Moses Benjamin Ezekiel
This week, I was reading about the final stages of the plan to remove the Confederate Veterans Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. The memorial, if you’ve never seen it, is atrocious. It’s the tallest structure in the cemetery, for starters, and it’s covered with racist, apologist imagery that glorifies the Southern cause. The monument is scheduled to be removed this month, and relocated to a Virginia state park at the site of the Battle of New Market, in the Shenandoah Valley. But the pedestal will stay, to avoid disturbing the graves surrounding the monument, because four people are buried at its base, including the artist—Moses Jacob Ezekiel.
Written Format*
There’s a line in the trailer for this podcast, that every week I look at the Torah and try to put it in context with the world around me. That’s not always as true as I’d like it to be. Some weeks are easier or harder to connect. Other weeks the news isn’t right, or isn’t news I want to dwell on.
This isn’t one of those weeks.
This week, I was reading about the final stages of the plan to remove the Confederate Veterans Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. The memorial, if you’ve never seen it, is atrocious. It’s the tallest structure in the cemetery, for starters, and it’s covered with racist, apologist imagery that glorifies the Southern cause. The monument is scheduled to be removed this month, and relocated to a Virginia state park at the site of the Battle of New Market, in the Shenandoah Valley. But the pedestal will stay, to avoid disturbing the graves surrounding the monument, because four people are buried at its base, including the artist—Moses Jacob Ezekiel.
Moses was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1844, to a family of Portuguese Jews. His grandparents had emigrated from Holland, and the family was deeply embedded in the South’s social hierarchy and early American Jewish life. His father, Jacob Ezekiel, was a cotton merchant who moved around a bit. He helped found the Hebrew Benevolent Society of Baltimore, Secretary of the Board of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Secretary of KK Beth Shalome, the Sephardic synagogue in Richmond, and a charter member of B’nai B’rith.
Moses was educated in Richmond, and enrolled as a young man at the Virginia Military Institute in Virginia’s western Shenandoah Valley. He served in the Honor Guard that accompanied Stonewall Jackson’s coffin to its grave. When Union troops moved through the valley in 1864, Moses and a couple hundred other cadets joined a volunteer Confederate force which decimated the more organized Union army at New Market, where the Confederate Memorial Moses sculpted will soon be moved.
Moses fought in the trenches of Richmond during the defense of the city, and despite sculpting busts for a wide variety of famous faces—Ulysses S. Grant, Isaac Mayer Wise, and even Prussian king Wilhelm II among many others—he was a lifelong supporter the Confederate cause.
It’s more than troubling to me that Moses was Jewish and while he’s quoted as saying that he didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a Jewish sculptor, that’s exactly how history remembers him. It probably doesn’t help that he represented the American Jewish community at the country’s centennial celebration, contributing a massive piece titled Religious Liberty that today stands in front of the National Museum of American Jewish History, on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. Or more personally for me, that Moses sculpted the Thomas Jefferson statue which stands outside Metro Hall in Louisville, KY. The piece was commissioned by Isaac Bernheim, the wealthy Jewish bourbon distiller and philanthropist. Even after the Civil War, it seems, Moses was well respected enough by all sides to cement a place in history.
This week’s Torah portion, Vayigash, continues the story of Jacob’s sons, picking up where the narrative left off last week, with Judah pleading to Joseph, who he doesn’t know is Joseph, to let their youngest brother, Benjamin, go free, and for the Lord of Egypt to claim Judah as a slave instead. If not for Benjamin’s sake, then for Jacob, as Judah pleads.
Genesis 44:18
Then Judah went up to Joseph and said, “Please, my lord, let your servant appeal to my lord, and do not be impatient with your servant, you who are the equal of Pharaoh.
My lord asked his servants, ‘Have you a father or another brother?’
We told my lord, ‘We have an old father, and there is a child of his old age, the youngest; his full brother is dead, so that he alone is left of his mother, and his father dotes on him.’ Then you said to your servants, ‘Bring him down to me, that I may set eyes on him.’ We said to my lord, ‘The boy cannot leave his father; if he were to leave him, his father would die.’
But you said to your servants, ‘Unless your youngest brother comes down with you, do not let me see your faces.’ When we came back to your servant my father, we reported my lord’s words to him.
“Later our father said, ‘Go back and procure some food for us.’ We answered, ‘We cannot go down; only if our youngest brother is with us can we go down, for we may not show our faces to the man unless our youngest brother is with us.’
Your servant my father said to us, ‘As you know, my wife bore me two sons. But one is gone from me, and I said: Alas, he was torn by a beast! And I have not seen him since. If you take this one from me, too, and he meets with disaster, you will send my white head down to Sheol in sorrow.’
“Now, if I come to your servant my father and the boy is not with us—since his own life is so bound up with his—when he sees that the boy is not with us, he will die, and your servants will send the white head of your servant our father down to Sheol in grief. Now your servant has pledged himself for the boy to my father, saying, ‘If I do not bring him back to you, I shall stand guilty before my father forever.’
Therefore, please let your servant remain as a slave to my lord instead of the boy, and let the boy go back with his brothers. For how can I go back to my father unless the boy is with me? Let me not be witness to the woe that would overtake my father!”
Somehow, I can’t get the connection between Judah and Moses Jacob Ezekiel out of my head. Both were distraught to witness the grief of patriarchal figures they cared deeply about, with fallout for the Jewish people from each of their mourning processes. For Judah, that was Jacob, and for Moses Jacob Ezekiel, that could have been anyone of a number of ex-Confederate leaders, like Robert E. Lee. In fact Moses submitted entries to at least four public contests in hopes of sculpting the Confederate general, but he was never chosen. He poured himself into other sculptures that still complicate the American Jewish story, like Religious Liberty, or the Arlington Cemetery Confederate Veteran Memorial.
Judah, for his part, continues to make seriously poor family choices, especially when it comes to his daughter-in-law, Tamar, whom he blames for the death of his own sons, but Tamar safeguards herself by fathering two children on him and continuing a family line that, according to Jewish tradition, led eventually to David and will someday lead to the Messiah. For sure, at least, the most obvious legacy of Judah is what we call ourselves today, Jews.
So, with another complicated ending, because this somehow marks my second episode about a Confederate Jew in the last month, I wish you a Shabbat shalom.
Thanks for listening.
*Written formats may differ from recorded versions
