Sometimes you meet a person who is a real inspiration.

This happened recently to me.

I met someone who, though very attached to Israel as a nation, very emotional over the hostage crisis, with close family history tied to the Holocaust, nonetheless lives with the objective of being able to engage around Israel and its moral obligations with those who might hold different views.

Barely getting to know one another, I was curious how she felt about what was happening in Israel and Gaza.

She started to respond and soon found herself fighting back tears.

And then apologizing for them—more than once.

Because, she said, she wants to be able to have difficult conversations around this issue and worries that her emotions get in the way.

But I saw it differently. The fact that she is willing to engage despite the emotionality of it for her—and even lives intentionally around this as a personal growth learning curve—makes it even more admirable in my eyes.

This week in Torah, Moses ascends Mt. Sinai again and receives more laws for the Israelites as they begin to form their new society; Moses then descends to repeat them to the people who, one voice, assent; Moses goes back up the mountain to receive the stone tablets of God’s teachings, and is enveloped in a flaming cloud where he will remain for forty days.

The laws recited to the people by Moses are all about ethical and ritual behavior: treatment of slaves and parents, murder, injury, virgins and brides, legal proceedings, dietary laws…so many of which seem to have little relevance in today’s world.

God also promises victory in conquering the Canaanites. Again, God says that, in return, they must be faithful to God’s teachings.

It’s a complicated thing: religion, the Bible and the things it says, promises God makes, what it asks of us.

We have the beginnings of ethical thinking in an ancient world, we have stories of oppression and freedom—of our people as the oppressed, but also as the oppressors. In the Bible, Jews are the enslaved but also the enslavers; we are the abused as well as the abusers.

I don't know how much of it comes from our trauma as a people and how much from political propaganda, but we have become very attached to certain stories we tell ourselves as a people—and to the idea of victimhood—that we forget—or purposely have put aside, stories of ourselves as the oppressors and avengers.

We have to be careful of how victimhood might be used as a political tool. This week I heard about how the Christian Right in the Trump Administration is pulling out that card now while Trump is rewriting the past, painting themselves as the oppressed!! (The nerve!)

But we Jews have to be cautious about this as well.

It is, after all, right there in our holy books: Israelites own slaves; Sarah abuses her slave Hagar and casts her out into the wilderness; Dinah’s brothers violently slaughter an entire town in retaliation for her rape; the prettified story of Purim and Queen Esther that actually ends with the slaughter of thousands by the Jews; the battles that God helps us win that result in the killing and expulsion of entire peoples (as in this week’s Parsha).

Yet it is precisely because we are human, as the Torah understands, capable of mistreating and exploiting each other and the land, that we receive all these laws on ethics.

In this week’s Torah reading, we are told to “turn memory into empathy and moral responsibility” (Shai Held, The Heart of Torah, Vol.1); “You shall not oppress a stranger (ger) for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Ex. 23:9)

It’s interesting to me that the word for feelings is “nefesh,” meaning soul, or most inner being. It means we should understand!!

But as Rabbi Held notes, it is more honest to acknowledge that, having been victims, we actually wrestle with two possible responses to the suffering of others: we might want to ensure that no one else has to endure what we endured, or we might feel entitled and above reproach.

This latter narrative is the one coming from dominant Jewish voices these days; “What else were we supposed to do? They want to kill us.”

Rabbi Held quotes Leon Wieseltier: “The Holocaust enlarged our Jewish hearts, and it shrunk them.”

Sadly, it is our very human limitations in being able to imagine others’ suffering that gives us the capacity to injure other people.

Yet “God” says that God “hears” the moans of oppression and “sees” the people who suffer.

To be a religious person, Shai Held declares, is in part, to follow God’s example (except maybe when it comes to war…?); “To listen even when others will not, and to see even when others look away.” (p.183)

This new friend I mentioned above, by living with the intention of hearing things that are very hard for her to hear—by wrestling the way she does with her own emotional response and views that challenge her own wounded Jewish soul—is the very example of what it means to be a religious person.

Let us declare our assent in one voice to strive to be like her, and to enlarge our shrunken, wounded hearts.

Shabbat Shalom