Shemot: What Does it Mean to Be Known?

Parsha Shemot opens with a list of names - and we already know most of these, so why is it repeated? Rashi (always looking for an explanation for duplication in Torah) has an answer.

Rabbi Mari Chernow of Temple Israel writes in The Social Justice Commentary about how saying names "confers dignity" upon people, and links this to the Say Her Name movement, started 2014, two years after Trayvon Martin's death. While the original focus may have been violence against Black women at the hands of police, #SayHerName quickly grew to encompass "sexuality, transgender identity or class", according to Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia.

Saying the names of victims - or a people living among us - helps us to know them.

And while Jews - or those of minority groups, whether cultural, religious, race, or LGBTQ status, are often used to living as ordinary, accepted members of society, all that can change if they are not 'known' to those in power. Pharoah embarked on genocide to solve the problem of a people he did not understand or trust. Interestingly, he used gender assigned at birth.

We tell the names of black women lost to police violence - or trans people - often black trans women - lost to violence, we are remembering them as human lives lost. In Judaism, we value every human life as if losing it were destroying an entire world.

Rabbi Elliot Kukla takes a slightly different approach to Shemot in Torah Queeries. He too sees the parsha as a call for social justice - but he looks at it through the eyes of a trans man who must always worry about passing and/or when to come out. He points out Pharoah's lack of 'knowing' to God's complete 'knowing':

Interestingly, Rabbi Kukla sees the intersectionality pointed out by Rabbi Chernow, but through the eyes of Silvia Rivera, one of the leaders of the Stonewall riot. Silvia is quoted as saying 'it was...homeless people who lived in the park...and then drag queens and everybody behind us.' Rabbi Kukla also quotes David Sedaris, who wrote about gay or gender nonconforming boys being pulled out of class for speech therapy for a lisp - Kukla also writes of his own fears of 'looking trans' in bathrooms, at the border, or on empty streets. Of a boy who came to speak to him at Yom Kippur, wearing Powerpuff Girl sneakers that he wore in spite of bullying. When one can fit in, it is difficult to decide when to act to help those who cannot.

Indeed, Moses 'passed' after narrowly escaping gender-focused genocide, and had to choose when to no longer fit in as the adopted son of Pharoah's daughter.

And so, every time we as Jews fight for inclusivity of marginalized groups, we must remember that those who come in our doors are the faces we 'know' - but that they represent entire communities outside our walls who are suffering. Each of them has to face the decision of when to simply be another person 'known' to the congregation, or when to stand up as one of their own and risk no longer 'passing.'

Say their names. The least we can do when we want to make sure we really 'know' those who are with us - an intersectional mix of race, sexuality, gender identity, or class - so that we value them as human lives, and can remember what their people may be suffering outside the walls of our synagogues.