Wednesday, February 14, 2018

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed" Stephen Biko

As I mentioned last week, I've been taking Walter Brueggemann and the Jewish commentators I've been reading to heart and have started really studying the story of the freeing of the slaves in Exodus, the central narrative of the Bible, in relation to which everything else, including the Christian books, has to be considered.

As also said last week, I don't think that it's necessary to believe that the depiction in the story of Moses and Pharaoh and the plagues and the hardness of heart and what Pharaoh and his people have to endure before they give up their slaves and the product of their labor, a major source of their wealth, etc. are an accurate history for the story to be important   Though I do think the arguments that there was some kind of exodus from Egypt by some population of Hebrews are convincing.  I believe something happened which survived in the tribal history of the descendants of those who made that exodus and which took on layers of meaning in possible embellishment of their own central narrative, "we were once slaves in Egypt and God freed us,"  under one of the most radical and extraordinary streams of moral consideration in the history of human texts 

I also think, more and more as I read, re-read, read in different translations (I'm ever more coming to like the one that Everett Fox did) along with many, variant and disagreeing commentaries on Exodus, coming to believe it is incredibly relevant to the spectacle of American democracy disintegrating before our eyes.  I mean that in the most literal sense you could possibly read that last sentence in.

Everything from the forgetting on the part of the Egyptians of how Joseph, the Jew, had saved their ancestors from famine, to the paranoia of a later Pharaoh about the non-native aliens among the Egyptians, to the long misery of the enslaved Children of Israel, the continued and panicked paranoia of Pharaoh ordering the reduction of the numbers of the aliens among them (read Trump's travel orders and the ICEsapo raids and arrests) the civil disobedience of the midwives and the mother of Moses*, to the refusal to change in the wake of one catastrophe after another is warned of, not averted and those warnings coming true. . . the pride and arrogance and macho pride of Pharaohs all have either obvious or close to obvious parallels with what has happened in the United States in the past half century if not longer. 

We are in for some seriously hard times because I don't see any indication that Americans are going to be freed from the Pharaonic oppression of the Billionaires and the lies of the media that seduce The People into not only not throwing off that oppression but in opposing their continued rule over us.  We don't have any place to go, our liberation is going to have to be here and now.

In the story of Exodus, even in the immediate freedom from Pharaoh, large numbers of the freed slaves hankered to go back to the security of their enslavement, even ot the Pharaoh who had ordered mandatory infanticide among them.  In the face of the hardships of the journey the story talks about people so recently freed backsliding, either in wanting to go back to the oppression they were used to instead of the freedom they didn't know and backsliding into the same belief of lies and materialism (the golden calf incident) that had oppressed them. 

The story of Exodus isn't history, it's an instruction into how these things happen, how hard it is to free ourselves from ways of thinking and habits and institutional structures that mirror that thinking and those habits and the legal structures that embody them that enslave and destroy us.   I think some of those are embedded into the Constitution and the common law and certainly the Supreme Court doctrine and the firmly held beliefs of liberals as well as conservatives and those are what produced the regimes of Nixon, to Trump which have brought us exactly where we are in which we are having to wonder if it will be possible to get rid of a despot who is destroying the vestiges of democracy, equality, justice while in obvious cahoots with billionaires foreign and domestic, a true if not strictly Constitutional traitor and oppressor. 

I think there's a lot there to consider in the coming weeks.

*  In Everett Fox's commentary he points out that at every crucial point in the life of Moses, it is women who save his life and enable him to be there to fulfill his role as the one who brings about God's liberation of the Children of Israel and the long early instruction of the liberated slaves in the moral consequences of their experience. 

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