Pharaoh’s Triumph

I’m neither a Torah nor a Talmud scholar, but I am a Jew, and if Jews know one thing, it’s to recognize evil when we encounter it. Pharaoh, of course, is the embodiment of evil, a self-appointed god so convinced of his ultimate power that he had neither eyes to see nor ears to hear, not to mention a heart so hardened that it couldn’t feel. Thus, according to the story recounted in the Book of Exodus, he reigned over a forced-labor system so crushing that it not only deprived the Hebrews of food, water and shelter, but crushed them so entirely that they required forty years of wandering in the desert in order to let a new generation rise up that had what today we might call agency.

Enough of the Sunday school lecture. The point is: what we are experiencing today, not just in Hungary under Orban and Russian under Putin and Gaza under Hamas, but right now and right here, in Washington DC under Trump, is evil. Evil in the biblical sense. Evil in its starkest, most black and white terms. Evil that has no room for negotiation, or nuance, or conversation, and certainly not for what too many of those with real power are doing: capitulation. The law firms Paul, Weiss; Skadden, Arps; Meagher & Flom; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher all cut deals with the devil in order to preserve their bottom line. Columbia University caved in order to continue benefiting from government largesse. (Good luck with that.) This is Neville Chamberlain all over again; it’s the Association of German Jews who, before the war, supported Hitler in the belief that he’d help fully integrate German (though not Eastern-European) Jews into the fabric of the nation; it’s the Jewish leftie useful idiots who came out on American campuses shouting pro-Palestinian slogans; it’s the Israelite overseers of Exodus who, like kapos, traded their morals for a second morsel of bread; it’s any one of us who pushes our fellows in front of a moving bus for personal gain.

Even Ronald Reagan, a President not known for his ethical sensitivities, knew evil when he saw it, declaring, “We do not negotiate with terrorists.”

As pretty much the entire world is aware of, Israel is at war with Hamas, a death cult focused on the eradication not only of Jews but of any of their own who speak out against them. In Israel, Hamas kidnapped, killed, raped, and maimed over a 1200 men, women and children, and kidnapped 240 civilians. What followed is still playing out. (My point has nothing to do with Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.) But here in America, the terrorist organization resides in the White House, where—in the name of making America great—the President and his enablers, sycophants, and ring-kissers have unleashed the power of the state to kidnap both documented and undocumented immigrants and sent them straight to something akin to the torture-prisons of Syria under Assad. I use the word kidnap on purpose, because, like Hamas, the American government is now in the business of kidnapping, imprisoning, and depriving its victims of basic rights. If the ruination of lives and families, and the paupering of the children of deported immigrants isn’t enough, the regime is dismantling every safety net that the poor, the vulnerable, and the aged rely on in order to meet their basic needs. Not enough? Let’s dismantle the world’s greatest universities and research centers, kill regulations that protect workers from injury and illness, snatch graduate students off the street and imprison them in Louisiana, abandon our allies, and destabilize the world economy.

None of these top-down directives are about statecraft, economic policy, or the welfare of Americans, but rather, the expressions of a man who, like Pharaoh, believes himself to be the sole arbiter of power.

Something we don’t often talk about at our Seder table is the end of the leaving-Egypt story, when the Hebrews safely make it to the other side of the Sea of Reeds while the Egyptian army, pursuing them in chariots, are drowned. No, not the bit about the Song of the Sea, wherein Miriam leads the Israelite women in ecstatic, celebratory song. No, I mean the bit that doesn’t happen, that isn’t dramatized or recorded, and that’s because, as far as the biblical story goes, it either doesn’t happen or, we can speculate, happens off stage. I’m talking about Pharaoh’s death. Because Pharaoh, in the biblical telling, doesn’t die.

The biblical literature is anything but straight-forward, but now and then it points to something so inexplicably true that you can’t help but think that it was, after all, divinely inspired. Pharaoh worshipped only himself. Sound familiar?