If one thinks of God as an all-powerful big man in heaven controlling the world, then this week’s reading would make me feel that this God was a sadistic and mean being whom I would rather not be in touch with. No matter how cruel the treatment of the Jews by Pharoah, such a God should have been able to devise a more loving strategy to get the people out of Egypt.
I don’t worship that God.
The YHVH I worship is the Force of Healing and Transformation in the universe, the Force that makes possible the transformation from that which is to that which ought to be, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. YHVH help us uncover the realities of the universe and its fundamental moral structure: that there is a karmic order, and that the evil and violence we do to others comes back to us. Understood in that way, we can see that the Torah story this week has elements of a response to the genocide of the first born Jews by the Egyptian people.
The message for us is very immediate. Our globe is filled with societies that have been acting with violence and destructiveness toward each other, toward our own citizens and toward the planet earth. The genius of Moses was to see God in the midst of the devastations hitting Egypt, to call them “plagues.” We too live in the midst of plagues as the universe fights back against the moral depravity of global capitalism, imperialism, and the senseless violence that characterizes so much of our relationships with “the Other” (whoever that may be in any given society). We live on a planet in which one out of every three people lives on less than $2 a day, and yet there are hundreds of millions of people in the more prosperous countries (from the U.S. and England to Israel and Taiwan) who don’t care, who shut their eyes and close their ears to the suffering caused by the global system from which they benefit. That global system is destroying the earth and within the next fifty years all of us will feel the karmic rebellion of the earth and the plagues will be upon us.
At the moment, we are going through the plague of darkness. We have eyes but we see not, ears but we hear not. We are all in darkness, unable to see what is right in front of our eyes.
The Torah portion is a gift of YHVH to us, to warn us that the ultimate reality of the universe is a moral order, that cruelty and social and environmental irresponsibility will have devastating consequences for us, and that it is time now to stop it. The big question is: have our hearts been too hardened to recognize our situation and act upon it?
For me, the answer is clear: it’s not too late. That’s why I’m working to create a Network of Spiritual Progressives to challenge the way we organize our society. And the Torah gives me inspiration for this work.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is the editor of Tikkun, Rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco and author of The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006).