Sunday, April 3, 2011
The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
I want to remind all of you that we will not hold services at our church over the next 2 Sundays. On April 10, we will join with our sisters and brothers of the Greater New Orleans UU cluster to celebrate the dedication of the new post-Katrina building for the Community Church congregation. It is a beautiful edifice and this will be a joyous occasion in our common long walk to recovery and renewal. There will be speakers from all 3 congregations, as well as a preacher from one of Community Church's post-Katrina partner churches, some very special music, and a reception will follow the 11 am service. I hope that as many of you as possible will be there, at the corner of Fleur de Lis and 38th Streets in Lakeview.
The following Sunday, April 17th, also at 11 am, will be our annual shared Earth Day service at the Tree of Life in Audubon Park, riverside of Magazine Street, on East Drive. The 3 congregations of the Greater New Orleans UU cluster will be joined by a volunteer group from our partner church, the Arlington UU congregation in Virginia, where our former minister the Rev. Michael McGee serves as senior pastor. There will be a combined choir from the GNOUU churches, and the Youth Choir from Arlington will give us the gift of their voices. The service will be followed by a potluck picnic – so bring your lawn chairs or blankets, and a picnic dish to share, and we’ll gather under the embracing arms of one of the oldest oak trees in the country for an inspiring service on “Sacred Waters.”
Thus, two weeks early, we honor the Jewish holy day of Passover, which will occur starting April 18th. While Passover began as a Jewish springtime celebration, marking both the passing of the seasons and the historic liberation from slavery, it has become a near-universal symbol of freedom. Those of us who have seen the classic movie “The Ten Commandments” cannot hear the story of the Exodus without picturing Charlton Heston as Moses, warning Yul Brynner’s Pharoah of the plagues to come, and later standing in front of a giant Red Sea, as the green Jello waves part for the Israelites to cross over to the Promised Land. We love the cinematic story, and we relate to the stirring theme.
We all like to think of ourselves as the Hebrews, escaping bondage into freedom. We thrill to the sense that God or the Power of the Universe is on the side of the oppressed and will with human help act to set things right. It is a powerful thought, and has heartened and inspired downtrodden people over the millennia.
Enslaved Africans in America, hearing the Biblical story from their slave masters and their ministers, saw themselves in the story of the Hebrews, and encoded messages of escape to freedom to the Promised Land of the North in their spiritual songs, “Go Down Moses” and “Wade in the Water,” which they brazenly sang in front of their masters and mistresses. (How the white folks never seemed to see themselves as the wicked Pharoah who ought to let “my people go” will always be a mystery to me. Perhaps it is a tribute to how nearly every person hearing the story manages to identify with the Hebrews.)
Later in history, in the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and ‘60s, Martin Luther King Jr. and other African American leaders used the story again in their struggle for legal and social equality. In his last speech the night before he was shot, Martin Luther King told his spell-bound listeners in Memphis (ironically named after a city in Egypt) that he had been “to the mountaintop” and had “seen the Promised Land” that he, like Moses, would not enter himself.
I say that the Passover-Exodus has become a “near-universal symbol of freedom” beyond Jewish people because being able to identify with it in that way, the way that sees your people as the Hebrew “good guys,” depends entirely on your existential point of view. As a graphic example, we heard in the excerpt from Tikkun magazine co-written by Rabbi Michael Lerner (who was the D’Orlando Lecturer a few years ago) that it is entirely possible from the viewpoint of the Palestinians to see present-day Israelis as modern Pharoahs, curtailing the freedoms of the Palestinian people, taking their homes and land, and proscribing and restricting their labor.
It’s also not hard to fathom why the Passover story would not symbolize liberation and freedom to Native Americans, and would resonate negatively with them. If you were an American Indian, who are the Egyptians and who are the slaves in the story? And who is already living happily in the Promised Land when the English refugees arrive, claiming the land has been promised to them by their god?
Indeed, the Pilgrims and the Puritans explicitly used the Passover metaphor of the Exodus to theologically explain their journey from England to the so-called New World (which was actually quite old to the people already here). To the newly-arrived colonists, who saw themselves as a “special people,” if not exactly as the Chosen People, the scripture story motivated them and excused their every action. Just as the Hebrews had moved into and taken over the land of Canaan in the Bible, by the sword if necessary, so did they have the right and privilege to take over this land, by violence if necessary. And so it was that a story ostensibly of liberation came to be used as a tool of oppression. It is no wonder that Native Americans read the Exodus story, as one member of the Osage Nation has written, “with Canaanite eyes.”
The western migration of Mormons, repeatedly persecuted by legal authorities for their religion and its practices, was also inter-preted by their leaders as the exodus of an oppressed people to a promised land of freedom and self-determination. At the Mormon center and museum in Salt Lake City, which Eric and I visited during the UUA General Assembly held there in 2009, we saw dramatic dioramas that portrayed the heroic Mormons as Israelites escaping from Egypt. We can be quite sure that the incursion and takeover looked completely different to the Ute nation.
This flexible and versatile story can be used in other current time political dilemmas, interpreted in different ways depending on who and where you are. If you are a resident of Houston, and feel overrun by poor New Orleanians escaping from the devastation of Katrina, who is Egypt, who are the Hebrews, who are the Canaanites whose land is invaded? If you are a displaced New Orleanian arriving somewhere after Katrina and find there good-paying work and functional public schools and decide, however reluctantly, to stay, who is Egypt, who are the Hebrews, who are the Canaanites whose land is invaded?
If you are a migrant worker coming to America from an impoverished and possibly oppressive country, with legal papers or not, who is Egypt, who are the Hebrews, who are the Canaanites whose land is invaded? If you are a low-wage worker in a place like New Orleans that attracts migrant workers, who because of their ambiguous legal status can be paid much less than you (and indeed even cheated of the low wages they are paid), who is Egypt, who are the Hebrews, who are the Canaanites whose land is invaded?
If you are an Iraqi or Afghani hearing the Passover story, who is Egypt, who are the Hebrews, who are the Canaanites whose land is invaded? If you are a young Egyptian who spent those recent days and nights in Tahrir Square, demanding freedom and self-determination, who in the story is Egypt, who are the Hebrews, who are the Canaanites whose land is invaded? Always we must ask oursleves, Whose liberation are we talking about? That is the perennial question.
While at blush the Passover story seems to be one that is quite clear in its depiction of “good guys” vs. “bad guys,” as we have already seen, it would be a mistake for us to see the story as simple good opposed to evil. The story is clear that not all Egyptians are bad guys; a clear example occurs early in the story when the daughter of Pharoah, a princess of Egypt, adopts a baby boy that she knows is Hebrew, and raises him in luxury and ease in the palace. (One story told by later rabbis says that the princess even gave up her title and place, and left Egypt with the Hebrews.)
In the Haggadah, the order of service for a Passover seder meal, one of the opening blessings calls for the liberation of “all people everywhere” and invites, “Let all who are hungry come and eat” – regardless of background or religion. Another reminds celebrants to beware of “movements which free only some of us, in which our so-called ‘freedom’ rests upon the enslavement or embitterment of others.” (Ari Davidow)
The Midrash, the collection of interpretations and stories that accumulated around the Torah over generations, teaches that, while watching the Egyptians succumb to the plagues, the angels in heaven broke into songs of jubilation, and in a stunning early example of universalism, God rebuked them, saying, “The Egyptians are my children also – my creatures are perishing, why should you sing praises?” To commemorate this, and to remind us that we are all, oppressed and oppressor, children of God, in the seder ritual participants spill drops of wine for each plague, to reduce their own pleasure and joy for the suffering of the Egyptians. One Haggadah says, “Our joy in our liberation will always be tarnished by the pain visited upon the Egyptians.”
When we remember the beginning of the story, back in Genesis, that the Egyptians started off as saviors of the starving Hebrew people during a time of famine, we realize the fine line between acting well and acting wrongly. Good guys all too easily become bad guys, forgetting their unity with people they hold down and mistreat. The very act of oppressing others causes internal oppress`sion, eroding a sense of shared humanity, leading to bigger and more monstrous acts. It is easier than we let ourselves believe for a good guy to act like a bad guy. All of us, whoever we are, are both Egyptian and Hebrew.
How difficult this is! How much easier if we could reduce the world to opposites, this or that, red or green, heroes and villains! But that is not the real world, the world in which we live, in which even well-intentioned acts can have terrible consequences, and even ostensible bad guys deserve our compassion. The Pass-over story teaches us, in all its complexity, that we must weigh what we think and what we do, to try to see beyond our immediate gains and losses.
In her poem, “For Memory,” Adrienne Rich writes:
Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark—
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.
This is our challenge and our responsibility. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
