Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 223
“We are all Pharaoh’s or slaves of Pharaohs. It is sad to be a slave of Pharaoh. It is horrible to be a Pharaoh.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 98)
Tonight we begin the celebration of receiving the Torah, the Holy Day of Shavuot, with a Tikkun L’Eil Shavuot, a repair/fix to the night of Shavuot. As my friend and teacher, Hazzan Danny Maseng, asks: “what are we repairing?” It is 50 days since we left Egypt, ie celebrated Passover where we were supposed to look inside of ourselves and see what slavery we needed to leave, and now we prepare ourselves to receive the Torah, the guidebook for being human. To answer Hazzan Danny’s question, I believe the quote/teaching above is crucial for us to delve into. While I don’t believe Rabbi Heschel meant this to be an either/or, I do believe he wanted to throw cold water on our sense of self, on our sense of spiritual egotism, religious behaviorism, and moral superiority.
It is so subtle to live as a Pharaoh and it is even more subtler to slide into being a slave of Pharaoh. On this 49th day after leaving Egypt, this evening as we study and repair our inner lives so we can hear the words of Torah that we have missed, that we have bastardized, we have to look at how we have been, are Pharaohs in the ways we treat people, how we look down on ‘those people’, how we disdain and ignore ‘them’, and how we seek to rule over ‘those godless heathens’ who claim liberty, freedom, dignity, as unalienable rights from above!
“Who are these ne’er do wells who think they can sit at the table with us ‘fine god-fearing white/black people who believe that god gave power to the white people because no one else could handle it. Who do those Kikes, darkies, wetbacks, camel jockeys think they are to demand their ‘rights’?” These are the thoughts that go through the minds of the people who are both “slaves of Pharaohs and Pharaohs” themselves. People who continue to be oblivious to their own taskmaster ways, people who have succumbed to the lies and deceptions of themselves and of another(s), believe in the rightness of their Pharaoh-ness, believe ‘those’ people need to be enslaved, imprisoned, maybe even killed because we have the audacity to demand freedom, to have control over our bodies as women, to have the right to vote no matter the color of our skin nor the political party we belong to, and have freedom of religion as the Bill of Rights promises.
The Christian Nationalists, the far-right and the far-left, white supremacists, fundamentalists of all stripes all believe in being Pharaohs, even while celebrating the exodus from Egypt. Their followers are in rapture over being slaves of these Pharaohs because they, in my opinion, foolishly believe in their deliverance by their Pharaohs. It is amazing that these ‘god-fearing good christians, jews, and muslims’ all have forgotten that the people who followed Pharaoh to recapture the Israelites all drowned! Just as the people following their self-deceptions and the deceptions of their “pharaohs” will be defeated and I pray it is in our time.
Tonight, I believe, one of the repairs we have to make is letting go of our desire to be “Pharaoh or slaves of Pharaoh”. We have to re-read the texts we love and use them as roadmaps to leave the inner slavery of Egypt behind us again and find ways to build roadblocks to the on-ramps of becoming either “Pharaohs or slaves of Pharaohs.” We do this by admitting our desires rather than hiding them, by owning our entire agenda instead of presenting what ‘looks good’. We cease and desist from acting out on our eye disease of prejudice towards anyone and everyone. We seek to cure our “cancer of the soul” that prejudice causes by getting to know people and no longer stereotyping them. We admit our own fears and failings, we seek the guidance and assistance of those who ‘know’ and we find “physicians of the soul” and moral guides and teachers to help us grow and aid us in figuring out what is the next right action.
Tonight, we deepen our interest in hearing the call of the universe, of God, of a power greater than ourselves, prior to accepting the covenant once again tomorrow morning. We listen to the stories, we accept the truth and wisdom of our ancient texts and mine them for our betterment and the betterment of another(s). We sit and discuss our fears and our joys, our hopes and our sadnesses, our errors and our bullseyes, with one another. We hide less tonight and in the coming year from those around us, we invite those we know care about us to interfere when we are doing the next wrong thing and be our “ezer K’negdo”, our partner in helping to rise about our baser instincts-be it dominance or submission.
This is a difficult way of living, I know. Plato says:”an unexamined life is not worth living” and Malcolm X says:”the examined life is painful”-a true both/and. I have found they are both correct and the pain goes away quicker and quicker each year because I get into the action of repairing the damage I have caused and asking for forgiveness. I watch with compassionate pity the people who disbelieve Plato and think an unexamined life is worth living, that they can do whatever they want-having lived this way prior to 1987. I know I have been both Pharaoh and a slave of Pharaoh and I know tonight my repairing involves letting go of my fear of being irrelevant, my fear of being forgotten, my fear of, once again, not being heard nor seen. These are the ways that enslave me and paths I run from and become a Pharaoh because I am running so hard and fast from them. Tonight, I will once again repair my inner life so I can receive more truth, more wisdom, more strength and more connection in the year to come. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark