Your first class of your first semester is entitled Moral Resistance 101. Your professors will be the Israelite Women of Egypt. One by one they will stand and tell their stories. They will tell you how, when the Pharaoh ordered that Jewish boys be thrown in the Nile, all their husbands all divorced them, for the men could not stand the thought of bringing children into such a cruel world. But the Jewish women of Egypt knew that each new child is a monument to hope – a testament to possibility. They stood up to their husbands, declaring, “you are worse than Pharaoh, for he commanded the murder of our male children, but your actions will terminate an entire generation.”
In this course, you will learn that moral resistance begins at home. If you cannot speak hard truths to the ones you love, you will not speak truth to power. You will learn that fear breeds more fear, that the darkness can creep all the way to our dinner tables and our bedrooms. But you will learn also that even the smallest acts can be acts of rebellion – that love can give birth to hope.
Your next course is called Speaking Truth to Power. Your professors will be Shifra and Pu’ah, the Egyptian midwives who defied Pharaoh’s evil decree. You will spend the semester learning their story in every detail. You will learn how the most powerful man in the world had ordered that they cast all the Israelite baby boys into the Nile. You will learn what even the Pharoah did not know, that one cannot be a midwife without loving the women and children you serve as if they were your own flesh. Shifra and Pu’ah who had attended to the Israelite women in their moments of greatest triumph and most terrible tragedy; who had seen them bleed and scream, and wail; who had held babies as they took their first breath; who had handed children to their mothers for the first time; or held mothers as they delivered horrible news, that these mothers had become like sisters to them. And the Egyptian women had come to view the ways of the Israelite God with awe and wonder. So that when Pharaoh gave his command, he might has well have commanded them to cast their own children into the Nile.
And you will learn what happened when it became clear that the midwives had defied the order, how they were called into the pharaoh’s palace, how he demanded to know why they had disobeyed him. You will learn how Shifra looked at the most powerful man in the world and lied to his face to protect the innocent. She said “the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, they are vigorous. Before we can come to them, they have already given birth.”[i] And you will learn how Pu’ah’s anger at the injustice she was being commanded to do burned in her until she could hold it no longer and she said, “woe to this man when God comes to settle with him.” And you will learn how Shifra deescalated the situation and said, “do not pay any attention to her, for she is only a child”.[ii]
Your assignment in this class will be to love your neighbor. You will be scored on how much your heart breaks for their pain. Through this assignment, you will be able to demonstrate that your liberation is bound up in theirs, that you have a stake in their suffering.
Your final examination will be speaking truth to power. Each student will choose a strategy. Will you be like Pu’ah, who speaks defiantly, unflinching in the face of injustice? Or will you be like Shifa, who speaks carefully and craftily, who preserves her position whilst laying trap with her words. On this examination there will be no wrong answers.
In this class you will be graded on your audacity. The curve will be the long arc of history. Have you learned how to discern if a command is unjust or amoral? Your answers will be graded not by your professors, but by a higher authority.
In the next semester, you will take a course called You Must Not Hide Your True Face. Your professor will be Doña Gracia Nasi and the textbook will be her life story. You will learn how she was born in the 16th century to aristocratic parents in Lisbon, Portugal. Like other Marrano families of the inquisition, they were forced to behave as devout Christians, but in secret they held on to their Jewish faith. You will learn how all her life she fought to practice her faith openly but was not able to do so until she was 39 years old. You will learn how she and her family became some of the most powerful merchants in the world, and how she used her network and connections to prepare safe passage for hundreds of Marannos to sneak out of Portugal. You will learn how she confronted Pope Paul the Fourth, considered one of the most anti-Semitic popes in history, and demanded that he end the inquisition in Portugal, threatening to organize a boycott of his ports.
Required reading for this course includes the Ferrara Bible. During the sixteenth and seventieth centuries, that bible “sustained hope for many Marranos who hoped to return to their faith but only understood the Spanish of that bible translation.”[iii] Published in 1533 by two Marranos, it is dedicated to your professor, Doña Gracia Nasi, for her brave work rescuing her fellow crypto-Jews.
In this course you will be tested on how well you know yourself, for you cannot speak truth to power until you can speak truth to yourself. You will demonstrate fearlessness in your actions and your words, rooted in your ever-evolving self-awareness and self-confidence.
Your next class is called Speak Up and your teacher is Ernestine Rose. She will regale you with stories from the time of her birth in Poland in 1810 to her death in America in 1892. She will teach you, for instance, how she successfully sued her father after her mother died and left her a dowry, so that she could keep her inheritance instead of being forced into an unwanted marriage. She will share how she came to the United States and became a warrior for racial and gender equality. She will share how she became a renowned speaker, how she rallied crowds to support property rights for women, women’s suffrage, and more liberal divorce laws. “People flocked to her lectures, which for many was a relatively new experience: hearing a woman express opinions in public. Rose was dubbed ‘Queen of the Platform.’”[iv]
On your first day of class, Professor Rose will declare “Freedom, my friends, does not come from the clouds, like a meteor; it does not bloom in one night; it does not come without great efforts and great sacrifices; all who love liberty have to labor for it.”[v]
In this class, there will be no exams. You will be graded on your participation. You must speak. There will be no grades awarded to those who stay silent in the face of injustice. You will learn to find your platform, to gather people around you who will listen and be moved. Yours is also an important story, and by the end of this class you will learn to tell it.
Your senior seminar is called “Be Fearless, and Do Not Let Them Break You – Lectures in Memory of Hannah Szenes.” Your professors will recall the brave warrior and poet, born in Budapest in 1921. They will teach that Szenes experienced discrimination from a young age. She was allowed to attend a Protestant girl’s high school, but her parents were forced to pay three times the tuition of the Protestant children. Though she was an incredible writer, she was barred from becoming an officer in the school’s literary society because of her Jewish heritage. Perhaps it was this that drove her to become an ardent Zionist and move to Palestine in 1939, where continued to write poetry. She also enlisted in the Palmach, the commando wing of the Jewish underground, and later in the British army in 1943. She trained as a paratrooper. She was the first woman to volunteer to parachute behind enemy lines to help undermine the Nazis. In your lectures, someone will read from her diary, where she wrote “we are the only ones who can possibly help, we don’t have the right to think of our own safety; we don’t have the right to hesitation… It’s better to die and free our conscience than to return with the knowledge that we didn’t even try.”[vi]
In these lectures, you will hear how she parachuted into Yugoslavia and crossed the Hungarian border with the aid of a partisan group. The Germans captured her and imprisoned her. One of her comrades marveled at her bravery, “her behavior before members of the Gestapo and SS was quite remarkable, she always stood up to them, warning them plainly of the bitter fate they would suffer after their defeat… [The other prisoners] felt awed in the presence of this refined, fearless young girl.”[vii] Her captors tortured her mercilessly to try and get her radio codes. Even after their most brutal abuses, even after they threatened her mother’s life, she refused to give in to them. On the last day of the semester, you professors will tearfully describe the day that the Nazis ordered her execution by firing squad. They will read from her poetry through which she lives on, phrases like “Blessed in the match consumed by kindling flame” and “oh God, my God, I pray that these things never end.”
In this class there will be no assignments, no exams, and no grade. Bravery cannot be taught, only modeled. Something burned inside Hannah Szenes, and you are only project is to blow on the hot coals of her memory and try and kindle a flame within yourself.
At the end of your coursework, you will all be expected to complete a practicum. Because the darkness is rising, there are no shortage of projects from which to choose. Through this final project, you must demonstrate what you have learned in your coursework. You will stand in front of a panel of your professors and demonstrate that you have taken their lessons to heart. Can you love and hope like the Israelite women? Can you speak truth to power like Shifra and Pu’ah? Do you know yourself like Doña Gracia Nasi. Are you ready to speak out like Ernestine Rose? Will you be fearless in the face of the darkness, like Hannah Szenes?
Each of your professors are mothers, and daughters, sisters. Each gave birth to a movement or fed it and nurtured it along the way. You who have come here to learn to battle the darkness, you too must be midwives of justice. If you want liberty, in the words of Ernestine Rose, you must labor for it. You must learn how to push, how to breathe through the pain. You must learn that the darkness comes before the great opening-up into light. Enrollment is open now; we do not discriminate in our acceptance of female or male students, but your professors will all be members of this hallowed matriarchy. You have come here to study the ancient methods of resistance, passed down from mother to daughter, passed down in our texts and our histories.
The coursework will not be easy. Our expectations are high and the stakes even higher. We expect of our graduates nothing less than to change the world. If you wonder whether this program is right for you, I can only tell you this: The darkness does not battle itself, and perhaps the world was waiting for a student just like you.