Passover I: The Economics of Exodus

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

When an activist reads the biblical story of Exodus and then turns to how we remember the story, there are some striking gaps.

As we prepare for Passover and its close cousin Christian Holy Week, we face modern Pharaohs and pharaonic systems that are racist, sex-and-gender tyrannical, anti-democratic, Earth-destructive, plague-productive. We should be trying to understand the whole system of oppression and the whole body of liberation in the Exodus story. Gazing at the gaps is important, and translating them into our generation is urgent.
 
Present in the biblical story but calling for much more attention is the economics of oppression and liberation: Prosperity – and its ragged edges.
 
The famous “plagues” ruin the Egyptian economy. But though the biblical story recites them at great length, we hear mostly the verbal battles between Moses and Pharaoh in the palace, until the last plague. Then the death of the first-born in every Egyptian family brings forth a shriek and wail of grief from every household that “has never before been heard and will never be heard again.”
 
The Passover Haggadah continues that blank-out of the Egyptian people’s suffering under Pharaoh’s cruelty. It expands on a midrashic contest about the number of plagues, but the nearest it gets to a sense of the people’s pain is reciting each plague while dripping with each one a drop of wine from everyone’s cup.

Exodus Alliance street seder in front of Chase Bank; Wayne, PA; April 20, 2022. Photo: Rachael Warriner

The drip-drip-drip of red wine looks and feels like the shedding of blood as locusts, mad cow disease, hailstorms bleed the Egyptian economy dry. There are at least two ways to understand this practice. One is to see it as a celebration of the bloodshed in the plagues that ultimately forced Pharaoh to free the Israelites. The second – which is the official oral tradition – says that this dripping wine from the cup is to avoid drinking the wine to celebrate the plagues, instead to mourn the suffering of ordinary Egyptians at the hands of their cruel king.
 
Or maybe the ambiguity of the ritual is precisely to recognize ambivalence toward the event: plagues that were terrible for the peasants of Egypt, but liberatory for the Israelites. Perhaps Jews learned the more empathic pathway in post-biblical millennia, when they lived again bent down in servitude. All these possibilities call us to notice that oppression of the Israelites and oppression of the Egyptian farmers went hand in hand, and to lift that truth beyond our blurry memories as we struggle against the oppressions of today.
 
A question to shape activism: What could we do now – maybe during Passover – that would weaken the ability of modern Pharaohs to ruin the Earth-rooted prosperity of those who are living fairly comfortably and to require reparations for those whose poverty is rooted in generations of oppression?
 
This is my first exploration for this year’s season of our joyful liberation. I welcome your responses, additions, doubts, criticisms. There will be "Passover II" and "Passover III" in the next several days, both about other aspects of the economics of Exodus.
 
Let me know what you would especially want me to explore beyond these.

With blessings of shalom as we all try to walk or dance our path of healing in this world of earthquakes

— Arthur