In a world run by bullies
Bullies. Everywhere I look, all I see are bullies. What’s a bully? A Pharaoh who builds a pyramid of power on the backs of all those beneath him, who uses people as bricks in his wall. A bully uses his power, or the appearance of power, to push himself to the top by pushing others down. In building this pyramid, the über-bully is happy to have under-bullies. In fact, he needs them. He needs people less powerful than he to whom he is willing to give power so that they may bully and control those who are now less powerful than they. The bully feeds them with one hand with the sweet taste of power, and with the other with the sour fear of revolt. “Let us outsmart him [the Jewish people], lest he multiply, and when war comes, he will join our enemies and flee the land. And he placed taskmasters upon him, to oppress him in their suffering.” (Shemot 1:10-11) The cost, and the reward, of being an under-bully is that to maintain your place in the pyramid, you need to ensure that there are people beneath you. Thus the pyramid is maintained, by ensuring that at every level, everyone looks down to dominate, rather than looking up to question or challenge.
Our world is run by just so many bullies, too-large and too-powerful versions of that kid who saw that you had something that he wanted, saw that he was strong enough to take it from you and believed that no one else was strong enough, or cared enough, to stop him. Bigger, stronger, but just the same inside. Maybe it’s always been that way? It seems lately that it’s gotten worse, coarser. Sometimes bullies will fight with each other, but any hopes that the defeat of one bully by another will trickle down to benefit those lower down on the pyramid are consistently dashed. The pyramid remains, always maintained by a mixture of fear and indifference. The fear that someone will replace you, the fear that someone will overthrow you, which prevent you from feeling any concern for those lower down suffering more than you.
The story of the Exodus is the great anti-bully narrative. It begins with small acts of simple and unexpected people who choose to raise up those lower than them rather than to push them down. The decisions of the midwives, of Pharoah’s daughter, and of Moses, are the precursors to God’s decision to overthrow the Pharaoh, to upend the pyramid and to bring an enslaved people to freedom. But overturning the pyramid isn’t enough without ensuring that the society that replaces it will not just create its own pyramid.
This is the educational work that appears as a recurring theme in this week’s Torah portion, on the eve of the exodus. We are introduced to two ideas which are at the core of the Torah’s vision for a society which is to be the antithesis of Egypt. The first is the centrality of children, and education. A bully does not value children, or women, or the elderly. They are all at the very bottom of the pyramid. Moses insists that all of them have religious value equivalent to that of men, and the parsha goes on to emphasize the responsibility to educate our children again and again.
The second is the content of that education. What is the message they are to take from the Exodus? That there is a power greater than the greatest bully, that redeemed them. That, therefore, the greatest power that exists is not the power to oppress, but the power to lift up the downtrodden, and to treat the stranger, not as a threat, but as an equal. “There will be one law for the citizen and for the stranger who lives in your midst” (Shemot 12:49). In a world run by bullies, we are charged to create the alternative. We have a long way to go.
