Parsha Shemot
By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel in Chula Vista, California
Everyone loves crowning Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. as the inventors of civil disobedience — the salt march, the dream speech, the nonviolent masterpieces. But let’s be honest: they were remixing an ancient track. The real blueprint? The Book of Exodus. The Torah basically dropped the world’s first “How to Tell a Tyrant No (Politely, Yet Firmly)” manual — thousands of years before it was cool.
The Midwives Who Started It All: Shifra and Puah -Pharaoh issues the ultimate nightmare decree: drown every newborn Hebrew boy in the Nile. Brutal. Efficient. Terrifying.
Enter two midwives — Shifra and Puah. Tasked with carrying out the order, they instead deliver the world’s first recorded, perfectly polite act of defiance: “Sorry, Pharaoh, those Hebrew women are just too quick — the babies arrive before we even get there!” (Exodus 1:19, with the biggest biblical wink imaginable.)
Pharaoh: utterly played. Babies: alive. Civil disobedience: officially invented.
Who were they? Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Rashbam, and Ramban say Jewish. Older sources — Philo, Josephus, Abarbanel, the Septuagint — insist they were Egyptian. Non-Jews. Total outsiders with no personal stake… except one: they “feared God” (Exodus 1:17).
That phrase isn’t about trembling at divine thunder. As Martin Buber brilliantly puts it, “fear of God” means deep, unshakable respect for human life — the very respect glaringly absent in Amalek, the Torah’s ancient prototype for those who target the weak and defenseless (a chilling echo in every era, including ours).
Shifra and Puah looked at a royal murder command and decided: Human life > Pharaoh’s ego. Righteous Gentiles, version 1.0.
When History Hits Rhymes — Is this just a dusty bedtime story? Hardly. The same spirit roared back during the Holocaust.
Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (that tear-jerker masterpiece) won Best Picture and reminded the world of the “Righteous Among the Nations” — non-Jews who risked everything to save Jewish lives. Think Oskar Schindler (who turned his factory into a lifeboat), Raoul Wallenberg (handing out protective passports like candy), and countless others who deserve eternal shout-outs.
Denmark — The king’s quiet solidarity inspired a nation. Nearly every Danish Jew was saved through heroic boat rescues to Sweden — one of the war’s most successful operations.
Bulgaria — The mind-blowing plot twist. Early Nazi ally, yet Bulgaria refused — despite relentless pressure — to deport its 50,000 Jews. Public outrage, parliamentarian Dimitar Peshev, Metropolitan Stefan of the Orthodox Church, and behind-the-scenes pressure on King Boris III created an unbreakable wall. Bulgaria’s Jews were persecuted (forced labor, property seizures, relocation) but not handed over. They remain the only Jewish community under Nazi influence whose numbers actually grew during the war. (Tragic exception: Jews in Bulgarian-occupied territories were deported — a painful reminder the story isn’t pure triumph.)
Spain — Franco played a dangerous neutral game with pro-Axis leanings. He refused Hitler’s requests to join the war or let German troops cross to Gibraltar, and he didn’t deport Spain’s small Jewish population. Tens of thousands of refugees (20,000–35,000) passed through on transit visas, often quietly aided by Spanish diplomats.
The record is mixed — lists of Jews, restrictions, some antisemitic sympathy — but heroes like Ángel Sanz Briz, the “Angel of Budapest,” shone brightly, saving over 5,000 Hungarian Jews with creative protective documents and safe houses. Yad Vashem honors nine Spaniards as Righteous Among the Nations.
Italy — A two-phase story. Mussolini’s 1938 racial laws were homegrown cruelty, stripping Jews of rights and dignity. Yet in Italian-occupied zones (southern France, Greece, Yugoslavia), Italian officers and diplomats frequently refused to hand Jews over to the Nazis, creating temporary safe havens that saved thousands. After Italy’s 1943 surrender, German occupation brought deportations and murder (~8,000 Italian Jews killed, about 20% of the community), with some Fascist collaboration. Still, many Italians — clergy, neighbors, resistance members — hid Jews, leading to a relatively high survival rate.
The Irony the Biblical Writers Loved –Kierkegaard argued that irony is the first step toward self-awareness. When we become ironists, we see that the external world and its social games are not the ultimate truth. He wrote: “Irony is a requirement for every life that is to be a life of the spirit… Irony is the boundary between the aesthetic and the ethical.” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript)
The biblical writers clearly loved irony too.
Here’s the delicious cosmic joke: The ancient Pharaohs built massive pyramids to immortalize their names forever. Today? We shrug: “Which Pharaoh was that again?”
But Shifra and Puah? Their names live eternally in the Torah.
The same goes for every generation’s quiet heroes — the midwives, the Schindlers, the Wallenbergs, the Peshevs, the Sanz Brizes, the everyday people in Denmark, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, and beyond who chose conscience over convenience.
They prove one person’s firm “no” can outlast any empire.
May God grant them (as the Targum so beautifully says) a name that endures forever. In a world that sometimes forgets what life is worth, they remain humanity’s brightest, most stubborn hope.
And honestly… if two midwives could sass a self-proclaimed god-king and win? The rest of us have no excuse not to find a little civil courage when it counts.
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Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista, California.