Son of the Egyptian
If you somehow managed to stumble upon my post from yesterday and saw the photograph of my journal page, you know I was going through something. When I go through these things I feel agitated. Amped. Short on composure. I get a little manic. Or a lot manic. I become someone who starts to bleed and ooze, and with that comes a compulsion to express, to vomit thoughts and feelings, to be a human being.
I've been thinking a lot about identity lately. I have a long-form writing project in progress, influenced by Simone Weil and W.G. Sebald, about identity, transition, movement, place, and time. Who knows if it will ever see the light of day. But you never know.
So anyway, yesterday I posted something wrenching and heartfelt and difficult on r/jewishleft. I'm a halfJew by the way. Father's side. The other half is Puerto Rican, Spanish Roman Catholic. I was born in 1981 and grew up in a neighborhood that was 93% Italian or Italian-American. Let's just say my identity issues and my sense of displacement started there. I'll elaborate more another time.
The post was high-speed vomit. Like someone said you have five minutes to freeform write, GO. I didn't know how it would begin or where it would end. I should add: despite the name, r/jewishleft skews pro-Zionist, and I am not. I made a post about growing up a disconnected halfJew in Brooklyn, about experiencing antisemitism as a child because the Italians knew my dad was a Jew. Somehow it went from there into Zionism as a form of internal destruction, and my thoughts on the state of Israel and its effects on Jews, on my family, and for my own safety and sanity, on me. I knew it would be controversial. I felt compelled anyway.
What happened? Mostly good things, actually. Real exchanges, real responses. But this morning I woke up to this notification.
The moderators had removed the comment. I can't see it on the post itself or respond to it. I wanted to badly. I started reading through this person's comment history and found what I expected: someone who has it all figured out.
Spoken like a true "son of the Egyptian."
The reference is Leviticus 24:10-16. A man who was half-Israelite, half-Egyptian tried to claim a place among his mother's people. Got into a fight with an Israelite who told him he didn't belong. In the course of it he invoked the name of God. The community stoned him. They chose it carefully. What they were saying: you are the half-breed who doesn't belong here. Your mixed blood is the problem. Your claim to speak in this space is illegitimate. Go back to Egypt.
I've been the son of the Egyptian my whole life. Too Jewish for the Italians in Bensonhurst. Too not-Jewish enough for the Jews. Too Puerto Rican for one side, too white for the other. Too leftist for the mainstream, too Jewish for parts of the left. Born into the in-between and trying to build a life in it ever since.
When someone reaches for a three-thousand-year-old text to tell you that your mixed blood disqualifies you from having an opinion about your own people, that's not a theological argument. That's a weapon. It lands not because it's right but because it names a wound that's been there since before you could speak.
Here's what they didn't reckon with. The passage doesn't say what they think it says.
The blasphemer wasn't exiled for being mixed. The Talmud is explicit: he was subject to Jewish law because his mother was Jewish. He left Egypt with the Israelites. He was brought before Moses, not sent away, but brought into the legal process of the community he belonged to. Orthodox sources use this very passage as evidence for matrilineal descent. He was inside. That's why what he said mattered. You can't blaspheme the God of a people you don't belong to.
And the law that follows his stoning? It established that the same rules apply to the stranger and the citizen alike. The passage used to call me an outsider is the passage that insists on my equal standing before the law. They grabbed the weapon and it turned in their hand.
But I don't want to only argue halachically, because the wound is older and deeper than the law.
Simone Weil, who was Jewish and refused baptism (she became very into Christianity) until she died, who stayed outside every institution that drew a hard line of exclusion, wrote about malheur, affliction, the particular suffering that doesn't just hurt but marks. That "takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery." That's what it feels like to be told again, by someone in your own community: you are not of us. Not that you're wrong. That you don't exist right.
She also wrote: Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others. She meant it as solidarity, not insult. The faith of the excluded. The ones left outside the camp. The commenter uses it as a slur in other posts. There's a difference between knowing the tradition and understanding it.
The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, a man who came from poverty and obscurity and built a revolution inside Judaism, taught that every person contains a divine spark. Not every Jewish person. Every person. He taught that a humble man with a pure heart could stand closer to God than a scholar filled with contempt. He built his entire movement on that premise because the scholars of his era were doing exactly what this commenter does: using learning as a gate rather than a door.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, who came from a Hasidic dynasty and marched in Selma and said he felt his legs were praying, said: "Our tragedy begins with the segregation of God." He meant: the moment you use the holy to exclude is the moment you've lost the thread entirely. He called racism satanism. He meant it literally. The claim that someone's blood disqualifies them from the community of the sacred is an inversion of everything the tradition stands for.
I'm a halfJew from Brooklyn. My father is Jewish, my mother is Puerto Rican. I grew up an outsider in a neighborhood that didn't have a category for me. I attend an Episcopal church. I am in DBT. I am pursuing peer support specialist certification because lived experience is the only credential I actually have and I'm done pretending otherwise.
I have a hypomanic spell and I post things on the internet at 3am and sometimes strangers show up and say we see you. That happened yesterday and it meant something.
And then someone reached into the tradition and pulled out a stone.
Here is what I know. The Torah commands thirty-six times, more than any other commandment, more than Sabbath, more than almost anything, that you shall not oppress the stranger. Thirty-six times. Because you were strangers in Egypt. Because the stranger knows what it is to be a stranger. Because displacement is not a disqualification. It is a qualification. It is the thing that makes you able to see what the settled cannot.
I was a stranger in Egypt.
I'm still here. Still speaking. Still bleeding a little.
That's enough.
Have thoughts? I'd love to hear from you — drop me a line at brian@pinkbeam.xyz