Rabbi Andrea’s Sermon 17th January / 28th Tevet 5786

"Why We Looked Away"

I do not believe that the task of a Rabbi is to preserve the Torah. I do not think that our primary

responsibility is to guard it or protect it from contamination. The Torah does not need to be saved from history, from politics, from moral conflict, or from the messiness of human life. If anything, the Torah exists precisely to be brought into that mess.

There is the mitzvah of returning a lost object (Deut. 22:1). But this is not a commandment limited to property alone. As perceptively observed by Mijal Bitton, a prominent contemporary Sephardi

intellectual, it implies a “responsibility of seeing”: keeping our eyes open and refusing to look away.

Avoidance is not allowed.

This is why today I want to speak openly. Of course, I am not a prophet, and I do not claim to speak with absolute authority. But for a long time now I have seen something dangerous unfolding. I have seen our moral sensibilities dulled by sophisticated language, violence renamed as “complexity,” and complicity rebranded as “prudence.”

So I am choosing to speak out.

Let us begin with Parashat Va’era, this week’s Torah portion (Exod. 6:2–9:35). Contrary to what we

might assume on a first reading, this is not a story about ancient Egypt alone, nor is it a fairy tale about a wicked king who eventually gets punished.

It is a text about power. It shows us how power operates, how it shields itself from reality, and how entire societies, including observers, commentators, and moral bystanders, can slowly be trained into moral indifference.

On the surface, the narrative of Va’era seems simple enough. The Israelites are enslaved. Moses appears. God sends him to Pharaoh. Pharaoh refuses. Plagues follow. Liberation eventually comes.

But the Torah does something strange. It insists on telling us, again and again, something that could have been stated once and then left behind: Pharaoh’s heart was hardened.

Sometimes the Torah says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart (e.g. Exod. 8:15; 9:34). At other times, it says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart (e.g. Exod. 9:12; 10:1).

So what is going on? Is Pharaoh responsible for his stubbornness, or is it imposed on him? Is he free, or is he being manipulated, by God, nonetheless?

Let us turn to the commentators. Rashi (on Exod. 7:3) notices something crucial: Pharaoh hardens his own heart at the beginning of the process. He dismisses the signs and the plagues. He minimises the threat. Only later does the Torah say that God hardens Pharaoh’s heart.

In other words, the hardening is a cumulative process, initiated by Pharaoh himself. It is learned

behaviour.

The Ramban (ibid.) pushes this further. God allows Pharaoh to continue choosing evil so that his refusal to let the Israelites go can no longer be excused. Pharaoh builds a worldview that justifies violence and oppression.

And here we encounter one of the Torah’s most unsettling insights: evil does not usually announce itself as evil. Evil trains itself. The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is gradual, and a key stage in that process is the construction of a system of propaganda, designed to isolate the evildoer and to provide him with excuses and justifications.

Evil regimes deny reality. They claim there is no opposition. They insist rebellions are exaggerated. They blame foreign agents. They repeat, again and again, that “it’s complicated”. Totalitarian states protect themselves by creating ideologies. And we see this happening before our very eyes.

I am talking about Iran.

Between 2006 and 2009, the Iranian regime defined itself through antisemitism. It organised

conferences devoted to Holocaust denial, distorted historical facts, and circulated conspiratorial

fantasies. This is the denial of reality I am referring to. It was not rhetorical excess or diplomatic

provocation; it was ideology. It was Islamism.

And when challenges emerged, the Green Movement in 2009, the regime responded with repression, killings, mass arrests, and torture. Like Pharaoh, it never said, “We are oppressing.” Instead, it said, “We are defending.” “We are preserving stability.” “We are protecting our society.”

And here is a painful truth: we, as progressive Jews, failed to see what was happening. A totalitarian

regime was protecting itself by constructing lies, just as it does now. Yet we persuaded ourselves that there were “moderate” imams, “reasonable” factions, interlocutors with whom we could negotiate.

We insisted that moderates could replace fundamentalists if only we were patient enough, nuanced

enough, sophisticated enough. In doing so, we forgot that this was an explicitly antisemitic regime. We ignored government- sponsored conferences of Holocaust deniers. We minimised the cartoon competitions mocking Jewish suffering. We treated these not as warning signs, but as minor inconveniences that could disappear thanks to a little more of diplomacy.

One of the Torah’s most uncomfortable truths is this: oppression does not always require visible

brutality. Sometimes it works better quietly. In 2011, Iranian law intensified penalties for travel to Israel. Family ties, religious connections, and communal relationships were transformed into crimes. For Iranian Jews, the message was unmistakable: having a relationship with Israel was a crime. And this too, we chose to ignore. The Iranian regime was building a system of discrimination

specifically targeted at religious minorities, and we preferred to look in another direction.

The Torah tells us that the Egyptians “embittered [our] lives” (Exod. 1:14). Ibn Ezra notes that this

bitterness is cumulative: not a single act of violence, but a condition slowly imposed, day after day.

This is slavery without chains. Fear administered through bureaucracy: paperwork, permissions and interrogations.

Here a question must be asked: why did we, progressive Jews, abandon Iranian Jews at this point?

Why did we look away precisely when oppression became bureaucratic and systemic?

And why, at the very same time—2008–2009, 2014, 2021—did we become increasingly attentive,

sensitive, and mobilised around another cause: the Palestinian cause? Incidentally, the very pretext

adopted by the Iranian regime to persecute Iranian Jews. Why?

Yes, in Gaza there was and there is real suffering, real injustice. This is true, although we will never

know the real numbers of deaths in Gaza. But it is also true that the Iranian regime branded itself as the champion of the Palestinian cause, and this is a political alignment we preferred to ignore.

I am not accusing anyone of bad faith. I am diagnosing selective attention.

Parashat Va’era dismantles the seductive illusion that tyranny can be softened. Pharaoh negotiates. He offers partial concessions. He adjusts his tone. He sounds reasonable. At times, he even sounds cooperative. But he never lets the Israelites go (Exod. 8–10).

Between 2013 and 2016, much of the West invested heavily in the image of the Iranian “moderate.”

Language softened. Diplomacy flourished. Optimism returned. Interfaith dialogue spiked. And yet the structure of repression in Iran remained intact. Internal violence continued. Antisemitism did not disappear; it simply became more polished, more presentable and more carefully framed as “anti-Zionism.”

On this subject, Maimonides offers a severe warning. In Hilkhot Teshuvah, he insists that repentance is always possible. But there are moments when “the door to repentance closes”, not out of cruelty, but out of justice (Rambam, Hilkhot Teshuvah 6:3). In the political domain, this means that there are crimes that are not redeemable. That we have no obligation to engage in dialogue with totalitarian regimes when we know that those regimes rely on manipulation and fabrication of excuses to cover their crimes.

Then came the moment when excuses collapsed under the weight of reality.

November 2019, what Iranians themselves now call Bloody November. According to human rights

organisations, more than a thousand people were killed in a matter of days. Thousands were arrested. Many disappeared into prisons whose names are spoken only in whispers. Let this sink in: we do not even know the names and locations of many Iranian prisons.

Then 2022–2023. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and the repression. Hundreds killed again.

Public executions. Teenagers shot in the streets. Women beaten to death or left to die for refusing a regime-imposed dress code. These were not rumours. This was documented, filmed, testified.

And yet, and this is the uncomfortable part, we progressive Jews were largely looking elsewhere.

Our eyes were on Gaza (incidentally, as prescribed by the pro-Gaza movement sponsored by the Iranian regime). Our moral language was consumed by Gaza. In doing so, many of us closed our eyes not only to the crimes of the Iranian regime, but also to the atrocities of Hamas, training ourselves in a rhetoric of equivalence that flattened responsibility and dulled judgment.

Why? Because listening to Iranians, and especially to Iranian Jews, was inconvenient.

Iranian Jews do not believe in the two-state solution as a moral mantra. Jews who have lived as a

tolerated minority under an Islamist theocracy do not trust binational utopias proclaimed from the

pulpits of privilege. They have reasons, historical, existential, embodied reasons, to want Israel to

exist and to remain a Jewish state, or at least a state with a Jewish majority. Because, to put it bluntly, when you live under an Islamist theocracy, you need a Jewish state to escape.

The narrative, the living history, of Iranian Jews became embarrassing in progressive Jewish circles.

Because the experience of Jews living under the mullah regime did not fit the narratives we preferred.

Their voices complicated the moral scripts we had rehearsed. So we chose not to listen.

The evidence was always there. The proof was there and we chose not to see.

By 2025, repression was no longer hidden. It was undeniable. It was all over the Western media, even on the BBC front page (it took some time, though). Police interrogations. Summons. Members of minorities were charged with insubordination, tortured to death. Among them, at least 35 Jews in Tehran and Shiraz were summoned, interrogated, and tortured over alleged contact with relatives in Israel.

And we kept silent. These antisemitic persecutions were mentioned in no Reform, Liberal,

Progressive, or Masorti synagogue, this one being the only exception.

Now let me tell you what I risk when I speak about Iran.

In April 2025, the UK government sanctioned a criminal network involved in violence against Jewish

and Israeli targets in Europe “on behalf of the Iranian regime.” Let this sink in: the Iranians are using

criminal structures to strike Jewish targets in the UK. That means that when we choose silence about Iran, not because we lack information, but because it is inconvenient, we are not choosing “nuance.” We are choosing to keep quiet about a threat against Jews, including Jewish refugees from Iran, who are already vulnerable and already watched.

In July 2025, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament stated plainly that among Iran’s

“tactical objectives” in the UK is the collection of information on Jewish interests. Again: this is not a

slogan. It is a parliamentary oversight finding.

So when I speak about Iran, I am not only “taking a moral stance.” I am stepping into a dangerous

space, a space where the consequences are not confined to social media.

It is easy to perform courage where the cultural winds blow behind you. But may I suggest that having to deal daily with potential informers of the Iranian regime is, how can I put it, a bit more stressful than arguing with your Zionist uncle on Friday night.

Enough about me. Let us return to those Jews who chose silence.

While the Iranian regime can no longer hide its murderous side, our public anxiety, especially in

progressive Jewish circles, was not primarily about what the Islamic Republic was doing to its own

citizens and minorities, including Jews.

It was about something else: whether we could still “stay silent” on Israel; whether our moral

credibility required ever stronger anti-Israel denunciations; whether the next step was boycott and

sanctions. Jewish identity became a vehicle of political pressure against Israel at precisely the moment when repression of Iranian Jews was becoming more targeted and systematic.

In recent weeks, that pattern has intensified. Iranian authorities have escalated violent repression,

often framed as “routine security checks,” targeting journalists, students, activists, and members of

religious minorities. Individuals are summoned to police stations and do not return. Travel bans are

imposed without formal charges. Passports are confiscated. Homes are searched.

Reports in early 2026 document continued executions and prosecutions for alleged spying for Israel. Even when defendants are not Jewish, the word “Israel” functions as an accelerant of state violence, producing fear across the Jewish community.

And what are we doing, meanwhile?

We are still looking at Gaza. We are still performing moral self-flagellation.

Some whisper that there is the danger of “playing Netanyahu’s game.” Others caution: “We must not jeopardise the interfaith work we have built”—work built, let us be honest, on the skin and at the expense of Iranian Jews.

So we keep silent. In the past, we amplified regime propaganda about the “tolerance toward

minorities" of the Iranian regime. We showcased staged images of coexistence while ignoring

interrogations, intimidation, and fear.

By doing so, we participated in the oppression of Jews more vulnerable than ourselves. While

engaging in “interfaith dialogue,” we avoided even mentioning the persecution of Jews in Iran in the

name of Islam. We looked elsewhere. We have been, and still are, guilty of complacency.

The time has come to turn the lens toward ourselves. Not in the spirit of self-flagellation, but in the

spirit of intellectual honesty.

We mobilise quickly, often rightly, for Gaza. We march. We protest. We write letters, sign petitions,

issue statements. We speak with moral certainty. And yes, suffering demands response. Civilian

death, displacement, despair—these are not abstractions.

But they happen in Iran too.

And yet, when we mention Iran, the volume drops. The urgency fades. The moral temperature cools.

Meanwhile, in Iran, women are beaten or killed for refusing to comply with a regime’s dress code.

Young men are hanged after sham trials. Dissidents are tortured. People disappear. Entire families live under surveillance, intimidation, and fear. This is not hidden. It is documented, filmed, testified

repeatedly.

We have the responsibility of seeing. Avoidance is not allowed.

And that brings us to the real question Parashat Va’era asks. It is not a question about Pharaoh. It is a question about us.

The question we must ask is not who today’s Pharaoh is. We know who he is. We know who the

tyrants are. The question is: where do we stand?

It's time for us to take a side, because as Jews (here, I said it), we cannot be silent anymore.

[a version of this sermon with links and references can be found at https://

rabbiandreazanardo.substack.com/p/vaera-when-power-learns-not-to-see