On Wednesday night, at the Passover Seder Table, we will read from the Haggadah, ‘Remember that you were slaves to Pharoah in Egypt.’ We are called to see ourselves as if we personally were there, and left. The memory is painted starkly and in binary terms. We went;
Me’Avdut LeHerut – from slavery
to freedom
MeYagon L’Simchah – from misery
to joy
UMeEvel L’Yom Tov – from mourning
to festivity
UMeAfela Le Or Gadol – and
from darkness to great light
What I want to do today,
on this last Shabbat before Passover, is suggest some problems and a hope, when
it comes to this way of looking at our history of enslavement.
And, in this, I’m hugely
indebted to a remarkable article by the academic and journalist, Gary Younge.[1]
Younge tells a story from
the 1860s, a time when Britain really did rule the waves and Manchester was the
largest processor of cotton in the world. The largest producer of cotton, at
the time, was the American slave-holding South, locked in a civil war with the
American North. Lincoln, hoping to isolate and economically cripple the south,
implemented a naval blockade of its cotton. But that brought hardship on the
mill workers of Manchester.
The British government [Younge writes] was officially
neutral. Many merchants in Liverpool, prioritising wealth at home over freedom
abroad, backed the Confederate south and organised warships to support the
enslavers. But in Manchester, a coalition of liberals, cotton workers and
abolitionists came together to back the north. After a famous public meeting at the Free
Trade Hall on 31 December 1862, Manchester’s workers
resolved to endure the privations of the blockade and lend their weight to the
fight against slavery. [writing in the Guardian, Younge states] (The Guardian
did not support them: its leader on that day warned that “English working men”
should “know better than to allow the organised expression of their opinion as
a class to be thrown into one scale or the other in a foreign civil war”.)
Months later, Lincoln wrote a letter of thanks to the “working-men of Manchester”. “I know
and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working-men of Manchester, and in
all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis,” he wrote. “Under the
circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question
as an instance of sublime heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in
any country.”
That letter is now carved
into the pedestal of a statue of Lincoln, in Manchester. Here’s the problem
that emerges when we look back, carefully.
We see that not everyone
got it. There have been merchants, kings and Pharaohs “who didn’t want to let
my people go” in every liberation narrative of humanity. God help us, there
were even Jews among the slave traders and slavers. There were even black Africans
who traded other black Africans across the Atlantic Sea. In the rabbinic
imagination there were Jews who, even as the entire edifice of Egpyt crumbled,
refused to leave Egypt. When the Torah says that the Israelites crossed the Red
Sea BHamushim, Rashi suggests that this strange untranslatable word
connected to the Hebrew word for five, could mean that only one-in-five left.
The rest, Shemot Rabba suggests, “had Egyptian patrons, and they had wealth and
honor there, [so] they didn’t want to leave.” It might seem so obvious
to us, descendants of the Hebrew slaves who left, that slavery was awful and we
should have been freed, but that wasn’t everyone’s perspective. It never has
been in any liberation struggle.
The journey from darkness
to light and from slavery to freedom, it isn’t perfectly binary. It wasn’t
then, it isn’t now. The real problem, it’s always the real problem, are the
bystanders, not the most immediately oppressive, but those of us whose comfort
depends on the enslavement of others. It’s hard to put more importance on the
freedom of others, far away and unseen – slaves are always unseen – than our
own immediate levels of comfort.
Writing about how we do
and don’t remember the trans-Atlantic slave trade of black men and women into
this country, Younge argues there has been a kind of aphasia. He cites the
anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler who suggested a similarity between the way we,
in Britain, treat the memory of British enslavement and the condition in which
a person has difficulty with their language or speech, usually after a stroke.
“It is not a matter of
ignorance or absence,” writes Stoler. “Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty
speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate
words and concepts with appropriate things.”
It’s certainly not, Younge
argues, an;
accidental, absent-minded misplacement of a fact. [he
writes] The transatlantic trade in human beings for profit doesn’t slip one’s
mind, momentarily, like an elusive name or date. A nation does not forget
centuries of slavery as a person might forget an umbrella.
This mental inability to
see the reality of enslavement, or any appalling mistreatment of an entire
class of human beings, as truly awful runs deep in the human condition, God
help us. As Jews we’ve suffered from it many times over many centuries.
As humans, we simply don’t
see the things that make us uncomfortable and when these things are pointed out
to us, we balk and recoil and find it so much easier to critique the messenger than
listen to their message, simply never connecting our experience of living in a
society in which human beings are enslaved with the great clear-cut binaries of
the Haggadah narrative.
That’s the problem with
this kind of memorialisation of the Passover narrative – it locks the past into
the past so we miss the nuances of how what happened and how it’s still
happening. It’s too binary and misses the importance of seeing mistreatment of
humanity as appalling.
Towards the end of his
article Younge says this;
But the more pluralistic a society, the greater the
likelihood that not everyone will subscribe to the same agreement. This
“forgetting” about the people who were massacred, enslaved, subjugated,
tortured or otherwise oppressed is a privilege of the powerful. Those from the
communities who were massacred, enslaved, subjugated and tortured simply don’t
have that luxury.
I’m sure that’s right. But
making space for the plurality of voices is about more than ensuring we hear
voices that we evade or ephase. It’s about recognising the possibility of the
human condition. If we can truly hear other people speak of their pain we can learn
how to address it. Pain can’t be smothered. It doesn’t, unaddressed, go away.
But hearing, holding and addressing the pain of others is, frankly, the apex of
the human condition - empathy. We don’t get any better than that.
Making space for the plurality
of humanity in its diversity and even in its pain, anger or bitterness, allows
us to appreciate quite how miraculous humanity is. And the other thing – to limit
the voices to be heard in society because of one kind of descriptor or another –
is truly appalling.
Speaking at Conference on
Religion and Race in 1963, in the States, introducing the conference’s keynote
speaker, Martin Luther King, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught this;
To act in the spirit of religion is to unite
what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child.
To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of
living humanity. Is this the way to honor a father: to torture his child? How
can we hear the word “race” and feel no self-reproach?
Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical,
how universal an evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man’s gravest
threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason, the maximum of
cruelty for a minimum of thinking.
The redeeming quality of [the human being] lies in [their]
ability to sense kinship with all [humanity].
How many disasters do we have to go through in order
to realize that all of humanity has a stake in the liberty of one person;
whenever one person is offended, we are all hurt. What begins as inequality of
some inevitably ends as inequality of all.
Amen to that.
That’s the problem that
comes from this very binary relationship to our journey from darkness to light,
what about hope?
My sense of hope is based on
the very same thing is at the heart of our problem – the viewing of historic liberation
struggles in binary terms – darkness v light, slavery v freedom. Viewed from
the perspective of today, the oppression of our people by the Egyptians is just
obviously awful, so obviously awful that the big thing we struggle with, around
the Seder table, is why didn’t Pharaoh realise it then and let the Israelites
go. The future judges differently than the present. In the present, our justifications
and semi-wilful blindnesses might make perfect sense. But the future won’t care
that we prioritised our immediate comfort over our commitment to do good, fight
prejudice, combat mis-treatment. The future will be a stark judge of the decisions
we make, and the decisions we duck because facing difficult decisions feels,
right now, too difficult.
What if we developed the
ability to think like historians of the future looking back on the decisions of
our present. What if, at school, there would be compulsory units in imagining what
it would be like to look back on our decisions today from the perspective of a
hundred years, or five hundred. I know, a little loose for a strictly academic
discipline, but wouldn’t it help? Wouldn’t it shape us? Maybe it’s really us,
of course, the middle aged, who should really be doing this work. I think our
children already know the way the future will consider our treatment of this
planet and its inhabitants. That’s a chilling thought.
I want to suggest a two-fold
approach to history, properly understood. We need to turn to the past with the
knowledge that it’s complex and almost certainly still unfolding. And we need
to learn to look back, with a historian’s eye, on our present from an imagined
distant future.
It would have us
celebrating the Passover with gratitude, humility and purpose, and it would
make us better citizens of today,
Shabbat Shalom,
Chag Pesach Sameach,
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