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Parashah Bo comment: Micki Weinberg



The Kabbalists teach that darkness is the vessel of light. While this has become a cliché when coping with challenging times in our lives, how might this metaphor be understood politically and socially? Does the “light” of a progressive liberal (or revolutionary) society need to engage in “darkness” to bring and preserve light?


This week’s parasha describes a situation where the Israelites are held hostage by the Pharaoh in Egypt. A series of punishing plagues are imposed collectively upon the Egyptian people, each worse than the other. Despite this, the leadership of Egyptrefuses to release the Israelites, until the last plague–where all the first born of Egypt are killed. The liberation of Israel, is directly tied to the necessary violence and suffering of the Egyptians. Where have we seen this in modern time? In the allied liberation of Europe? In Israel’s war to liberate the hostages?


Shakespeare famously wrote: “Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep…” (Henry VI-Part 2). Is it precisely because of the depth of violence, of darkness, of pain and of suffering, that we can enjoy the light of peace and comfort and joy? What are the political, social & practical consequences of such an outlook?


The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in his book Humanism and Terror: “Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion, and political choice occur only against a background of violence. What matters and what we have to discuss is not violence but its sense or its future. It is a law of human action that the present encroaches upon the future, the self upon other people…He who condemns all violence puts himself outside the domain to which justice and injustice belong. He puts a curse upon the world and humanity—a hypocritical curse, since he who utters it has already accepted the rules of the game from the moment that he has begun to live.”


One of the most difficult things for me to observe is the hypocrisy of those in the West who enjoy a freedom & peace ensured by military, by police, by government intelligence services, by war and other violent constitutive forces and deterrents who use violence & power to preserve a form of liberal western democracy - but then these same profiteers, who hide under pseudo-progressive language, seek to deprive only Israel & Jews of the right to benefit from the same deterrence and security that produces the lifestyle that these hypocrites enjoy. Whether you morally agree with the violent origins of your life or not, it raises questions why there are those who feel certain groups are permitted to benefit while others (Jews) are not.


The ethos behind this week’s parasha is reflected in the following words from the revolutionary Georg Lukacs in Tactics and Ethics: “It is not the task of ethics to invent prescriptions for correct action, nor to iron out or deny the insuperable, tragic conflicts of human destiny. On the contrary: ethical self-awareness makes it quite clear that there are situations – tragic situations – in which it is impossible to act without burdening oneself with guilt.


But at the same time it teaches us that, even faced with the choice of two ways of incurring guilt, we should still find that there is a standard attaching to correct and incorrect action.” What morally challenging actions are demanded of us in our path to liberation?

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