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This provocative piece makes the inevitable comparison of George W. Bush and the Pharaoh. How timely. (editor’s note)
PHARAOH OR FREEDOM IN AMERICA? by Rabbi Arthur Waskow *
There are four traditional questions that are recited at the Passover Seder. But the real first question is this:
“Is Pharaoh our god, or is the Breath of Life?”
From Rabbi Jesus marching in Jerusalem against the Roman Empire just before Passover time (”Palm Sunday”) down to Fannie Lou Hamer chanting Black American freedom songs like “Go Down, Moses,” the Exodus story has been used for centuries as an inspiration for resistance to tyrants. We should also pay attention to the other side of the story: its brilliant description of Pharaoh’s addiction to top-down, unaccountable power. We should pay attention because we are living through this history in America today.
The story begins at the end of the Book of Genesis with a Pharaoh who feeds the whole nation during famine — at the price of taking over all their land, turning yeoman farmers into serfs. Then comes a Pharaoh who turns his absolute power into a military addiction — an aggressive army of chariots and an internal police that scapegoats the Israelite “foreign element,” enforces slavery, and attempts genocide. Finally this addiction to coercion shapes a Pharaoh who cannot step back from his own need for control and violence, even though it brings about disaster for himself and his country.
Pharaoh begins by hardening his own heart to the plight of the poor and powerless, and after a series of disasters (the “plagues”) brought on by his own arrogance, his addiction takes over.
God — read “Reality” — takes over, and from then on it is God Who hardens his heart.
What is this like? — Use heroin once, twice, thrice - and you are making a free choice. But at some point the addiction takes over, Reality takes over, God takes over. Now it is the heroin that is doing you, not you doing heroin.
If you choose hard-heartedness so long you get addicted to it, at some point you are no longer choosing: God, Reality, is hardening your heart.
And arrogance is not only a moral and spiritual malady. It breeds stupidity. For those who are utterly convinced of their own absolute rightness cannot hear the warnings of others, cannot pay attention to the signals from the world around them.
Pharaoh depends more and more on violence to control the rebellious world — rebellious workers, his own rebellious daughter, the rebellious earth itself. Even when Pharaoh’s own advisers shriek at him, “You are destroying Egypt!” he can no longer turn back.
At each stage, at each plague, Pharaoh pauses for a moment, but then falls back into its addictive march to disaster.
We have seen this happen in Washington — twice. In June 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency reported to the UN a bleak picture of the probable effects of global “warming” on the US itself. A few weeks later, a reporter asked the President what he thought of the report. “Ohhh, bureaucrats!” sneered the president. Even a warning from his own advisers that his policies were endangering America did not deter him.
Just a few months ago, the same scenario. The Iraq Study Group, made up of Establishment luminaries (structurally, our equivalent of “Pharaoh’s own advisers”), warned that the Iraq war was weakening America. They called for a staged withdrawal of troops from Iraq and for direct discussions with Syria and Iran. But the Bush Administration’s pharaoh-like addiction to power and violence took over once again, and it decided to send more Americans to die in Iraq and decided to threaten - and perhaps to consummate - a war against Iran.
Today, we face not merely a single person but a set of interlocking institutions that are our “Pharaoh” –
Big Oil, the swollen military, the Imperial White House. This Pharaoh has so addicted itself to its own uncontrollable power that it can no longer make a free choice.
Unfortunately, when those who have great power insulate themselves in arrogance and violence, the disasters they create do not wound only themselves. They wound the whole society.
• They chose to ignore evidence that Al Qaeda was preparing a major strike inside the US,
• chose to ignore warnings of plans for a airliner hijacking,
• chose to ignore scientists’ warnings about the onrushing climate crisis of global scorching,
• chose to ignore all the warnings that an invasion of Iraq would mire the US in a disastrous and unending occupation,
• chose to ignore all the evidence that Saddam had no mass-destruction weapons, and chose to invent evidence that he did,
• chose to smear, humiliate, and fire honest officials who questioned these falsities;
• chose to ignore warnings of hurricane disaster in New Orleans and chose to ignore the plight of hundreds of thousands of people who could not evacuate the city,
• chose as Attorney-General, Chief Justice, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court supporters of Presidential power to order the use of torture despite US and international law,
• chose to ignore the health and educational needs of Americans in order to funnel obscene amounts of money to those already rich.
The results of this arrogance have been enormous disasters. Plagues:
Iraq.
New Orleans.
The advance of global scorching and the melting of the Arctic ice.
The disappearance of health insurance for one-fourth of the American people.
The debacle of care for veterans at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
The Oil/ / Bomb/ Power interlocking Pharaoh sent the present US government to war, killing more than 3,200 Americans so far and somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 Iraqis, partly for control of oil.
Katrina’s ferocity owed a great deal to the global scorching that heated the Gulf beyond all historical records. And much of that scorching came from the over-use of oil. The hurricane’s fury owed a great to the oil wells that made tatters of the Gulf Coast wetlands that had absorbed past storms. Many died because after the hurricane disaster, the National Guard that usually rescues and protects was far far away, fighting for oil. An entire city shattered, thousands dead, many more homeless. In great part for oil.
People die - and Big Oil makes the highest profits in world history.
In the biblical account of Pharaoh’s downfall, YHWH, the “Breath of Life,” acts almost independently of human resistance. Pharaoh’s oppression of the poor brings the earth itself into rebellion, and that is ultimately what topples him. In our world, it is possible for grass-roots energies to check the power of institutionalized pharaonic power.
We are not Pharaoh’s “advisers.” We are the sovereign people of the United States. Through elections, through mass demonstrations in Washington, through en-masse constituent visits to local district offices of members of Congress, through direct actions of refusal to cooperate with the machinery of war and oiloholic addiction, we can draw on the God-power inherent within us to check the unbridled use of Pharaoh’s power in our lives. Against our lives.
Congressional votes to force an end to the Iraq war are the first firm action by our representatives to say to the interlocking institutions of Big Oil, Big Army, and Big Presidency –”We will not obey your murderous orders, Pharaoh!” — just as the ancient midwives Shifra and Puah refused to obey Pharaoh’s murderous decree. I wish Congress had set the deadline much sooner, but they have remembered the Constitution, have remembered that the American people is sovereign, and have taken the first step forward in standing up to Pharaoh.
Will they keep moving forward? On the war? On the oiloholic addiction and its “drug lords” — Big Oil — that are dooming us to global scorching? On ending and punishing the disgusting use of torture and the illegal behavior of the FBI — our modern Pharaoh’s modern “overseers”? It is only if we take our stand that our representatives will stand fast.
The midwives who refused Pharaoh’s murderous orders revered the God Who is the Breath of Life, more than they feared the Pharaoh who claimed to be god — and whom all Egypt obeyed as a god until that moment. Today it is the same question that we need to face: Is the Oil / Blood/Bomb interlock our god, or not? Is our oiloholic addiction our god, or not? Is Pharaoh our god or not? That is the root of our crisis, as it was so long ago.
Palm Sunday, Passover, our memories of Martin Luther King on April 4 — are all moments for us to face this question. The first question.
———————–
* Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center www.shalomctr.org and the author of many books - some on US foreign and military policy and some on Jewish thought and practice. Most recently he is a co-author of The Tent of Abraham (Beacon, 2006). Permission is granted to use this essay
This provocative piece makes the inevitable comparison of George W. Bush and the Pharaoh. How timely. (editor’s note)
PHARAOH OR FREEDOM IN AMERICA? by Rabbi Arthur Waskow *
There are four traditional questions that are recited at the Passover Seder. But the real first question is this:
“Is Pharaoh our god, or is the Breath of Life?”
From Rabbi Jesus marching in Jerusalem against the Roman Empire just before Passover time (”Palm Sunday”) down to Fannie Lou Hamer chanting Black American freedom songs like “Go Down, Moses,” the Exodus story has been used for centuries as an inspiration for resistance to tyrants. We should also pay attention to the other side of the story: its brilliant description of Pharaoh’s addiction to top-down, unaccountable power. We should pay attention because we are living through this history in America today.
The story begins at the end of the Book of Genesis with a Pharaoh who feeds the whole nation during famine — at the price of taking over all their land, turning yeoman farmers into serfs. Then comes a Pharaoh who turns his absolute power into a military addiction — an aggressive army of chariots and an internal police that scapegoats the Israelite “foreign element,” enforces slavery, and attempts genocide. Finally this addiction to coercion shapes a Pharaoh who cannot step back from his own need for control and violence, even though it brings about disaster for himself and his country.
Pharaoh begins by hardening his own heart to the plight of the poor and powerless, and after a series of disasters (the “plagues”) brought on by his own arrogance, his addiction takes over.
God — read “Reality” — takes over, and from then on it is God Who hardens his heart.
What is this like? — Use heroin once, twice, thrice - and you are making a free choice. But at some point the addiction takes over, Reality takes over, God takes over. Now it is the heroin that is doing you, not you doing heroin.
If you choose hard-heartedness so long you get addicted to it, at some point you are no longer choosing: God, Reality, is hardening your heart.
And arrogance is not only a moral and spiritual malady. It breeds stupidity. For those who are utterly convinced of their own absolute rightness cannot hear the warnings of others, cannot pay attention to the signals from the world around them.
Pharaoh depends more and more on violence to control the rebellious world — rebellious workers, his own rebellious daughter, the rebellious earth itself. Even when Pharaoh’s own advisers shriek at him, “You are destroying Egypt!” he can no longer turn back.
At each stage, at each plague, Pharaoh pauses for a moment, but then falls back into its addictive march to disaster.
We have seen this happen in Washington — twice. In June 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency reported to the UN a bleak picture of the probable effects of global “warming” on the US itself. A few weeks later, a reporter asked the President what he thought of the report. “Ohhh, bureaucrats!” sneered the president. Even a warning from his own advisers that his policies were endangering America did not deter him.
Just a few months ago, the same scenario. The Iraq Study Group, made up of Establishment luminaries (structurally, our equivalent of “Pharaoh’s own advisers”), warned that the Iraq war was weakening America. They called for a staged withdrawal of troops from Iraq and for direct discussions with Syria and Iran. But the Bush Administration’s pharaoh-like addiction to power and violence took over once again, and it decided to send more Americans to die in Iraq and decided to threaten - and perhaps to consummate - a war against Iran.
Today, we face not merely a single person but a set of interlocking institutions that are our “Pharaoh” –
Big Oil, the swollen military, the Imperial White House. This Pharaoh has so addicted itself to its own uncontrollable power that it can no longer make a free choice.
Unfortunately, when those who have great power insulate themselves in arrogance and violence, the disasters they create do not wound only themselves. They wound the whole society.
• They chose to ignore evidence that Al Qaeda was preparing a major strike inside the US,
• chose to ignore warnings of plans for a airliner hijacking,
• chose to ignore scientists’ warnings about the onrushing climate crisis of global scorching,
• chose to ignore all the warnings that an invasion of Iraq would mire the US in a disastrous and unending occupation,
• chose to ignore all the evidence that Saddam had no mass-destruction weapons, and chose to invent evidence that he did,
• chose to smear, humiliate, and fire honest officials who questioned these falsities;
• chose to ignore warnings of hurricane disaster in New Orleans and chose to ignore the plight of hundreds of thousands of people who could not evacuate the city,
• chose as Attorney-General, Chief Justice, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court supporters of Presidential power to order the use of torture despite US and international law,
• chose to ignore the health and educational needs of Americans in order to funnel obscene amounts of money to those already rich.
The results of this arrogance have been enormous disasters. Plagues:
Iraq.
New Orleans.
The advance of global scorching and the melting of the Arctic ice.
The disappearance of health insurance for one-fourth of the American people.
The debacle of care for veterans at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
The Oil/ / Bomb/ Power interlocking Pharaoh sent the present US government to war, killing more than 3,200 Americans so far and somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 Iraqis, partly for control of oil.
Katrina’s ferocity owed a great deal to the global scorching that heated the Gulf beyond all historical records. And much of that scorching came from the over-use of oil. The hurricane’s fury owed a great to the oil wells that made tatters of the Gulf Coast wetlands that had absorbed past storms. Many died because after the hurricane disaster, the National Guard that usually rescues and protects was far far away, fighting for oil. An entire city shattered, thousands dead, many more homeless. In great part for oil.
People die - and Big Oil makes the highest profits in world history.
In the biblical account of Pharaoh’s downfall, YHWH, the “Breath of Life,” acts almost independently of human resistance. Pharaoh’s oppression of the poor brings the earth itself into rebellion, and that is ultimately what topples him. In our world, it is possible for grass-roots energies to check the power of institutionalized pharaonic power.
We are not Pharaoh’s “advisers.” We are the sovereign people of the United States. Through elections, through mass demonstrations in Washington, through en-masse constituent visits to local district offices of members of Congress, through direct actions of refusal to cooperate with the machinery of war and oiloholic addiction, we can draw on the God-power inherent within us to check the unbridled use of Pharaoh’s power in our lives. Against our lives.
Congressional votes to force an end to the Iraq war are the first firm action by our representatives to say to the interlocking institutions of Big Oil, Big Army, and Big Presidency –”We will not obey your murderous orders, Pharaoh!” — just as the ancient midwives Shifra and Puah refused to obey Pharaoh’s murderous decree. I wish Congress had set the deadline much sooner, but they have remembered the Constitution, have remembered that the American people is sovereign, and have taken the first step forward in standing up to Pharaoh.
Will they keep moving forward? On the war? On the oiloholic addiction and its “drug lords” — Big Oil — that are dooming us to global scorching? On ending and punishing the disgusting use of torture and the illegal behavior of the FBI — our modern Pharaoh’s modern “overseers”? It is only if we take our stand that our representatives will stand fast.
The midwives who refused Pharaoh’s murderous orders revered the God Who is the Breath of Life, more than they feared the Pharaoh who claimed to be god — and whom all Egypt obeyed as a god until that moment. Today it is the same question that we need to face: Is the Oil / Blood/Bomb interlock our god, or not? Is our oiloholic addiction our god, or not? Is Pharaoh our god or not? That is the root of our crisis, as it was so long ago.
Palm Sunday, Passover, our memories of Martin Luther King on April 4 — are all moments for us to face this question. The first question.
———————–
* Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center www.shalomctr.org and the author of many books - some on US foreign and military policy and some on Jewish thought and practice. Most recently he is a co-author of The Tent of Abraham (Beacon, 2006). Permission is granted to use this essay
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