40 | JANUARY 12 • 2023

SPIRIT

T

he opening chapters of Exodus
plunge us into the midst of epic
events. Almost at a stroke, the
Israelites are transformed from pro-
tected minority to slaves. Moses passes
from prince of Egypt to
Midianite shepherd to
leader of the Israelites
through a history-changing
encounter at the Burning
Bush. Yet it is one small,
often overlooked episode
that deserves to be seen
as a turning point in the
history of humanity. Its heroines are two
remarkable women, Shifra and Puah.
We do not know who they were. The
Torah gives us no further information
about them other than that they were
midwives, instructed by Pharaoh: “When
you are helping the Hebrew women
during childbirth on the delivery stool,
if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him;
but if it is a girl, let her live.” Ex. 1:16
The Hebrew description of the
two women as hameyaldot ha’ivriy-
ot is ambiguous. It could mean “the
Hebrew midwives;” so most transla-
tions and commentaries read it. But
it could equally mean “the midwives
to the Hebrews,” in which case they
may have been Egyptian. That is how
Josephus, Abarbanel and Samuel David
Luzzatto understand it, arguing that it
is simply implausible to suppose that
Hebrew women would have been party
to an act of genocide against their own
people.
What we do know, however, is that
they refused to carry out the order: “The
midwives, however, feared God and did
not do what the King of Egypt had told
them to do; they let the boys live.” Ex.
1:17
This is the first recorded instance in
history of civil disobedience: refusing to
obey an order given by the most power-

ful man in the most powerful empire of
the ancient world, simply because it was
immoral, unethical, inhuman.
The Torah suggests that they did so
without fuss or drama. Summoned by
Pharaoh to explain their behavior, they
simply replied: “Hebrew women are not
like Egyptian women; they are vigor-
ous and give birth before the midwives
arrive.” Ex. 1:19
To this, Pharaoh had no reply. The
matter-of-factness of the entire incident
reminds us of one of the most salient
findings about the courage of those who
saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust.
They had little in common except for
the fact that they saw nothing remark-
able in what they did. Often the mark
of real moral heroes is that they do not
see themselves as moral heroes. They
do what they do because that is what a
human being is supposed to do. That is
probably the meaning of the statement
that they “feared God.” It is the Torah’s
generic description of those who have a
moral sense.
It took more than 3,000 years for what
the midwives did to become enshrined

in international law. In 1946, the Nazi
war criminals on trial at Nuremberg all
offered the defense that they were mere-
ly obeying orders, given by a duly con-
stituted and democratically elected gov-
ernment. Under the doctrine of national
sovereignty, every government has the
right to issue its own laws and order its
own affairs. It took a new legal concept,
namely a “crime against humanity,” to
establish the guilt of the architects and
administrators of genocide.
The Nuremberg principle gave
legal substance to what the midwives
instinctively understood: that there are
some orders that should not be obeyed
because they are immoral. Moral law
transcends and may override the law of
the state. As the Talmud puts it: “If there
is a conflict between the words of the
Master [God] and the words of a disci-
ple [a human being], the words of the
Master must prevail.” Kiddushin 42b

RIGHT OVER MIGHT
The Nuremberg trials were not the
first occasion on which the story of
the midwives had a significant impact

On Not Obeying
Immoral Orders

A WORD OF TORAH

Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks