Rabbi Andrea’s Sermon 29th November / 9th Kislev 5786

Stories that we refuse to erase

This week, with Parashat Vayetze, we meet Jacob at the threshold of exile. He leaves home abruptly, stepping into a world where welcome is conditional and where someone else holds the power to tell the story. He is fleeing danger, uncertainty, and family fracture. And it is exactly in that moment, alone, lying on the ground with only a stone beneath his head, that Jacob dreams the dream that will accompany his descendants throughout all of Jewish history: a ladder reaching to the heavens, and God standing not only above it, but, as Rashi insists, nitzav alav, standing directly over Jacob himself [Rashi on Gen 28:13].

This is the moment when God enters exile. The Divine Presence does not wait for stability or strength. God goes with the refugee, stands with the displaced, and insists that exile may endanger the body but cannot extinguish the soul.

And then come the mal’achim.

Jacob sees angels going up and down the ladder, moving between earth and heaven while he lies still on the ground. Our Sages notice that the angels first ascend and only then descend. Rashi explains that the angels who accompanied Jacob in the Land of Israel now ascend, returning to their domain, and that a new set of angels, appointed for life in exile, descend to accompany him. [Rashi on Gen 28:12].

Even before empires rise and fall, the dream is telling Jacob: you are not alone in foreign space; God goes with you.

The Midrash widens the horizon. In Bereshit Rabbah, [68:12] the angels are not only Jacob’s personal guardians: they are the symbolic angels of the nations, ascending and descending one by one, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, each rising and falling in turn, each proven temporary. [Rashi on Gen 31:7].

But the angel of Israel ascends and does not descend: the covenantal identity of the Jewish people does not collapse with the rise and fall of empires. It is anchored in memory and in truth.

From this sublime vision the Torah turns abruptly to the human and the messy. Jacob arrives at the home of Lavan, where everything heavenly is now tested on earth.

At first, Lavan presents himself as a warm relative. Jacob falls in love with Rachel, Lavan’s younger daughter, and offers seven years of labour for her hand (Gen. 29:18). But on the wedding night, Lavan replaces Rachel with Leah under cover of darkness. Jacob discovers the deception only at dawn. Lavan shrugs and says, “In our country, we do not marry off the younger before the firstborn” (Gen. 29:26).

Jacob works another seven years. He tends Lavan’s flocks faithfully, even as Lavan exploits him relentlessly. Lavan repeatedly changes Jacob’s wages, “ten times,” Jacob later says (Gen. 31:7), a phrase that, as Rashi notes, means “many times,” a pattern of habitual manipulation.^4

When Jacob prospers, Lavan’s sons accuse him, and Lavan’s face changes (Gen. 31:1–2). Jacob flees. Lavan pursues him and, when he catches up, makes a breathtaking claim: “The daughters are my daughters, the children are my children, the flocks are my flocks; all that you see is mine” (Gen. 31:43). Ramban [ad loc.] comments that Lavan’s claim is not merely one of property but one of narrative: an attempt to rewrite Jacob’s entire life as Lavan’s own achievement.

Hospitality becomes domination.

Welcome becomes erasure.

The victim is told that his story never happened.

This dynamic echoes painfully and vividly, in the modern Jewish story, in the near-total expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran between the late 1940s and early 1970s. Nearly one million Jews, from Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli, Tunis, Sana’a, Aleppo, were stripped of citizenship, dispossessed, terrorised, or driven into sudden exile. Millennia-old communities, older than Islam itself, were erased in a single generation.

Yet this trauma remains marginal in many Jewish spaces, especially in progressive circles that imagine themselves as champions of justice.

Who remembers that exodus?

The State of Israel remembers.

In 2014, Israel established 30th November as the national day to mark the departure and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran. The Knesset holds a special session; schools teach the history; survivors speak; public ceremonies are held. At the United Nations, Israeli diplomats read into the record the names of destroyed Jewish communities, often to an indifferent chamber.

Meanwhile, in many Progressive synagogues, the date passes unnoticed, despite the warnings of the Board of Deputies’ Commission on Racial Inclusivity (2021). Its report notes that many Sephardi, Mizrahi and Yemenite Jews “feel that their stories and histories have been forgotten and neglected.” It identifies “one glaring omission”: the absence of Progressive rabbinic training pathways for Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews. And it recommends that “Progressive streams of Judaism should find ways to better incorporate Progressive Jews of Sephardi, Mizrahi and Yemenite heritage.” [1]

As an Italian Rabbi of Sephardi background, I can attest: this recommendation has remained entirely on paper.

This is not a marginal issue.  It is the structural erasure of an entire Jewish civilisation.  And around this silence, conspiracy theories flourish.

Some claim Jews lived in perfect harmony in the Arab world until Zionism “ruined everything.” Others insist Jews left only because Zionist agents orchestrated their departure, an argument promoted most famously by Avi Shlaim, despite overwhelming archival and testimonial evidence to the contrary. [2]

Still others claim that Ben-Gurion imported “cheap Mizrahi labour” to win a demographic war, casting him as a modern Pharaoh and fleeing Mizrahi Jews as mere census numbers. This is not only historically false; it is morally grotesque.

And then come the personal insults.

Those, like me, who insist on remembering this history are attacked with racist stereotypes. I have been publicly called “a gangster like all Italians,” because slander is easier than memory. In this very city, people smirk: “Well, all rabbis are a bit gangster like, aren’t they?”

How delicate.   How sensitive.   How inclusive.

But this is not scholarship.  It is Lavan again, rewriting Jacob’s story because the truth is inconvenient.

And there is a deeper silence still: the silence of those who imagine a Middle East without a Jewish state.

For that fantasy to endure, the suffering of Jews from Arab lands must remain unspoken. If Jews were persecuted in Baghdad, Cairo, Sana’a or Tripoli, then Israel is not a colonial aberration, it is a refuge. And refusing to name Arab antisemitism becomes a way to smuggle in the fantasy that a “de-Jewishized” Israel would guarantee Jewish safety.

But the expulsions happened.

The pogroms happened.

The denationalisations happened.

Jewish safety in the Middle East has always required Jewish sovereignty.

Because here is the truth: the Italian Jewish community, yes, the community mocked with clichés, was one of the few organised Jewish communities in Europe that welcomed the Jews expelled from Libya in 1967 and 1970. Italian Jews housed them, educated their children, rebuilt their lives.

And yet the same voices fall completely silent about Libya. They never mention that an ancient Jewish community was destroyed. They never mention that the Libyan regime stripped Jews of rights and property. [3] 

They never mention that Muammar Gaddafi not only completed the erasure of Jewish life, but also became a key sponsor of international terrorism, funding, arming and hosting Palestinian rejectionist groups and other militant organisations, as documented in multiple American and European intelligence and policy reports over several decades, while at the same time preventing any Jewish refugee from reclaiming a home, a business, or even a gravestone. [4]

Silence protects a narrative that cannot survive truth.

Imagine someone claiming that, despite six million Jewish deaths, coexistence between Poles and Jews had always been harmonious; that Russian or Romanian pogroms were orchestrated by Jews; that the rise of Nazism was “understandable.” Would such a person be welcome in our movement?

Of course not.

Yet similar slanders circulate freely when the targets are Mizrahi Jews, Jews with darker skin, with a Mediterranean accent, with Arabic or Judeo-Arabic liturgy.

This has a name: erasure.

Erasure of Jewish history.

Erasure of Jewish suffering.

Erasure of Jewish lives.

In the face of erasure, the Torah gives us Jacob’s model.

After twenty years of exploitation, Jacob sees Lavan’s envy, hears God’s command to return home (Gen. 31:3), and recounts to Rachel and Leah how Lavan “changed my wages ten times” (Gen. 31:7). They urge him to flee. The entire household escapes.

Lavan pursues Jacob; when he confronts him, the encounter is fierce: Lavan accuses Jacob of kidnapping, theft, betrayal. Jacob answers with devastating clarity: twenty years of unpaid labour, sleepless nights, losses he bore alone.

Then they build a boundary. Jacob calls it Galeid, “the mound of testimony” Lavan declares: “This mound shall be a witness… I will not cross it to harm you, and you will not cross it to harm me” (Gen. 31:47-52). According to Sforno, this boundary is not merely a peace treaty, it is a boundary of truth: a safeguard ensuring that coexistence does not require the erasure of the past. [Sforno ad loc]

So today, in the spirit of Jacob, I extend again a sincere invitation, to those who have insulted me on social media, for daring to talk about this tragedy of Jewish history. 

Come meet the survivors.

Come sit with those who fled Tripoli, Benghazi, Misrata.

Come tell them their suffering was imagined.

Come tell them Gaddafi was misunderstood.

Come tell them they would be safe in a “post-Jewish” Middle East.

And then listen.

Listen to those whose memories are stronger than ideology.

Listen to those who know what it means to be Jacob in the house of Lavan.

And to those who speak to me every day about Palestinian suffering, yes, that suffering is real. I acknowledge it. I mourn it. But today, you must also look into the face of Jewish suffering. Not instead of, alongside. Not to silence others, but to stop silencing us.

Jacob’s ladder still stands before us. And nitzav alav, God still stands over those who insist on remembering their truth, even when others want them silent.

I sincerely await your reply.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Dr. Andrea Zanardo, PhD

[1] Board of Deputies, Commission on Racial Inclusivity in the Jewish Community (2021), p. 65–69.

[2] Avi Shlaim discusses the alleged Zionist role in the exodus of Iraqi Jews in Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (London: Oneworld, 2023), especially chapter 7. For scholarly studies that challenge this claim, see: Nissim Kazzaz, The Jews in Iraq, 1917–1952 (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 1991) [Hebrew]; Moshe Gat, The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948–1951 (London: Frank Cass, 1997); Edwin Black, Banking on Baghdad (New York: Wiley, 2004), chs. 19–21; Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: JPS, 1991), chs. 6–7.

[3]  On the history and final exodus of Libyan Jewry, see Maurice M. Roumani, The Jews of Libya: Coexistence, Persecution, Resettlement (Brighton/Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2008; rev. ed. 2021), and his policy study “The Final Exodus of the Libyan Jews in 1967” (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007). See also Renzo De Felice, Jews in an Arab Land: Libya, 1835–1970 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), and Jacques Roumani, Judith Roumani, and David Meghnagi (eds.), Jewish Libya: Memory and Identity in Text and Image (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018), which combines historical analysis with oral testimonies of Libyan Jewish refugees

[4] On Muammar Gaddafi’s sponsorship of terrorism, including Palestinian rejectionist and other militant groups, see “Libya Under Qadhafi: A Pattern of Aggression” (U.S. National Security Council, 1980s); C. Zoli et al., Patterns of Conduct: Libyan Regime Support for and Involvement in Terrorism (Syracuse University, 2011); and the U.S. State Department memorandum reproduced in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, vol. XVII, which identifies Palestinian radicals as the principal beneficiaries of Libyan aid. For a concise policy overview, see also the Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder “State Sponsors: Libya” and, in the UK context, the House of Lords Library briefing on compensation for victims of Libyan-sponsored IRA terrorism