Remembering Joseph, Remembering January 6
This week we begin the book of Shemot , the story of our people’s descent into slavery and, ultimately, their redemption. And the Torah opens with a single, chilling verse: “Vayakam melech chadash al Mitzrayim, asher lo yada et Yosef.” “A new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” It is one of the most consequential sentences in the Torah, and one of the most disturbing. How could Egypt not know Joseph? Joseph was not a minor figure lost to history. He saved Egypt from famine. He reorganized its economy. He was, in effect, the architect of Egypt’s prosperity. And yet, suddenly, the Torah tells us that a new king arose who “did not know” him. Our traditional commentators are almost unanimous in their understanding that this was not ignorance. It was willful forgetting. It was a conscious decision to erase an inconvenient past in order to justify a new and dangerous present. That act of historical distortion is what sets slavery in motion. Oppression doesn’t begin wi...