“There came out among the Israelites a man whose mother was Israelite and whose father was Egyptian. And a fight broke out in the camp between that son of an Israelite woman and a certain Israelite” (verse 10).

וַיֵּצֵא בֶּן־אִשָּׁה יִשְׂרְאֵלִית וְהוּא בֶן־אִישׁ מִצְרִי בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וַיִּנָּצוּ בַּמַּחֲנֶה בֶּן הָאִשָּׁה הַיִּשְׂרְאֵלִית וְאִישׁ הַיִּשְׂרְאֵלִי.

This story comes out of nowhere and poses a lot of questions. Who is this person? Why is it important that he was the son of an Egyptian and an Israelite woman? What fight broke out? Why do we need to know his mother’s name? Why does everyone have to put their hands on his head? Rashi explains that the individual tried to set his tent in the tribe of Dan, his mother’s tribe, and the people rejected him because he was the son of an Egyptian. Then a fight broke out between the individual and the people. In his frustration with the perceived injustice, he cursed the name of ה׳. According to Rashi, his mother’s name is mentioned because she was a gossip and a prostitute who slept around while in Egypt. Rashi’s reading of this story paints a very negative picture of the blasphemer and his circumstance. He was the son of an illicit relationship and he was a troublemaker who tried to buck legal norms and then lashed out when he did not get his way.

The Midrash paints a slightly different picture. This person was the offspring of a rape committed by the Egyptian task master that Moshe killed in the beginning of Exodus. The taskmaster was beating him to try to keep him quiet after the Egyptian raped his wife. The Midrash take on the story is one of trauma and the feeling of being an outsider. The cursing in this version is not the same “bad apple” of Rashi, but more of an outsider who is constantly rejected until he lashes out. The Midrash version helps inform the last question- why the leaders have to place their hands on his head. The Rav explains that “let all who were within hearing lay their hands upon his head” comes to teach that during the court proceeding for a blasphemer the judges themselves must hear the exact words of the curse. Everyone else in the courtroom is asked to leave. Because the judges hear the exact wording, they are complicit in the tragedy. This ending is similar to the case of an unidentified body found between two towns, discussed in Devrarim 21. In that case, the leaders of the nearby towns place their hands on a cow that is killed. The leaders had a collective responsibility to look out for the stranger, and their failure to do so led to the unsolved murder. Here as well, the leaders must place their hands on the accused because it was their failure as leaders that allowed for someone to reach such depths of despair that their only recourse was to curse out the name of ה׳.