Passover III — The Economics of Exodus

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

From the standpoint of Pharaoh himself, what are the implications of his own power in Egypt’s economy?

We start with the Pharaoh of several centuries before the Exodus generation. With the help of a start-up foreign adviser, Joseph the Israelite, son of Jacob and Rivka, he has used the emergency of a great national famine to take ownership of all farmland, turning Egyptian yeoman farmers into share-croppers and centering great wealth in himself.

His descendant Pharaoh is probably constrained by growing public anger at this usurpation to find a scapegoat to deflect the blame for it. He chooses as scapegoat the very people whose leader gave the oppressive advice, turning that long-ago counsel into the reason for centuries of oppression. When Israelite leaders demand freedom, they are met with Pharaoh’s worsening oppression that broke the will of popular resistance. His enormous wealth seems impregnable.

But Moses, Aaron, and Miriam are not broken. They invoke the Truth behind the new Name of God: the Truth that all life is intertwined by the Breath of Life, so that cruel and tyrannical rule over humans brings rebellion from locusts and hailstorms. Plague after plague follows. But Pharaoh gets more stubborn after every plague.

Are the plagues that ruin Egypt’s economy the result of Pharaoh’s own stubbornness and cruelty in trying to protect his own wealth and power, or of God’s own triumphalist decision to show how powerless Pharaoh really is in the face of the Breath of Life?

This question arises because the story says that in the early plagues — after each one is halted because Pharaoh pleads with Moses — Pharaoh hardens his own heart. He refuses to let the Israelites go even a short sojourn from Egypt even for a brief time to serve their God. In the later plagues, the story says that YHWH hardens Pharaoh’s heart, perhaps to demonstrate through still harsher smitings how much more powerful YHWH is than all the godlets of Egypt.

This reading leaves some readers, even or especially Jewish readers, aghast. How could our God, merciful and empathic, not only reject but worse, prevent, Pharaoh from repenting of his tyranny?!

But if YHWH is not “Lord” or “King” but the interwoven Breath of Life, the progression from hardening one’s own heart to finding one’s own heart hardened willy-nilly is an accurate portrayal of rulership rampant.

The story is describing an addictive process: Sniff your own oppressive power as a drug often enough, and you will find it has taken over and you cannot shrug it off. You cannot even breathe the Breath of Life without your brain detecting some of the PressThemDown drug.

The Breath works its intertwining even within you, and indeed that process is powerful beyond planning or pleading. Take into account that Pharaoh is not only a person but the apex of a political, economic, and religious system, and the toughened heart is even more made strong by all the lives that fit within it.

So the biblical story tells that the great shriek of pain that followed the death of every first-born Egyptian was accompanied by the final economic collapse of the system: The Israelite band of runaway slaves asked every Egyptian household for its gold, silver, and clothing. The Egyptians, awestruck by everything that had happened, handed over their wealth. And so reparations, a repair, was made for the work-payments withheld during centuries of enslavement.

To be conscious of the economic aspects of this ancient tale of oppression and of liberation can enrich our own understanding of liberating ourselves from modern Pharaohs. They too, as did their ancient forerunners, define parts of our interwoven society as subhuman pariahs because they differ in “race,” culture, language, religion, work, income. They too turn their whole economic system to wrecking Earth’s ecosystem and bring on neighborhoods and regions the plagues of fire, flood, famine, and disease.

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?

Exodus Alliance street seder in front of Chase Bank; Ann Arbor, MI; April 20, 2022. Photo: Rodney Curtis

This is my third exploration of “The Economics of Exodus” for this year’s season of our joyful liberation. I welcome your responses, additions, doubts, criticisms. 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