Shabbat Bo 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
It took a drama for me to get on board as well. I’d vaguely heard about the Post Office scandal. I’d read something about it years ago and knew it clearly wasn’t all that it seemed, but not knowing anyone personally affected, not knowing anyone who ran a Post Office at all and not even knowing the people who own the numerous Post Offices locally, why would I have given it any thought? But wow, I was, like many of you, in tears by the end of the fourth episodes of the ITV drama and feel like the news this last week has been the live unfolding of episodes five and six without the need for any actors or scripts.
What was so compelling about their tragic story? It was the frustration of being so misunderstood, the disbelief that people’s lives could be ruined because there were two competing narratives and that theirs was not believed is excruciating. The impact on their mental health of the loneliness, the despair, the feeling of failure. When we are so out of control of our own destiny, it isn’t surprising that depression takes hold, that we can feel like we are going mad when reality, as we know it, is not the reality being presented back to us.
The aspect I found most fascinating, in terms of what it tells us about the human psyche, were the people who had pleaded guilty to false accounting. Assured that the charge of false accounting was more minor than that of theft and therefore could avoid prison, led the innocent to admit to something they knew they absolutely hadn’t done. It was as if their story suddenly started at a new place. The story started with the with the theft, with the missing money, with the numbers that didn’t balance rather than starting before that with the hardworking sub-postmasters going about their everyday.
How many times do you have to be told something, even when it’s an absolute lie, about yourself or about something so misunderstood, before you start behaving like you are in the wrong? When do you start doubting yourself? When do you plead guilty, just because you have been told you are? When does someone else’s truth become your own?
For the last 18 years of my rabbinate I have read this section of the Torah and cringed. I have tried to minimise the teaching of the plagues to our kindergarten children, tried to avoid glorifying the punishing hurt inflicted by the pestilence, the darkness and the senseless death of the poor children. I don’t want to tell my story with vitriol and hate. I want to hold the moral high-ground, so I want to sweep the plagues under the carpet and remind us that it’s my same Torah that runs this narrative of punishing plagues as the Torah which commands us in the next book:
V'ahavta l’ray’acha kamocha
Love your neighbour as yourself
But this year I’m screaming, why? Why were the plagues necessary? How am I ashamed of the plagues rather than remembering where it started, why it was necessary? In our Torah reading only two weeks ago Joseph was the hero, a senior government official, steering the nation through famine and his father, brothers, nieces and nephews were hard working immigrants in Egypt, who settled there, making it home. Not in a threatening way; they had been given a second lease of life and therefore they were thriving. And that’s the moment where the story veers onto a different path and history can be re-written if you only begin your story telling here, it’s all there in the text, one verse, and this is where it starts:
Exodus 1:8
וַיָּקָם מֶלֶךְ-חָדָשׁ, עַל-מִצְרָיִם, אֲשֶׁר לֹא-יָדַע, אֶת-יוֹסֵף
A new King arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.
The new Pharoah fears the minority group which dwells peacefully among them, simply because of their numbers and because he doesn’t know their history. This combination makes him fearful of them and immediately he legislates to cull their numbers and oppress them. Two peoples living harmoniously until one turns on the other, until one turns into the aggressor.
When we talk about the plagues we cannot allow them to be seen in isolation, we cannot simply see them with shame and embarrassment, we have to see them in their context, as part of the whole narrative. The narrative that starts with Pharoah making the midwives kill the innocent Israelite baby boys in childbirth; the narrative that enslaves. The narrative that begins with dialogue, “Let me people go that they may serve their God”. A narrative that starts with inconvenience and unpleasantness which is met with a deeper and more gruesome oppression as the retaliating plagues get more and more severe.
How many times do I have to read this piece of Torah, read the plagues in isolation and feel guilt and shame, how could my God afflict such suffering on the Egyptians, before I too hold my hands up and admit my guilt? Taking a drop of wine out of my glass accepting my part in the seemingly ruthless crimes against the Egyptians who suddenly become the victims in my tale. Would I like it to be different? Yes. I am not proud of the story. I am not pleased because it makes my Israelite ancestors, and therefore me in turn, look like the strong aggressors. Would I prefer it if the narrative stopped last week? No drama, no big gestures, just a “let me people go” and a big Exodus. Blood could be daubed on the doorpost for safety but no death of the first born. Next week seas could still part but no Egyptians would drown. We probably wouldn’t be telling the story of survival thousands of years later but we also wouldn’t be struggling with the guilt, could we have done this without violence? Yes, this could have happened without violence but it would have needed Pharoah not to have oppressed us, kept us in slavery and denied us our liberty.
Where any narrative starts will always be something which is debateable, which takes nuance and understanding. But what we saw from the sub-postmasters is frightening: it’s scary to see how fast one’s view of one self changes when bombarded with a narrative about ourselves, the narrative someone else is trying to convince us of. It’s amazing how quickly we can change our perspective on anything, but very scary to think how quickly we can have that perspective changed even when it’s about ourselves. When someone paints a picture of our actions which causes despair, distrust and fear, how fast do we put up our hands up and say “I am guilty, perhaps of a lesser crime than the one you would like me to plead guilty to but still I accept at least part of the guilt.”
I don’t think I can finish this sermon here, because I think you know which other story in the news I am referring to, when I want to say, how is it that the start of this conflict, the earlier part of this narrative has been forgotten? And yet I feel too guilty while the plagues are raining down to say that I hold no guilt. I’m inundated with the voices which are putting the guilt on me, they are everywhere I turn and the images of destroyed homes, hospitals and makeshift graves are tragic, violence in my name and for the survival of my people, I feel the weight of guilt and responsibility just as I do for the ancient Egyptians who were our taskmasters. Yet the voice that says “but you took our babies, you raped our daughters, you killed our fathers,” which was screaming out more than 100 days ago has become so hoarse it’s become so faint, so quiet it’s even drowned out our plea of “let my people go, it doesn’t need to be like this.” When such a different narrative is reflected back at you, you raise your hands in despair, take on someone else’s narrative and admit your guilt.
The guilt is what makes us strive for the highest of moral standards which I have no doubt we aren’t achieving and should be. Yet on this Shabbat I am mindful that every narrative has many different starting points and it’s dangerous for our personal wellbeing when someone else’s judgement defines that starting point. When we feel our worst about ourselves ask again, where does the story start?
