But I think what happens in the Exodus is the primal scream that permits the beginning of history. In the verb “cry out” (za’ak) there is a bit of ambiguity because on the one hand it is a cry of misery wretchedness with some self-pity, while it functions for the official filing of a legal complaint. The mournful one of the plaintiff. As Erhardt Gartenberger has observed, it is characteristic of Israel to complain rather than lament; that is Israel does not voice resignation but instead expresses a militant sense of being wronged with the powerful expectation that it will be heard and answered. Thus the history of Israel begins in the day when its people no longer address the Egyptian gods who will not listen and cannot answer. The life of freedom and justice comes when they risk the freedom of the free God against the regime.
The grieving of Israel, perhaps the and surely complaint self-pity but never resignation, is the beginning of criticism. It is made clear that things are not as they should be, not as they are not as they were promised and not as they must be and will be. Bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling criticism that permits a new reality, theological and social, to emerge. That cry which begins history is acknowledged by Yahweh as history gathers power:
"I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their suffering, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians." (Exod. 3:7-8)
"And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come tome, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come, I will send you . . . ." (Exod. 3:9-10)
That cry which is the primal criticism is articulated again in 8:12. Moses and Aaron now know that serious intervention and intercession must be made to Yahweh the God of freedom and not to the non-gods of Egypt. . . .
I would expect that for a lot of you as for me, when I read that the first thing that comes to mind is the great Black Lives Matter protests and the other demonstrations against the oppression meted out to our own people who are in an analogous position to the Children of Israel in the Exodus account, who reject resignation. Which is very good but it is only the beginning.
That is a kind of rejection of resignation and an appearance of genuine grievance that is mimicked by the supporters of the American regime in the anti-mask, anti-social-distancing and pro-Trumpian fascist entity and the cabloidized media will certainly cover as being the equivalent if Biden become president and they do to him what they did to Obama, the first Black president and Hillary Clinton, the first woman to ever win the vote in a presidential election. That mimicking of legitimate protest by their oppressors is the equivalent of what Pharaoh’s magicians did in the Exodus account of them producing the first two effects that Aaron did in bringing the first two of the seven plagues as a way of blunting their effectiveness. I don’t know if the intention was to contrast the difference between the genuine religion of Moses to that which could, by artifice produce some of the same appearances but whose power would not suffice to free the Children of Israel (as those first two plagues did not) but I take in that the warning that the secular means of the secular left will not do that either. They have certainly not worked very well in the period after the assassination of Martin Luther King jr. And, in that vein, it should be remembered that the next four which Pharoah’s establishment experts could not imiatate didn’t do it either. It was the most extreme of the plagues that forced Pharaoh to let the Chilren of Israel go and almost as soon as they left he went after them in the way that American slave power successfully did during the period of legal slavery AND IN THE RE-IMPOSITION OF OPPRESSIVE SERVITUDE AND TERROR IN THE JIM CROW ERA when one of the Founders’ safety nets for slavery, the Electoral College, got their collaborator, Rutherford Hayes in office.
And, as it also got first Bush II and then Trump into it.
I could go on and on about the deceptive power of secularism, mere legal wrangling about the "right way" to apply the imperial law, the Constitution, as a means of the present day left making progress, in which it won’t no matter what temporary gains are made which our recent history, especially under that other boon to slavery, the Supreme Courts self-granted power of nullification of duly adopted laws, are easily lost. Especially through the corruption of that other boon to slavery, the anti-democratically constituted Senate brings.
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