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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