Passover II — The Economics of Exodus
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
The theme of economic pressure is reinforced by another less-explored aspect of the story — the transformation of God’s Name.
A Name of God is not a mere label but a way of understanding the Universe — more like “E = mc2,” teaching that energy and mass are interchangeable, than like “Izzy” or “Judy.“ The biblical story makes the point that for the earlier Israelites, the patriarchal ancestors, God was known as “El Shaddai,” God of Breasts — Nurture. The Flow of Prosperity. This Nurture Name honors the experience of farmers and shepherds: If you sow the seed and nurture it with care, you will surely reap the harvest.
The Divine Voice announces that this “Nurture” Name is no longer the Truthful one. Instead, God is to be known as YHWH, a Name that can only be “pronounced” by simply breathing. This Name focuses on the connections among all living beings, which sometimes comes as life-giving and sometimes as dangerous — the Wind of Change, the Hurricane of Destruction/Transformation. If you treat your neighboring farmer with hatred or contempt, the soil and the seed themselves will become your enemies. If the world is to be transformed by plagues, then Nurture is an inadequate Name of God.
The new Name teaches that how Pharaoh treats human beings will affect how water, frogs, locusts, will behave. For through the Breath of Life, all lives are interconnected. It is this newly urgent Truth that Pharaoh cannot learn. He wants, he needs, each plague to be an accident. “Stuff happens.”
Learning the “YHWH” Name, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam — and slowly, with difficulty, other Israelites and even a few Egyptians like Pharaoh’s Daughter — learn the Interconnectedness. This new knowledge changes her own behavior and her own name. She joins the Exodus and becomes “BatYah,” not “Pharaoh’s Daughter” but “Daughter of the Breath of Life.”
That was for a single individual. When a whole community transforms its understanding of the world from unconditional nurture to a range of economic possibilities — including scarcities of food caused by the denial of love and justice — then what people do to secure economic plenty changes. Not just sowing seeds but sharing the crop fairly becomes necessary.
As we approach Passover, how do we both teach and embody such a worldview — a Truthful economics?
Can we find vulnerable spots in the economic underpinnings of the domineering systems? Can we turn each eruption of those destructive plagues into community resilience and resistance? Can we insist on reparations to those worst subjugated by the old system? Can we create from the renewable energy of sun and wind an inclusive democratic economy and an ecologically attuned planet, instead of obedience to top-down corporations?
Can Passover become a flagship festival for not only remembering a liberating transformation in the past, but actually creating a liberating transformation in the future? What are the changes in our language and behavior that would be necessary if we want to abandon an outdated hierarchical world-view in favor of an ecological world-view, applied not only biologically but economically and culturally?
This is my second exploration of the economics of Exodus for this year’s season of our joyful liberation. I welcome your responses, additions, doubts, criticisms. There will be “Passover III“ and maybe “Passover IV” along the way. Let me know what you would especially want me to explore.
With blessings of shalom as we all try to walk or dance our path of healing in this world of earthquakes
— Arthur