How to Defeat Tyrants - Parashat Bo

 I want to pick up, as it were, from the sermon I gave a couple of weeks ago.

Way back then – who can remember such a time – I suggested that there is something prototypically Jewish about getting up the nose of Pharaoh and wannabe autocrats ever since.

I cited the work of Jose Faur, who suggested that, at the heart of the discomfort felt towards Jews of Pharoah after Pharoah and Furer after Junta-leader after despot after tyrant is the fact that we Jews simply aren’t that impressed by physical might, bullying aggression. Ain Lanu Melekh Ele Atah we say – we have no other God than you. I wanted to make the point that we, Jews, know – at least we ought to have a finely tuned sense of – how despots and tyrants fall, their bravado crumbling like the walls of the Tower of Babel, and Jerico and … well every other so-called impregnable fortress built since.

What I want to do this week, is try and share how that can happen.

I get, I know, after all the Seder night Haggadah, that there is a way of telling this story – the Story of Exodus – which involves God, and nothing other than God. “I and not a seraph, I and not a messenger,” a version of the story in which human agency, human efforts are worthless – in the grand scheme of things. And, for sure, this particular despot is only toppled as a result of miracles out of the reach of humanity.

But even in the story of Exodus, both in the tale we’ve been reading these past three weeks, and certainly in the Rabbinic understanding of this tale, there are clear signposts for us, humans, seeking to act to better our own lives and that of the society in which we live.

The first is not to become habituated to that which is unconscionable. Nothing good happens in the story of Exodus until the Children of Israel cry out. We have to remember to keep crying out. There’s so much talk, these days, about the Overton Window. There’s an idea in Halachah that Ein Atah Tamod Gezerah Al HaTzibur Ele Im Ken HaTzibur Yachol Laamod Ba – that you can issue a ruling onto the community unless the community can stand it – it’s the sort of thing that led some Rabbis in the American Conservative Movement forty years ago to hold off saying you couldn’t drive to Shul on Shabbat because they felt that the community wouldn’t be able to withstand such a ruling. It’s a kind of societal tolerance test as to what Jewish law should and shouldn’t be used to say and do.

It’s an interesting idea, but it can’t shift our sense of morality. We have to be able to respond to that which is wrong as wrong, even if everyone else is prepared to go along with shifting values and mores. Or at least, until we do, until we call actions unacceptable, unsufferable-in-silence, nothing will change.

The refusal to accept the things societies can fall into as acceptable is the pre-eminent marker of the Jewish prophet. It doesn’t matter if everyone is happy running around after other gods, the prophet will call that out. It doesn’t matter if everyone else is prepared to the look the other way – to one example – of King David sending Uriah off to die at war so David can marry Uriah’s beautiful wife-now-widow. A prophet, a prophet like Natan, will call that out.

Don’t become habituated.

 

Secondly, don’t forget before whom we really stand.

There is a wonderful Midrash – one of my all-time favourites[1] – the reimagines the moment Moses and Aaron first went before Pharoah to call for the release of the Children of Israel. Pharoah lets the dusty shepherds into his great hall and mocks them for appearing without a gift to give to the most mighty man of his day.

Moses and Aaron call for the release of the Children of Israel in the name of God and Pharoah responds, “Who is this GOD that I should listen to His voice. Doesn’t He know enough to send me a crown, rather you come with words. [This God of yours] is he young or old? How many cities has he captured? How many states has he humbled? How long has he been in power?

Moses and Aaron reply, “the strength and power of our God fills the world. God was before the world was created and God will be at the end of the worlds. God fashioned you and placed within you the breath of life.’

What else has he done? Pharaoh asked.

They replied, ‘God stretched out the heavens and the earth and God’s voice carved out flames of fire,[2] God rips open the mountains and smashed the rocks.[3] God’s bow is of fire, God’s arrows are flames, God’s spear is a torch, God’s shield is the clouds, God’s sword is lightening,  God forms the mountains and the hills; covers the mounts with grass, the heavens with clouds, God brings down the rain and the dew and gets the plants to grow and the fruits to ripen. God afflicts the beasts and forms the embryo in the womb of the mother and brings it forth into the light of the world.’

It’s important to acknowledge human might and human efforts. I had the opportunity to meet with our local MP this week, I’ve had the opportunity to meet Ministers, Prime Ministers, Heads of State, millionaires and Lords and Ladies. It’s good to be polite, it’s good to be gracious. But it’s good to remember that all these cloud-capp'd towers, gorgeous palaces, the great globe itself,
shall dissolve Leaving not a rack behind. 

Canadian Premier, Mark Carney, spoke of something similar in his speech at Davos this week, citing the great Czech over-thrower-of-despotism Vaclav Havel. He shared that despots thrive in a space where everyone is afraid of pointing out that their despotism. But if one person can affirm in themselves, and find a way to share to the outside world, the paucity of these claims, the nakedness of the King’s new clothes – even the less powerful can find their allies and this pulls the veil from the pretentions of the despot.[4]

Moses was right about the downfall of Pharoah. And Havel was right about the downfall of the Soviet Empire.

And third, remember this saying from the anthropologist Margaret Mead, I’ve cited it before, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

It’s the saying that concluded the excellent Reith  lecture series on Radio 4 in December. The philosopher and activist Rutger Bregman gave a series about how tough it is now – and it is tough now – but also how to get beyond where we are now. The best of the lectures was the second where he told the story of the abolition of slavery in this country.[5]

It did, indeed, take a small group of thoughtful committed citizens to overthrow our own, and I speak as a British citizen, our own enslaving tendencies.

He also charted how much slower other societies were in the move towards abolition. How little the issue played out in America, Spain, Portgual, France and the like. It was the leadership of the band of as Breman called them, ‘renegades, Quakers and evangelicals,’, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson.

The thing that, I think, many of us lack, I lack too, is a certain courage and faith. That’s the thing we need to re-instill.

This is Bregman’s take, in his Reith lectures, I recommend them

As Theodore Roosevelt, the historian and president, once said, It is not the critic who counts. History isn't changed by those without skin in the game, not by the cynics who explain why things will never work, or by the clever voices pointing out every flaw, something I've seen especially often among journalists. Change comes from the people who risk embarrassment, who make mistakes, who get knocked down and stand up again. They are the ones who dare to commit themselves to a cause bigger than their own comfort. Sometimes they win. Often, they fail. But as Roosevelt reminded us, even in failure, they achieve more than those who never tried, who played it safe, who preferred irony over courage, and who never knew the taste of victory or the shame of defeat.

To change the world, to overthrow despotism, both on a large and a small scale, we need to call out that which is unacceptable, but that’s not enough – critics don’t change the world – it’s not enough to sit there, criticising, scrolling, doom scrolling. We need to remember to be outraged, to never forget the locus of true power and be prepared to organise.

Slavery can be abolished.

Despots can be toppled.

Freedom can reign.

May it come to us all.

Shabbat Shalom

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[1] Midrash Tanhumah, V’era 5

[2] (Psalms 29:7)

[3] (I Kings 19:11)

[4] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-carney-speech-davos-rules-based-order-9.7053350

[5] https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2025/Reith_2_R4_2025_Transcript.pdf

Reflections on Mental Health in Jewish Community - In Honour of JAMI Mental Health Shabbat

We are delighted to partner with JAMI, the mental health service for the Jewish Community on this Shabbat on which we read the plague of darkness. JAMI are also running a Parent Café this Sunday, 11am focussed on supporting parents managing children's anxiety, especially around the online world.

 

The biblical plague of darkness is referred to with an extra word Aphela, alongside the standard term for darkness Choshech. It is a darkness, the Torah says, that is tangible in its consuming quality. In Midrash Tanhuma, Rav Abdimi understands the plague as paralysing, “An Egyptian who was standing was unable to sit, while one who was sitting was unable to stand, and one lying down could not rise.” The verses and their commentators feel as if they describe not so much a physical phenomenon, but a psychological one.

 

The paralysing, tangible quality of depression is, awfully, one I’ve seen and heard sufferers share. It is a lethal disease.

 

Peer-reviewed, government-supported actions include normalisation of depression as a medical condition, not a personal failure. As a medical condition, it can and will respond to professional, medically trained intervention. “Lots of people experience these feelings. They can be addressed, speaking with a GP or medical health professional can help.” For many the combination of both medication and therapeutic support will be more effective than either in isolation.

 

Social connection and reducing isolation are also attested as a protective factor. This isn’t the same as telling someone who is experiencing depression that they should ‘cheer up.’ There will be many social spaces that a person experiencing depression will feel they need to avoid. I hope the Synagogue, however can be helpful. It won’t work for everyone every time. But if coming to Shul, sitting together or even sitting apart is ever helpful, I couldn’t be more proud to make it clear that this is, among so many other things, what we are here for. No need to schmooze, no need to come to kiddush. But part of the idea of a community is to know we are never truly alone. And if physically being the space doesn’t work, there’s the stream. And also … me. I’m not a medical professional, but I have resources I can share and would both want to be know and show a sense of care that we all deserve.

 

As Rebbe Nachman shared, and it does seem that the great founder of Bretzlav Chasidism experienced both mania and depression, the world is a narrow bridge, but the most important thing is never to give into fear.

 

May we all know only brightness.

 

Rabbi Jeremy

Annoying Pharoahs Since ...

 

https://truah.org/welcome-to-our-store/

I read, over my winter break, the new book by my friend and successor as Rabbi at St Albans Masorti Synagogue, A Spark of Total Darkness.

There’s a Chapter on Hierarchy or Authority which focuses on a line from the Nishmat prayer, we recited this morning – Ain Lanu Melekh Ele Atah – there is no Sovereign other than You - God.

It is, claims Rabbi Adam Zagoria-Moffet, the very foundation of the Torah’s political principles. That is to say that in Judaism, there is one conception of true Authority, and then there is nothing else in the human or corporeal realm that has true power. Sure, there are social contracts and apparatus to allow for the need of humans to feel led, to appoint a King or President or Prime Minister, but as for true sovereignty? Ain Lanu Melekh Ele Atah.

Nothing counts when compared to a God with whom we have a relationship but who has no physicality, no corporeality.

This relationship with authority, Rabbi Adam suggests, riles those who have come to hate Jews, from Pharaoh’s time, from the time of Haman and … well, until today.

This fundamental, and fundamentally Jewish, refusal to accept human-born power as impressive, the refusal to consider that right can ever be demonstrated by exercising physical might, this might be the thing at the heart of so much of the antisemitism we, as Jews, have encountered and continue to encounter.

“Antisemitism is,” says Rabbi Adam (p. 92) “driven by the fact that Jewish thought is fundamentally threatening to all those who claim power for themselves and attempt to use it to coerce others.”

There’s a remarkable commentary in the Etz Chayim Chumash, way back on the opening chapter in Genesis, that expresses the same idea, as it were, the other way round. It’s on the verse that states that the model for all humanity was created in the image and likeness of the divine.

“In the Ancient Near East,” wrote Chaim Potok, “the ruling king was often described as the image or the likeness of a god, which served to elevate the monarch above ordinary mortals. In the Bible, this idea became democratised. Every human being is created “in the image of God;” each bears the stamp of royalty.”

There’s God, who has no likeness, and then there are each and every human being created ever since Adam HaRishon. And we are all in the same boat, equally neither God nor untouched by godliness. We are powerful, we are limited, and those two things cohere quite beautifully.

Rabbi Adam’s analysis is built on the teaching of the Argentinian-born, Rabbi of the Syrian Jewish community, Jose Faur.

“How [asks Faur] “can a Rex or a pontifical ruler be expected to exercise absolute sovereignty over his subjects when a high-profile minority refuses to subject itself to the absolute sovereignty of anyone?!” 

This question, Faur suggests, leads to the idea that “antisemitism [should be] the preferred strategy of political and religious systems claiming unlimited sovereignty.”

Rabbi Adam suggests that this analysis can explain the way that antisemitism is and has been equally cherished as a political tool by the extreme left and the extreme right, by the Nazis and the Stalinists and a response that has come from both Christians and Muslims.

 

And it’s not that the nature of the kind of sovereignty that we, as Jews, do accept can be compared to the sovereignty of a King of Basar V’Dam – flesh and blood. Faur notes that the image of God that emerges from Judaism is a God who has to entice our acceptance, welcome us into a covenantal relationship. Torah cannot be compelled. It has to be received as an act of free will; kimu vKiblu is the rabbinic term.

The ideal of the only sovereignty to be acknowledged in the Universe is non-coercive, just, and capable of withstanding criticism.

And put like that, it’s no wonder two things apply.

One is that it’s not just Pharaoh and Haman and the like who have struggled to cope with Jews; it’s no wonder that every other jumped-up wannabe dictator, fascist, demagogue through time and across space has struggled with Jews.

 And here’s the second thing, the really interesting thing. It’s no wonder that Jews have got good at standing up to jumped-up wannabe dictators, fascists, demagogue through time and across space.

One of my favourite Jewish social action organisations, T’ruah, has a T-shirt that reads, ‘Been standing up to oppression since the time of Pharaoh.’

Let me do one important piece before going too far.

I don’t think it’s just Jews, who have suffered as a result of the same false claims to power made by those who want us to believe that true power comes in a human form. It’s been those on the left and the right and Jews and Muslims and everyone else. And, again, more importantly, it’s not just the Jews who have learnt and excelled and performed mighty deeds in overthrowing demagoguery.

I like, in particular, a comment from Tikvah Frymer-Kensky who observed that the heroic Meyaldot HaIvriot – midwives who saved the boys from drowning and faced down Pharaoh with exactly the level of disdain his genocidal hatred deserved – can be understood either to be Egyptian women serving the Hebrews, or Hebrew midwives. It’s perhaps exactly correct that there is the sort of ambiguity that should lead us to consider it’s really up to us all.

But this, this ability to model a relationship with power that is above the selfish self-serving claims of illegitimate political leadership, is the very role for us, Jews. It’s what we, at the very heart of everything we believe, stand for. And the models of how to stand up in opposition to oppression and the abuse of power permeate our texts at every level, again and again and again; from Abraham willingness to stand up to even God, to … the Hebrew midwives standing up to Pharoah and the daughters of Tzelophachad standing up to Moses and Natan standing up to King David and … it’s the very essence of who we are.

The best collection I know of of what all this means – all these lessons in how to oppose wrongdoing and stand up for the good – is in David M. Blumenthal’s book, The Banality of Good and Evil. As I wrote in my weekly words, it’s a survey of how inculcating prosocial behaviour has worked and also has failed – has worked and failed during the time of the Holocaust.

I’ve been aware of a kind of malaise creeping into our contemporary discourse, a sort of Yeiush – despair at how complex these times are, with the ecology thing and the economic thing and the AI thing and all the other things. And it won’t do, it certainly won’t make anything better.

It’s not the case that it’s never been darker. It’s been much darker. And it’s not the case that, from the previous darkness, we, as Jews and as members of the human race, have been unable to emerge. We’ve emerged. And it’s still the case, it will never not be the case that at the heart of the re-emergence from dark times, there will always be a need for courage and faith and the sort of disregard of the necessity of might always winning out. We should remember what has happened time and time again in our history and human history when fools have made the case that might will win out. Might never wins out unless it is accompanied by a commitment to decency and justice and the respect for all humanity. The question, the challenge is, how quickly can we organise, motivate ourselves and find the courage to stand strong in the face of demagogy.

The Sikh peace activist, Valerie Kaur, shared an analysis of the darkness she was experiencing, particularly as a mother raising, as she put it, “a brown boy in America, [in] a world that is more dangerous than the one I was given.”[1]

And she said this

“What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our [country] is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and detentions and political assault? What if they are whispering in our ears, “You are brave”?

And then she takes as her inspiration the verses we read just today, the verses about those Hebrew midwives.

“What [she said] does the midwife tell us to do? Breathe. And then? Push. Because if we don’t push, we will die. If we don’t pus,h our nation will die. Tonight we will breathe. Tomorrow we will labor in love through love and your revolutionary love is the magic we will show our children.”

It’s a terrific speech.

The moral of the story, our story, the story of Exodus, the story of our continued existence as Jews is that there is something more powerful than the power wielded by human Pharaohs and wannabe Pharaohs. There is the One and Only Sovereign who rules without coercion and the threats and actualisation of violence. And then there are us – created in the image of the Divine and called upon to oppose demagoguery and cruelty, to stand up for what is right, even in the face of that which is more superficially mighty than we are. We shouldn’t be despairing. After all, we’ve got the greatest story ever told on our side.

 

Shabbat Shalom

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[1] https://speakola.com/ideas/valerie-kaur-interfaith-watch-night-2016

The Banality of Good and Evil - Reflections on a Great Book in Contemporary and Earlier Times

 This week, against the backdrop of the news of our time and the opening of the Book of Exodus, I’ve been reflecting on David Blumenthal’s The Banality of Good and Evil, a book which would make it onto my desert island shortlist.

Blumenthal’s book is an enquiry into how NOT everyone folded into the superficially attractive genocidal horror of Nazism. It’s steeped in sociological and psychological investigations of the heroes of that bleak time – the righteous among the nations, the subjects of the Oliners’ The Alturistic Personality and the like.

In this time, as we are being drawn, banally and otherwise, into accepting things that should call us to action in fierce opposition, Blumenthal’s lessons are worth restating.

The central idea that emerges from Blumenthal’s research is that heroes, bystanders and even villains don’t emerge ready-formed. They are shaped by their experience, or lack thereof, of prosocial and antisocial values. This seems as true today as it was in the run-up to the Holocaust and – on this week in which we read of Pharaonic genocide and brave resisting midwives –in the time of the Exodus.

Blumenthal’s call is that we – religious leaders, teachers, parents, humans of all kinds –teach and model what he identifies in powerful and moving lists as ‘prosocial’ actions and values. We need to discuss terms such as “inclusiveness, goodness, kindness, justice, fairness, law, integrity, virtue, uprightness, caring, protest, resistance, humanness, and humanity. And the complements: exclusiveness, isolationism, ethnic superiority, injustice, oppression, prejudice, unfairness…”

We – all of us – need to be sensitive to the way that the language we use forms who we are and who we become. When we speak with “compassion, concern, affection, love, [and] care”, we create one set of ripples that impacts on ourselves and those around us – we are drawn towards the prosocial. The reverse is also true.

We – Blumenthal counsels – must discuss the nature of social processes and provide proper instruction about social hierarchies; “Discuss the terms: authority, obedience, disobedience, resistance, autonomy, ingroup-outgroup, conflict management win-win,”

We must teach critical thinking and empathy. We must encourage and model the identification of our own, and others’ feelings and emotions – are we feeling proud or brave or scared or tired?

Perhaps most of all, we need to share the central idea that human beings are built towards doing good. We have, as humans, banally allowed awful things, but we have also stood firm, resisted and thrived by being social, co-operating and celebrating difference. We can again. We must again.

These lists contain so many deeply Jewish ideas, values and concepts; Blumenthal, aside from his philosophical and sociological academic efforts, is very much a Rabbi. Nowhere, in our sacred texts, are these ideas more powerfully modelled and articulated than in this week’s Torah reading and in the weeks to come. This is important. These teachings can, and have, changed the world. These teachings are needed again, this time around. The challenges of the banality of how humans can be habituated and trained towards evil are not new. The solutions are not new either. We just need to pay attention and believe.

Shabbat Shalom