The American people in choosing a new President are beginning to heal ourselves, rebirth ourselves, from seven years of a Presidency that has echoed ancient memories of Pharaoh.
Perhaps most basic, in the archetyypal biblical story the slaves who become free are "Ivrim" - Hebrews, we say in rough transliteration, but the word meant "cross-over people," "furriners," "rootless cosmopolites," wetbacks. People who lived on the fringes. Even their leader was fringey - a mixture of Israelite and Egyptian, prince and rebel, runaway and shepherd. Grass-roots organizers.
No matter who wins the Presidency, the real issue is whether those grass-roots organizers go back home after the election -- or stay on the streets, the telephones, the store-front community offices. Even beyond the specifics of their demands will be their continuing vigilance, for the medium is indeed the message: the deepest response to Pharaoh is restoring the varied centers of citizenly power.
THE PRESIDENCY: HEALING FROM PHARAOH
From Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Awaskow@shalomctr.org
www.shalomctr.org
The American people in choosing a new President are beginning to heal ourselves, rebirth ourselves, from seven years of a Presidency that has echoed ancient memories of Pharaoh.
What characterized "PHARAOH"? Mobilizing an imperial army of war-chariots, and an internally brutal "overseer" police system; centralizing all wealth and power; reducing yeoman farmers to sharecroppers and reducing workers to slaves; scapegoating an immigrant community; causing and then shrugging off preventable environmental disasters (the "plagues"); infusing government with Divine authority and awe.
Top-down, unaccountable power in all spheres.
And most important, the power-holder addicted to his own power, hardening his own heart until he can no longer choose to soften it, plunging forward even when his own advisers say he is destroying his own country, plunging forward even into the waters of his death.
In America, during the last seven years: Waging an illegitimate and self-destructive war; militarizing the border against immigrants; legitimating torture; carrying out searches without warrants; imprisoning persons for years without legal process; delivering huge amounts of wealth to those already hugely wealthy; abandoning financial regulations in such a way as to invite fraud, impoverishment, and economic breakdown; asserting Presidential power to annul acts of Congress; further degrading a dangerously wounded environment in the name of economic advantage; trying to imbue all this with the aura and authority of a single strand of American religious belief, and trying to invest that religious belief with the Authority of State.
The archetypal biblical tale is amazingly rich and insightful in exploring the addiction of the powerful to their own power, even when the addiction proves lethal. It is also rich in portraying the psychology of insurgent leadership (Moses, and to a lesser extent, Aaron and Miriam).
It puts less effort, unfortunately, into showing how new empowerment sprouts from the grass-roots in order to heal a culture from the physical, environmental, political, economic, ethical, and spiritual disasters of living under Pharaoh. Yet there are hints, and these hints point us in the direction of healing ourselves - our America.
Perhaps most basic, in the story the slaves who become free are "Ivrim" - Hebrews, we say in rough transliteration, but the word meant "cross-over people," "furriners," "rootless cosmopolites," wetbacks. People who lived on the fringes. Even their leader was fringey - a mixture of Israelite and Egyptian, prince and rebel, runaway and shepherd.
And even before Moses, the story tells of still more fringey people -- midwives who defy Pharaoh and (the midrash recalls) other women who in defiance of the social norms and Pharaoh's diktats inspired their men toward resistance. Organizing at the grass-roots, at the birthing-stool, in bed, or beneath a flowering tree in a moment of delicious coupling stolen from exhausting toil.
The story calls on ordinary folk to defy their overlords by illegally sacrificing lambs in prospect of their liberation. To defy their overlords by daring despite their fears of Pharaoh to mark their own houses. Taking the risk that the blood-mark on the door will bring repression by the police -- in order to take the risk of liberation by the Breath of Life. Outlining each doorway in blood, making each house a womb of rebirth outlined in blood through which a people reborn could enter life.
Those who were defiant became free.
And ultimately, not the official Leader but a minor neighborhood organizer takes the first step into the Sea, deeper and deeper until -- just as he is about to drown -- the water recedes.
So if this tale is archetypal, telling deep truth across the millennia, then it is no accident that the impulse to heal America has been focusing on two fringey people: One is fringey because (a lot like Moses) she mixes the outsider with the insider --- outsider as a woman, as the graduating Wellesley student who said, "We're searching for a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living"; insider as the Senator who voted for the war and organized her campaign from the top down.
And the other, his whole biography a fringe. Mixture of continents, of races, of religions, of Harvard Law Review and the gritty South Side of Chicago. Never an insider, organizing his campaign to become the Ultimate Insider by stirring the grass roots.
And no accident that the grass roots are where the action is. Outsiders all, making phone calls, giving money, ringing doorbells, organizing communities. Becoming nonviolent, democratic analogues of the insurgents who stymied the Cowboy Pharaoh and its irresistible fire-power.
No matter who wins the Presidency, the real issue is whether those grass-roots organizers go back home after the election -- or stay on the streets, the telephones, the store-front community offices. Even beyond the specifics of their demands will be their continuing vigilance, for the medium is indeed the message: the deepest response to Pharaoh is restoring the varied centers of citizenly power.
In the biblical story, those organizers of the band of runaway slaves moved swiftly from the transcendently glorious moment of crossing the Red Sea to thirstily demanding their leaders provide for mundane needs like water.
And today? Many of those grass-roots organizers will probably gather in Washington on Inauguration Day to celebrate a glorious moment. Will they also demand the new President, no matter who s/he is, quench the nation's thirst for peace by ending the war in the swiftest possible way? Or will they come perhaps the very day before -- Martin Luther King's official Birthday - to say even more clearly that the struggle for peace and justice is won in our towns and neighborhoods, and only ratified in Washington?
Will they demand the "war on terror" be transformed into a global effort at grass-roots economic and cultural development?
Will they organize Abrahamic coalitions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims to work for a broader peace across the entire Middle East that Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar traversed?
Will they set up their own picket lines at Big Oil and Big Coal offices around the country, and press Big Corn to go back to producing food instead of burning the earth with even more CO2?
Will they confound the bitter, cynical critics who accused them of wiffty utopianism by actually building windmills rather than tilting at them, building swift railroads rather than just railing at lost jobs?
Will they require banks to forego foreclosures and reduce their mortgage rates if they want to keep on doing business in their cities?
Will they apply the biblical prohibition against returning runaway slaves to their masters, by renewing America's commitment to welcome refugees? Will they redefine immigration as not just a domestic issue but one that demands working out new protections for workers and the environment on both sides of the Rio Grande, making it possible for workers to build a decent future in Mexico and Central America as well as in the USA?
Will they make sure the new President -- even if it is one they have elected -- renounces and denounces the Pharaoh-like powers the last President gobbled up? (The temptation will be great for even a grass-roots, fringey President to keep all those monstrous powers in hand, just in case.) Will they insist the CIA end its worship of cruelty and torture?
All that is what it will take to heal America from the seven lean years of a presidential Pharaoh. For many, it may mean the explicitly spiritual renewal of the ancient visions of a covenanted community beyond Pharaoh, beyond Caesar, beyond the power elite of Mecca. It may mean reawakening the dormant energy of Passover, Palm Sunday, Eid al-Idha themselves -- to turn their ancient rituals once more into living transformation. #
For all, whether they draw on explicitly religious language or not, it will take self-disciplined commitment, the kind of covenanting with each other that all our ancient religious traditions saw as the root of peace and justice.
May the reawakening we are beginnnig to see grow deeper into spirit, mind, heart, and action.
Shalom, salaam, peace --- Arthur
# For example: Holding Street Seders during Passover -- Passovers for the Earth -- at Congressional, Exxon, or EPA offices.
Bringing matzah and bitter herb into the public sphere, chanting the plagues of today - blood spilled in war, rivers undrinkable, frogs dying, the Great Lakes drying, glaciers melting, seacoasts rising, droughts consuming, etc -"- as we pour wine from our cups.
Welcoming with joyful song and dance the Elijah in each other -- the Elijah who turns the
hearts of parents and children to each other "lest the earth be utterly destroyed."