Many people have mined the lessons from the 1918 Flu pandemic to understand the history now unfolding in our current world-wide calamity. These lessons are mostly medical and social.
But there is an even older story we can mine for political lessons. What I am referring to is the story of the Exodus and the plagues in Egypt. This seems particularly relevant as the COVID-19 death rate continues to peak this week just as the Jewish Holiday of Passover is happening. Jews around the world will engage in ritual retelling this story on both Wednesday and Thursday nights, the first nights of the Jewish Holiday.
The 3000-year-old Passover home ritual acts seem strangely relevant this year. The ritual name “Passover” is to literally ask the plague to pass over our homes as we shelter in place. We are asked to wash our hands twice. To dip our food in saltwater. And to get over the plagues we’re asked to take two tablets — of the ten commandments. And go to Mt. Sinai — the real mountain not the hospital.
Jews will retell the Passover story, one of the amazing loyalty and self-righteousness of leaders and there followers. It’s about a Pharaoh who leads the Egyptian people through 9 plagues: multiple diseases, agricultural failures and environmental catastrophes. For the first nine plagues, Pharaoh watched the suffering of his people but remaining unswerving in order to save face and retain power. He was buttressed by a government filled with family members, government ministers, and priests, people chosen as they owed their loyalty to Pharaoh the man. A breathtaking show of personal loyalty to a leader chosen, allegedly by inherited divine right.
In fact, Pharaoh’s policy toward the Jews did not change until Pharaoh’s own eldest son died at the final 10th plague.
Pharaoh’s unflappability is an interesting contrast that the Jewish leader of the tale.
Moses was full of doubts as the story is told in the book of Exodus. And Jews were far from unified behind his leadership. He was far from charismatic: he stuttered. The only staff he seem to know how to manage was wooden. In fact, Jews do not even mention Moses’ name once in the lengthy traditional Passover ritual haggadah recitations.
There is a sort of a pattern in this Jewish treatment of its archetype human leaders: Consider the heroes of the Hannukah story of a later armed Jewish liberation. While the five books of the Maccabees are include the Christian canon, Jews exclude them from their own Bible. And like Moses, the Maccabees actions are not highlighted n in the Hannukah celebrations.
Effective leadership and “ratings” measured by popular celebration seem to diverge.
Passover also asks us to remember the catalyst for the conflict. Hebrews had come to Egypt in order to escape an ecological crisis: a drought years earlier in the so-called “land of milk and honey.” Jews are reminded of the lesson of these 400 years of being “the other” multiple times in the book of Exodus by the repetition of the phrase: “you know the feelings of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” As a consequence, we are told to have just one law for everyone, even refugees.
And finally, the Passover ritual reminds us that our liberation from Egypt was a collective affair. Our freedom, our redemption from slavery was not granted to act out libertarian ethics, but one calling us to a higher obligation of communal service. The Jewish concept of redemption is not an affair of the individual soul going to heaven or hell, but as a collective.
Pharaoh was told by Moses not just to “Let my people go” but rather “Let me my people go so they may serve…”