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