Every time, the Torah uses a different verb: Harden, stiffen, weighted, turned away. Every time, the Torah uses a different grammatical form: passive, active, reflexive, causative.
The distinctions are so significant that their similarity can be lost in translation. English versions will tell you that Pharaoh was stubborn, indifferent, callous. They will elide that in every one of these Hebrew idioms, the common word is Pharaoh’s heart.
We are supposed to imagine a heart that has long been bolted shut to cut himself off from the feelings of others. In the ancient world, the heart was considered the seat of all thoughts and feelings, much in the same way as we think of the mind today. A hardened heart is one that won’t permit any thoughts or feelings but one’s own.
That was Pharaoh. That is how the Torah describes Pharaoh every time it explains why he would not let the Israelites go. Pharaoh would not let people out because he would not let people in.
Over the last year, I have come to relate to that hard-heartedness. The pandemic and lockdown have been a stressful experience. Personally, I think I have turned inwards, focusing much more on myself and my family than on others and their needs. I have looked forward, determined to get through the crises, but I have not looked around at others and made the conscious effort I should to empathise.
A heart that can’t let anyone in also isn’t ready to let itself out. I wonder how the last year will affect people’s psyche. Has the last year, with its necessary focus on isolation and separation, prepared us for the hard emotional work of returning to being in community? What kinds of people will be when we emerge from this year? Will we have the empathy we need to let our people go?
This is Mental Health Shabbat. It is a time for us to reflect on the state of our hearts. We do not want our hearts to be hard, like Pharaoh’s. It is a time to open up our hearts, so that we can let our own feelings out, and the feelings of others in.
This was a short sermon for Friday night at Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue.
Job was a man of complete integrity. According to his eponymous book of the Tanach, no matter what happened, Job was the epitome of Jewish righteousness. Then hardship fell, and Job began to doubt God’s justice.
This was hardly surprising. God had stripped him of everything, ridden him with disease, killed his children and destroyed his livelihood to test whether or not Job would remain faithful.[1]
As it turned out, Job could only endure so much. His friends comforted him with explanations of how God must be righteous after all, but they were insufficient. Finally, Job began to snap. What if God was not just?
Just then, God burst out through the clouds. “Who are you to question Me?” demanded God.[2]
After a lengthy excursus from Job’s inadequate interlocutors, we might expect a more thorough explanation. God has arrived and will explain the nature of justice.
Instead, God goes off on one about mythical beings. God talks about the Behemoth, an enormous bull-like monster that can rampage fields. God describes Livyathan, a fire-breathing dragon that cannot be killed.[3]
And this, apparently, satisfies Job.[4] Well, I’m not satisfied. I don’t know about you, but if I’m having doubts about my faith, “have you heard about the monsters God tamed?” won’t really cut it for me. You can’t respond to rational concerns by piling on ever more improbable legends. Now I’m filled with even more doubts.
But perhaps that’s the point. The author of Job, arguably the most philosophically complex text in our Tanakh, probably knew that these myths weren’t really an answer to the question posed.
The real answer, hidden within these poetic arguments, is that we don’t know. Whatever God is, it is beyond our comprehension.[5] Whatever justice is, we cannot fully reason it enough to grasp it. ‘You don’t need to understand,’ is what God is really saying.
Similarly, our parashah this week concerns Moses’s doubts. We have come to the book of Exodus, and Moses has already run away into the wilderness. Out of a flaming thicket, God summons Moses to rescue the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt.[6]
Just as God answered Job from the clouds, so too does God answer Moses. But the answer Moses receives is no more comforting. ‘You don’t need to understand,’ says God, ‘you need to get going.’
“What if I’m not good enough?” asks Moses. “You will be,” says God.[7]
“Who even are you?” asks Moses. “I will be whatever I will be,” God roars back. “Tell the Israelites ‘I will be’ sent you.”[8]
“But what if I can’t find the words?” asks Moses. At this point, God loses patience. “I gave you your mouth, I will give you the words! Now get yourself down to Egypt and set those slaves free!”[10]
Miracles might be convincing to some. Logic and reason might work some of the time. But, ultimately, you have to act. When faced with injustice, there is little time to contemplate the nature of sin and perfection and God’s role in it. You have to get out and do.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Conservative theologian and civil rights activist, famously pictured alongside Martin Luther King Jr at the march on Selma. He said that Judaism does not require a leap of faith, but a leap of action. We are called upon, first and foremost, to act. Whatever we think about it can come later.
This might sound strange to us, educated in a Western thought system that teaches us to calculate and reason before making choices. But it was not strange to the Israelites. When God called on them at Mount Sinai, they replied “we will do and we will hear.”[11]
According to the Talmud, a heretic accused Rava using this verse. Rava was sitting, so engrossed in study, that he didn’t notice he had trapped his finger in a chair leg and it was spurting blood everywhere. “You impulsive people!” the heretic said. “You still bear your impulsiveness of acting before you think. Listen first, work out what you can do, then act.”[12]
Rava responded with the verse from Proverbs:[13] “The integrity of the upright will guide them.”[14] We trust in our integrity. We trust in our conscience. We can be moved by our faith that we know right from wrong.
I think, over the last few years, progressives have done a great deal of doubting. We have been introspective and thoughtful. We have wondered, internally and out loud, whether we are right after all. Perhaps, as nationalist ideas return and religious conservatism gains strength, we might be able to make compromises on our ideals and find a middle-ground with others.
This week, fascists marched on the White House. They carried Confederate flags into Congress. A Nazi showed up among the rioters wearing a shirt that said: “Camp Auschwitz” on the front, and “staff” on the back, as if taking credit for the mass murder of Jews. They proudly displayed nooses, the symbol of anti-Black lynchings. Every brand of far-right conspiracy theorist and white supremacist descended on Washington, and video evidence shows that the police not only tolerated them but let them in.
Where has all our doubt and consideration left us? In our desire to find common ground and engage in reasoned discourse, we now come across as morally ambiguous and uncertain in our principles. We have left an ethical vacuum, and fascists have stormed into it. Intellectual curiosity is little use against the blunt force of white supremacists seeking to violently cease power.
Rabbi Professor Tony Bayfield has pointed out that our uncertainty is what differentiates us from fascists. Fascists are, by definition, absolutists. They do not interrogate their views or consider other perspectives. Our advantage over fascists comes from the fact that we give arguments due consideration and approach our own convictions with humility.
He may be right. Doubt might separate us intellectually from fascists. But it is action that separates fascists politically from power. There is no joy to be had in feeling superior if white supremacists gain power in government.
This week’s events may have been a terrifying climax to Trump’s presidency. But it is equally likely that they are a prelude to worse events. American white nationalists are emboldened and convinced that they can seize power through either ballots or bullets, depending on whichever method suits them. The situation in Britain is scarcely different, where racists have not felt so confident in decades.
Whether Trump now recedes into the background or his racist ideas come to dominate the world will depend on how we act. It will not depend on what we think, but on what we do. Events are calling us to action. If we want to eradicate fascism, we must be willing to fight it.
By all means, have doubts. Moses doubted. Moses was unsure. But God said to him, ‘go anyway. Get down to Egypt and free those people.’
We must be willing to face the Pharaohs of our time with the same vigour. We must be able to say: “I have come to act because God sent me. I am standing for justice because I know it to be right and true. I am standing against racism because I know it to be wrong. I will free these people. I will uproot tyrants. I will defend democracy and advance the cause of the oppressed.”
The integrity of the upright will guide us.
Although we may not fully understand these monsters before us, we will slay them.
Once, Rabbi Israel Salanter, the founder of the Musar movement, visited a new matzah bakery in order to check its work practices and level of kashrut. He reviewed all the manufacturing procedures extensively and observed the intense labor and toil of the employees. At the end of Rabbi Salanter’s visit, the bakery owner proudly asked him, “What does the rabbi say?” He answered, “The Gentiles accuse us, God forbid, of using the blood of Christian children in matzah. While this is not the case, from what I have seen here, there is indeed a violation of the prohibition on blood in food. The blood of the workers is mixed with the matzah! I will not certify this bakery as kosher.”
For me, my proudest moment of 2020 came in the middle of a Torah shiur. Early on into the lockdown, I was teaching a class over Zoom. 8pm was nearing and one teenage girl in attendance interrupted. “We have to go clap for the carers!” she said. At once, almost the entire class got up and walked away from their screens. I did the same. We whooped and cheered, then, ten minutes later, returned to our studies. Clapping for the carers became part of our weekly Torah study.
That, I thought, was real Judaism. It is not in our texts or our rituals, although those are important. Judaism lives in the dignity and respect we show to each other. It is in the solidarity and love we demonstrate to each other, even when we cannot physically be together.
This year, for the first time that I can remember, care workers received the recognition they deserved. In this pandemic, we learnt who really keeps the country ticking. It is the nurses, the cleaners, the teachers, the nursery workers, the porters, the social carers and home support. So often, this work, which constitutes the majority of work, is ignored or made invisible.
In this parashah, we get a rare insight into that kind of work. Jacob and Joseph both die. We hear of how the dignitaries and officers of Egypt mourned them. But we also hear, just in passing, of the physicians who embalmed their bodies. Or, rather, as Rabbeinu Bachya points out from the grammar of the sentence, that the physicians instructed others, who were lower-ranking and skilled in the matter, to embalm the bodies. We glimpse, if only momentarily, amidst the hullabaloo of important people wailing, what care work looked like in Ancient Egypt.
Care for the elderly must have been one of the hardest jobs to do this year. The Coronavirus pandemic spread fastest and with most deadly impact in the elderly care homes. The workers, without adequate protective wear, on low wages and with few rights, went in to care for older people. These workers had to return to their own vulnerable family members, potentially infected.
For many older people, their care workers were the only human contact they received, as families were prevented from mixing in the homes to prevent the spread of the virus. Care workers have done an amazing job this year, and everyone is forever indebted for their service.
So it should be a cause for absolute disgrace, for moral outrage, that a care home within the Jewish community should be spotlighted for its abhorrent treatment of elderly care workers.
That’s right. I’m talking about The Sidney and Ruza Last Foundation at the Yehoshua Freshwater Centre, better known as Sage Care home, in Golders Green. The staff there have been asking for fair wages, full sick pay and union recognition since September. These domestic and maintenance staff are paid well below the London Living Wage, denied fully paid time off if they are sick, and their grievances have been brushed aside and ignored. The management have flatly refused to have any meaningful negotiations with them, or made the workers any offers.
What an insult, then, that this care home calls itself Jewish, and says it serves the Jewish community! Who in the Jewish community is it serving? It certainly does not serve the care workers in this congregation. It definitely does not serve our elderly and vulnerable family members if it puts them and their carers in danger. Above all, it does not serve our Jewish God and our Jewish values if it exploits people.
The great conservative rabbi and posek Jill Jacobs, says that a Jewish company must meet certain labour standards to be considered kosher. It must treat workers with respect; pay a living wage; protect workers’ living conditions; and recognise their trade unions. Needless to say, the owners of Sage Care Home have failed on every single one of these fronts.
Moreover, the elderly are not safe from the pandemic if staff cannot be open about when they are sick to get necessary time off. The elderly cannot receive high quality care if employees don’t feel like when they complain about risks to health and safety they will be taken seriously. This is a grave issue for residents and staff alike.
As a result, the staff at this care home have now ballotted to strike. Unless the management intervenes swiftly to meet the carers, the whole workforce will walk out this month. The strike is scheduled to begin on 15th January.
It should never have reached this point. Many care homes manage to look after their residents and staff, by focusing on the human beings they are, rather than just profit. By ignoring the workers’ legitimate requests, the owners are endangering both staff and vulnerable older people. They must be held to account.
I know that the elderly people in these care homes and their family members want to know that their care workers have safe and fair working conditions. I know the Jewish community in London has high ethical expectations of its communal institutions.
The care workers are calling on the Jewish community to give them support. I know you will. The same community that came out to applaud care workers in the spring will surely stand by them in their struggle for a livelihood through winter.
If you have family at this care home, please write to the management to let them know your concerns. Express to them your concern for the welfare of the workers and your family.
Alternatively, take action by signing the petition or donate to the strike fund.
Let us join with the elderly and their carers to demand more from our communal institutions. May we be able to take pride in our care homes. May we truly be able to call every Jewish space kosher.
Sim Lev 