Children’s Book Ponders How “Moses Could Have Been Selfish”

Ten days ago, a deranged man shoved a 25-year-old woman onto the subway tracks. Last month, a Filipino American man was stabbed as he rode New York City’s L Train. And in February 2020, a 23-year-old woman from Bangladesh was attacked while riding a Bronx subway train. Although all three survived, no one helped. No one interfered.

It’s not entirely fair to blame witnesses in these situations; there’s a high probability that they considered helping the victims but rightly feared for their own safety, especially if the attacker was armed.

Three thousand years ago, someone saw a man being cruelly beaten and decided to stop the attack. The man who intervened was Moses.

MJ Wexler, a Chatsworth-based children’s book author, was always drawn to Moses’s intervention, which she understood as a call to action. “While it is important to teach the story of Passover, most stories are based on the miracle of G-d,” she told the Journal. “But my favorite part of many Jewish holidays is the lesson of standing up against injustice.”

To that end, Wexler recently published a children’s book titled “Moses Could Have Been Selfish,” which tells the Passover story in charming rhymes and illustrations. But through one simple but powerful observation, the book compels readers to pause and contemplate a seldom-asked question: What if Moses had never aided the Israelite who was being beaten viciously by an Egyptian taskmaster?

“He (Moses) could have been selfish,” the book observes, “He could have said, ‘well at least I’m well off,’ but when seeing the injustice, it really made him scoff!”

“That moment of helping the Israelite was a turning point,” said Tal Sessler, Senior Rabbi at Sephardic Temple. “Before that, Moses hadn’t done anything for his people in an active way.” In fact, Moses had reached great stature and comfort in Pharaoh’s palace, and he simply could have walked away.

Like most children’s book authors, Wexler is skilled at summarizing complicated events into relatable (and digestible) content for kids. Parashat Shemot describes the incident as: “Moses grew up and went out to his brothers and looked at their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man of his brothers.” The next line seems simple but is deeply profound: “He [Moses] turned this way and that way, and he saw that there was no man; so he struck the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.” The simple meaning is that Moses looked back and forth for Egyptian guards, but he “also wanted to see if anyone else was doing anything to help,” Sessler said.

“It is so easy to do the right thing when you have nothing,” said Wexler. “There’s nothing to lose! But Moses was raised as royalty. He didn’t have to step up. But he saw something wrong, and he did the right thing. I would love for more people to focus on Moses’s wonderful action of standing up against injustice.”

“I would love for more people to focus on Moses’s wonderful action of standing up against injustice.”

Wexler has a diverse background, having taught Hebrew school and run synagogue youth groups. She currently teaches digital analytics at UCLA, does web design and cares for her four-year-old son. “I [also] work to get women elected to office,” she said.

For Wexler, there was a glaring lack of illustrated characters in children’s Passover books who actually resembled those who lived in Egypt and the Levant. “Moses, the Israelites — and often even Pharaoh — are typically illustrated as Caucasian,” she said. “But we know as a fact that thousands of years ago, people in the Mideast were, at the very least, brown. But it is important that we provide children with an accurate description of people in the Torah.”

Wexler is right. A few years after I arrived in America from Iran and saw a drawing of Moses on a synagogue wall (forget even in a children’s book), I couldn’t believe my eyes: Moses had white skin, thin, blondish eyebrows and green eyes. This was the man who wandered under the desert sun? I wondered. I always thought Moses would have looked like one of my thick-eyebrowed, dark uncles.

I asked Wexler how parents can teach their children the difference between healthy and harmful selfishness. “There are times when it’s okay to be selfish,” she said. “We all have different mental/emotional/physical needs. Sometimes my son needs to only be with my husband. And that’s okay. He lets us know when he needs ‘special Daddy time’ or ‘special Mommy time.’ It’s important to acknowledge the emotional needs of all children instead of labeling them as ‘selfish.’ Sometimes their need is just to be heard.”

Wexler also sees complexity in selfishness: “What we often find selfish in children is really due to the fact that they do not have the language to express their needs,” she said. “A child who hogs all the toys at school might just not have toys at home and doesn’t know how to talk about their feelings. It is important to differentiate between this sort of selfishness and a child who has literally everything and still expects the world to be about them.”

Rather than simply giving orders, Wexler prefers to ask her son how a nice child would respond to parents, teachers and friends. “This has actually made a huge difference in his behavior,” she observed. “I get him to set the expectations. And while having these conversations, he often tells me why he doesn’t behave or why he might be selfish, and we come up with a plan together on how he can improve.”

The book includes an important and engaging series of discussion questions for parents to ask their children, including “What would you do if you saw someone mistreating someone else?” and, in light of the Israelites’ strife and difficult journey, “Why do you think they kept going? What would you do to stay positive?” For Wexler, such questions “help children draw a connection between Passover and current-day situations and are designed to get kids to think about their actions.” Her son loves the book so much that he stated he wants to be an author.

Although it was written for toddlers to eight-year-olds, “Moses Could Have Been Selfish” inspires adults to really imagine the spiritual and historical implications of Moses’ singular decision: Had he not aided the slave, would he ever have achieved the kind of “supernal empathy,” which, according to Sessler, elevated him to the status of a national leader, toward a “cosmic responsibility to all of humankind”?

The book is a thought-provoking addition to the seder table, particularly in light of recent disturbing upticks of racist hate crimes against Jewish American and Asian American communities.

“We’re talking about something from thousands of years ago that can be so abstract for a child,” Wexler said. “I wanted an age-appropriate Passover story for my son that covered the basics. And my passion for social justice led me to this version of the Passover story.”

Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker and activist. Follow her on Twitter @RefaelTabby