Shemoth: Oppression

This is the book of names.  They  are taking down names.  These are the names of the brothers who sold Joseph into slavery.  Now, they will become slaves, as they pledged when Joseph's stolen goblet ruse caught them.  These are the 12 brothers who could have returned to  Canaan... but did not.  Now their descendants  will stay in Egypt for hundreds of years. 

The Hebrew immigrants are oppressed. They are foreigners.  Who knows where their allegiance lies?They may join with the enemy, a fifth column. They could have been expelled, the Egyptians could have built a wall.  Instead they enslaved  them.  They became gardeners and house cleaners.  They found an ironic project: build store cities.  Joseph, the viceroy who had brought these Hebrews down from wherever they belong, had risen to his position by storing grain.  Let them continue his tradition and build cities for the storage of grain.  Let them appear to participate in the hated collectivization of the land.

The Hebrews have so many babies! Pharaoh has a plan.  Kill the boys ( and keep the girls) The midwives refuse to carry out this Nazi level policy. When called to task, they get away with a lame excuse.  All they need to do is invoke the  prevailing bigotry  and call the Hebrews animals.   When the 20th century Nazis formed Einsatzgruppen,  squads of soldiers who shot Jews into pits ( how my maternal grandparents probably died), there was little or no punishment for refusing to participate.  At least on some occasions, standing up for good over evil can be worth it. 

The daughter of Pharaoh rescues a doomed Hebrew boy.  She knows exactly what she is doing.  Moshe's mother had followed the royal edict: she had cast her male child into the river.  Who said she could not use a boat? Pharaoh's daughter was rebelling against her father... and fighting an evil. She raised a prince that would defeat her realm... and drowns its sons in the sea of Reeds. 

When Moshe and Aaron ask for a  holiday, the Pharaoh detects a nation-building activity . He reacts by making the work of the enslaved Hebrews impossibly difficult.  They will now need to produce bricks without a a supply of raw materials. When they fail the impossible, the Egyptian overlords beat the Hebrew supervisors. The image evokes scenes from the Holocaust 

Bricks  are the symbol of industrialization, and the subjugation that it implies. Bricks are first mentioned as part of the (sin of) the tower of Babel.  The text tells us that the bricks replaced stones. The manufactured, more uniform, building material replaced the naturally occurring ,  irregular stones that impart uniqueness to every construction; that require (expensive) skill to use correctly.  Bricks generated a (lower) class of brick makers and degraded the status of the builder.  (Concrete is even worse.) The Pharaoh and his minions used the adoption of this socioeconomic system, established at the dispersion of Babel ( which created the distinction between the native and the immigrant) to subjugate the Hebrew foreigners. 

The parsha names heroes, women who would not obey evil decrees. The drudges who carried out the decrees, without protest, possibly without thought , were just  banal parts of the machine.  That is also a crime.  

Fight evil, you might get away with it.