Boh 8 Shevat 5767 / January 27, 2007

Some years ago, I offered a course on great Jewish cities of the world and I was speaking about Vilna. So I went into New York and up to the JTS library, where I have borrowing privileges, and walked away with a few books and a few articles on the city and its Jews. As I was flipping through one of the volumes, a Hebrew book printed back in 1929, I noticed an inscription. In beautiful Hebrew it was inscribed to the son of his dear colleague Meyer Waxman: “To Mordecai, on the occasion of his becoming a Bar Mitzvah.” Wow! My father was still alive at that point and I asked him how the book had ended up at the Seminary. He shrugged and said that he had probably lent it to a colleague who never returned it and when the colleague died, his donated books ended up at the Seminary. Alas, I returned the book and neither of us was smart enough to go to the Seminary librarian and reclaim it for the family. Perhaps one of these days I’ll get back to the Seminary library find the book again and make the request.

But I share the story because of a disturbing passage in this morning’s Torah reading. The text says that the Israelites borrowed from the Egyptians objects of silver and gold and clothing. Indeed the Torah says: “And the Eternal had disposed the Egyptians favorably toward the people, and they let them have their request; thus they stripped the Egyptians.”

This behavior was already suggested back in chapter 11 (11:2): “Tell all the people to borrow, each man from his neighbor and each woman from hers, objects of silver and gold.” That command and its execution should leave us feeling uneasy. It seems unethical to borrow things knowing that you won’t return them.

Over the course of centuries the commentators have struggled with this passage, which speaks of the despoiling of the Egyptians. As Brevard Childs, the noted biblical scholar writes in his commentary: “Few passages have provoked such an obvious embarrassment both to Jewish and Christian expositors as has this one.”

One response is to assert that the Egyptians gave these items to the Israelites as outright gifts. Already in the first century of our era, Josephus observed: “They honored the Hebrews with gifts, some did so that they might depart more quickly, others because of the neighborly relations that they had with them.” The Mechilta, the early rabbinic midrash on the Book of Exodus, adopts a similar position: “As soon as the Israelite said, “Lend me,” he [the Egyptian] brought it out for him.” Both Rashi and his grandson the Rashbam argued that the Israelites received these items as irrevocable and outright gifts.

The second approach suggests that all of this largesse was compensation for the hard work that the Israelites had performed in Egypt. We find this idea articulated in the Book of Jubilees, which is from the 2^nd Century BCE, which declares that the Egyptians gave the Israelites their precious objects “in return for the bondage in which they forced them [the Israelites] to live.” (48:14). In the first century of our era, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo argued: “They [the Israelites] were receiving the wages owed to them for their service all that time.” The Talmud in Sanhedrin (91a) offers a story in which G&ebiha ben Pesisa defended the Jews against the charge that they had failed to return the borrowed property of the Egyptians. He argued that the Egyptians owed the Jews for the several centuries of slavery, to which his foes had no response. And jumping to the Middle Ages, Nachamanides, the Spanish exegete wrote: “This refers to the payment as ‘atonement’ for all the damages inflicted on Jews.”

It is this second position that is the most intriguing and that has resonance today. Over the past years, there have been a number of cases in which Jews who served as slave labor for German companies have been compensated. They have received reparations for their oppression. We have hailed these actions, though lamenting the often parsimonious compensation doled out to survivors and their families. We have commended companies such as Siemens, Volkswagen and Daimler-Chrysler which at long last owned up to their reprehensible war-time behavior and have made financial atonement. We are most comfortable with the arguments that have compelled German companies to compensate those who profited them in the midst of the war, and did so as slaves.

Are we as comfortable with the concept when it is applied to domestic slavery? There have been several lawsuits filed demanding reparations for Black slavery. Only last month a Federal Court of Appeals in Chicago issued a ruling on a suit against companies that included Aetna, CSX (that is a railroad conglomerate) and FleetBoston, which all profited in one way or another from pre-Civil War slavery, at least their 19^th century corporate ancestors did. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected most of the plaintiffs' claims. But the court ruled that contrary to a trial judge's decision last year, companies could be held liable if they lied about their ties to slavery to avoid chasing away customers.

Last year, the Episcopalian Church launched a year-long probe into church slavery links and into whether the church should compensate black members. The State of California, along with 12 other states, has enacted a disclosure law, requiring insurance companies doing business within the state to reveal “their role in slavery.”

The question of compensation is one that is not going away and continues to generate much heat.

Those arguing for reparations have pointed to the Jewish examples, of payments from Germany and now corporations for their actions during the Holocaust. It is further argued that though not a single person directly affected by slavery remains alive—unlike that of Holocaust victims and their family members--, the fact remains that African Americans continued to suffer disproportionately from segregation and discrimination well into the late 20^th century.

On the other hand, only a tiny minority of White Americans ever owned slaves—and most of us had no relatives here when slavery was a reality. Furthermore, it wasn’t only Americans who were responsible: Black Africans and Arabs were largely responsible for the sale of slaves in Africa. There were even, strangely enough 3,000 black slave-owners in ante-bellum United States. Additionally, unlike those who have received Holocaust reparations, Blacks today would be several generations removed from the outrages of slavery. And finally, it is contended that reparations would exacerbate racial issues and detract from a genuine understanding of equal opportunity.

The problem is complex and we seem torn between the inestimable cost of reparations at this late date along with some of the arguments against the very idea and the belief that justice delayed is at least justice applied. And furthermore, that just as our ancestors were deserving of compensation for their labors and those of their ancestors, so, too are the descendants of American slaves.

In Hamlet, Polonius is famed for declaring, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” And though in the scheme of things my father’s case of a lent book turning up in the library’s possession is both annoying and entertaining, the broader issue before us this morning goes beyond the issue of lending and failure to return borrowed items. At the heart of our discussion is the question, can one ever compensate for past wrongs? How do corporations and nations atone for immoral behaviors, decades later? Is there a statute of limitations? Sometimes the answers are easy; but more often than not, they present with difficult choices for us to ponder.

Shabbat shalom.