adds an insight that touches completely on the psyche of the people, due to their awareness of history. The people knew that the promise to Avraham had been for his children to be strangers in a strange land for 400 years. They also knew that from the time Yaakov came down to Egypt until the Exodus, only 210 years had passed. Many may have felt there were 190 years to go, albeit in a different location. And this was the rub, because they knew how their women and children had been treated in Egypt: relatively well. But there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty as to how a Canaanite or Emorite bondage would have translated into mistreatment of the women and children. And so, the return to Egypt was offered as an option because it seemed the better of two evils.

 We are the beneficiaries of 20-20 hindsight. We know that the choices and decisions, as well as the thought processes of the Israelites were out of line. We know they followed the advice of 10 spies instead of the two righteous ones who were faith-driven men preaching what they knew to be correct on account of their relationships with the Divine. We know that if the spies incident had gone differently, the people likely would have been in the land within days or weeks, not 40 years. And we know that had Moshe led them into Canaan, they wouldn’t have experienced Canaan as “an evil” in any way.

 The question is if we would have behaved any differently? How many people are ready to leave a less-than-perfect yet familiar life to branch off into the “eretz lo zarua” – the land of the unknown? Who feels comfortable moving to a new place where the promises that have been offered haven’t been actualized yet? 

While hopefully our options are not even remotely similar to Egyptian bondage or Canaanite bondage, life presents its own set of challenges that sometimes push people to seek personally greener pastures in education, employment, self-employment, what neighborhood, state, or country to live in, and in how to raise a family.

 Some people may not like that the Zayats attended the Belmont race. Perhaps horse racing is not in the spirit of Shabbos. But I think that with the bad press certain elements of the Orthodox world have been getting, the example the Zayats set in stating that God comes first, in wearing their Shabbos clothes to the races and in camping out so they could be in attendance without driving, is a welcome Kiddush Hashem. 

Seeing a Jewish family engage in their greener pasture while respectably honoring their God does not even fall into the equation of the lesser of two evils. Maybe not all of us would have done the same in similar circumstances (honestly, most Americans do not understand the subtleties of Shabbos questions). But the Kiddush Hashem aspect cannot be overlooked. It is a hallmark of the Jewish people that the spies, and people who followed them, overlooked. You honor God first. And then pray that everything else will fall into place.

 And with American Pharoah, it seems everything did.