Radical Torah

“Pharaoh hurriedly summoned Moses and Aaron and said, ‘I stand guilty before HASHEM your God and before you. Forgive my offense just this once, and plead [that your God] but remove this death from me.’… HASHEM caused a shift to a very strong west wind [so that] not a single locust remained in all the territory of Egypt. But HASHEM stiffened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go.”—Exodus 10:16-20

“They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: They promised to take our land, and they took it.”—Red Cloud, Lakota leader

Certain aspects of the Exodus story are troubling, even disturbing. The suffering caused by the plagues is not pretty, and it’s all too easy to imagine the great wail that went up with the death of the firstborn in Egypt. Worse still, it seems that if God had not actively intervened to make Pharaoh more stubborn, the Israelites might have been free before this even had to happen!

Yes, I find Par’shat Bo disturbing. But it does not make me question God’s moral fiber or buy into Christian interpretations of a wrathful “Old Testament” deity. On the contrary, it fills me with admiration for the Torah’s keen insight into the pathology of power.

The thing is, I don’t think we are meant to read the Torah like a novel, with God as simply one character among many. In the Exodus story, God is a historical force sweeping the Israelites to freedom, and events unfold as they are destined to. Since I view this story as a blueprint for revolution, I see the disturbing aspects as serving an important didactic function.

The Torah admits as much in this week’s opening verse: “Then HASHEM said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh. For I have hardened his heart… in order that I may display these My signs among them, and that you may recount in the hearing of your sons and of your sons’ sons how I made a mockery of the Egyptians.”

The Torah narrator is breaking the fourth wall, saying, “Pay attention! This part is important!” God does not really usurp Pharaoh’s free will; the Torah is merely adding literary embellishments to make sure we don’t gloss over the significant parts.

Because Pharaoh’s stubbornness is very important. It represents the characteristic of the powerful that most decent people, to their eternal grief, find hardest to understand: Some people are so wedded to their power, so invested in the oppressive systems that they head, that nothing short of death will ever make them change.

Four times, Pharaoh promises to free the Israelites, only to go back on his word the moment the pressure is removed. Even after he frees them, as we will read next week, he goes back on his word again. Only twice does he give up his power over the Israelites, and both times only after human beings have been killed. The second time, he is one of them.

If you have ever been involved in radical political struggle, you probably recognize this pattern. It can be summed up by one of the most important rules of the game: “Cops lie.” It’s not just cops, of course—the fact that politicians lie is more widely accepted than the theory of evolution. And don’t even get me started on the corporations (tobacco companies, anyone?).

On the small scale, this means that the cops will often arrest you after striking a bargain to the contrary. On a larger scale, it means that the US has violated every treaty it has ever signed with an indigenous nation. It means that First World countries talk about democracy, but send in the CIA or Marines if an election doesn’t go their way (Arbenz and Allende, anyone?).

I’ll tell you why the cowboys always seem to win and the Indians always seem to lose: it’s because we keep believing that our opponents are people like us. And most of us are simply not the kind of people who torture prisoners, deliberately terrorize civilian populations or make deals with someone just so we can kill them easier.

But the powerful are not like us, we who value life so highly. The powerful are worshippers of death, and like Pharaoh, they will do anything to hold onto their power. We could make a case for this psychologically, but I think that the American continent’s 500-year history of terror and genocide is a far more compelling proof. To take just one example, it is well documented that the FBI orchestrated the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton in 1969.

I truly believe that every human being is capable of profound change. But there is a great difference between being able to change and being willing to. And I see no evidence, in history or the present day, that the powerful have any intention of giving up the privileges that they reap from their ongoing oppression of the poor, the brown and the nonhuman.

As disturbed as I am by the wailing of the Egyptian mothers, I am far more disturbed by 400 years of wailing Israelite mothers, by 500 years of wailing indigenous American mothers and by the blood that cries out to us at this very moment, as it is spilled. And I will not weep, nor take wine from my cup, for anything suffered by the slavemasters, until all the slaves are free.

“And the blood on the houses where you are staying shall be a sign for you: when I see the blood I will pass over you, so that no plague will destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.” — Exodus 12:13

Why does God ask the Israelites to mark the doorposts of their houses with blood? Being omniscient, wouldn’t God automatically know the difference between an Israelite and an Egyptian house? Rashi famously answers this question by pointing to the words “a sign for you.” According to this interpretation, the blood on the doorpost is less a sign for God than it is for the Israelites - presumably as a reminder of God’s redemptive power.

Taking Rashi one step further, we might regard the blood on the doorpost not only as an internal sign for the Israelites, but as an external sign for the Egyptians as well. After all, by marking their doorposts in the way, the Israelites were publicly identifying themselves and their households throughout Egypt. Marking their homes with blood was thus be an act of proud defiance - the Israelites were, in a sense “wearing their oppression” openly to the outside world.

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This week we’re in parashat Bo. Here we read about the tenth plague, and about the Israelites’ departure from Egypt. Intriguingly, just before the climactic moment, there’s a fairly lengthy digression from narrative, in which Moses exhorts the Israelites to observe the annual commemoration of the exodus which hasn’t quite yet taken place.

And thus you are to eat it: your hips girded, your sandals on your feet, your sticks in your hand; you are to eat it in trepidation — it is a Passover-Meal to YHWH.

(That’s Everett Fox’s rendering.) The Passover meal is to be eaten, the text tells us, in haste and even with a little bit of awe. We are on the cusp of a journey. Excitement and trepidation are appropriate, because we don’t know where we’re going, or what our travels may bring.

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Because I’m spending this year in a hospital doing chaplaincy work, reading parashat Bo is different for me this year than ever before. This year, the death of the firstborn grabs me viscerally and won’t let go. This year, it is all too easy for me to imagine the suffering of the mothers, the fathers, the aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins, of each of those lives lost.

It is hard to watch others suffer. Torah tells us God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, time after time, so that the first plagues and the middle plagues did not lessen his resolve. Only when firstborn sons died throughout the land, from the firstborn of Pharaoh himself to the firstborn of those in the lowliest dungeons, did Pharaoh relent and release us from slavery. But Torah is, typically, matter-of-fact in the retelling. It isn’t a novel; it doesn’t show us what these terrible wonders felt like for the Israelites. What was it like to take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in lamb’s blood, and paint our doorposts red, knowing what we were warding away by the act? What was it like to hear the cries of mothers all around us, in every Egyptian household in the land, bewailing these sudden deaths?

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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.

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