Gainesville
One phrase, that’s all it takes to completely change the trajectory of the life of the Jewish people. And what is that phrase?
“A new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” (Ex.1:8)
And just like that, everything changes. The Israelites had been numerous ever since Joseph’s brothers and their households arrived in Egypt. But now, their numbers are perceived as a threat. The Egyptians think there are too many of them. They had been working the land for generations, paying their taxes, and being good Egyptian citizens never rebelling or challenging the Pharaoh’s authority. But now, our story begins to change. Where once we were happy, now we are miserable. Where once Egypt was a place of safety and security, now it begins to be the place of curses and a metaphor for slavery. The love of Pharaoh’s daughter is long gone. Now the Pharaoh and all Egypt are the enemy. All because of one king that did not know Joseph. How soon they forget.
But we know how the story ends, of course. We tell it every Passover. But what we sometimes forget is the woman who lived in comfort and yet risked everything for baby Moses and, even if they didn’t know it, the Jewish people. This woman, Pharoah’s daughter, is not like her father. Where this Pharaoh has forgotten Joseph, something else stirs her soul. She has something more praiseworthy than the power of being Pharoah’s daughter: she has a sense of the right.
We see this when the text tells us: “The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe in the Nile.” (Ex. 2:5)
What seems like a simple statement of moving from one place to the next – that is she ‘came down to the river,’ is so much more in the context of this story. Physically, she left the palace. But we soon find out that she also came to the Nile, the lifeblood of the nation and there saw Moses where no one else could see him, or would see him. She humbled herself to see the suffering of this little baby. And because of her humility, began the story of the Exodus.
I am not the first to think of this. As Ecclesiastes says, ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’ In fact, in the Talmud Rabbi Yochanan, in the name of Rabbi Shimon, suggests a pointed purpose for her descent: “She came down to cleanse herself from the idolatry of her father” (b.Sotah 12b). In other words, she came to wash away the impurity she felt as a result of the Pharaoh’s unjust policies. This impurity was her father’s uncaring and slavish household. She wanted something else and when encountered suffering and despair in the form of a child in a basket, she embraced it and raised it as her own.
Moses learned his empathy and sympathy from his adoptive mother. He got close enough to feel their suffering in his own gut. These were the moments that would guide him, inspire him and create the leader he was destined to be.
In our everyday lives, we try to avoid suffering. There are those who will never step foot into a hospital, even to visit family, or go to a funeral. These are extreme examples, of course, but how many people avoid the unpleasant truths of contemporary suffering? When millions are left to fend for themselves without any help, when social nets are taken away, when hospitals close and children can’t get food, is our soul with them or do we turn away? The lesson of this week’s Torah portion is that we have to descend from our places of safety and insulation from injustice and go down to the proverbial river to risk getting our hearts moved. It’s a hard thing to do because it doesn’t come from simple charity. It comes from a soul burning for justice and right.
These days, too many people speak of justice in the sense of retribution. They ‘demand justice’ which too often means punishment. But that is not the full spectrum of justice. Justice, true justice, is the active exercise of the soul in bearing witness to hungry children, communities polluted with industrial waste and economic racism, and the sufferings of others. It involves going down the river from our palaces and exercising that part of our soul that sees what others want to avoid. It means afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.
A true story: On a grave in Ruleville, Mississippi, there grows a cactus, one that flowers every so often. It’s been there since 1977 on the grave of Fannie Lou Hamer. You’ve probably never heard of her but, in her own kind of way, she is Pharoah’s daughter.
She was the 20th child of a family of black sharecroppers in the poorest part of the poorest state in the nation. When she married and found she couldn’t have children, she and her husband adopted two daughters.
In 1963, when she was 45, she heard a speech that turned her life around. She was reminded that she was a citizen and old enough to vote. She tried to register but failed the literacy test which was Mississippi’s way of preventing black people to vote. She vowed she’d be back the next month to try again — and again — and again — until she passed. Her landlord came and told her that if she kept trying to register, she’d lose the little bit of farming equipment she had and the land she and her husband were sharecropping. She continued to descend to the river. Of course, she was evicted.
A voter registration group heard of her courage and asked her to work for them. And, in her work, she was arrested for going into the “whites only” part of a bus station, hauled off to jail and badly beaten. Eventually she was released. By the way, the bitterness that might have been there wasn’t. As she put it, “It wouldn’t solve any problem for me to hate whites just because they hate me.”
Here was a woman, mostly self-educated, who decided in the latter half of her life to use the God-given power that was hers for bringing justice to Ruleville and other parts of the South because instead of hiding behind relative safety, she would not be deterred. She may not be as famous as Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks, for sure. But in the sight of Ruleville, Mississippi, she is a Pharaoh’s daughter who was not afraid to reach into the Nile, get herself dirty, and do something about the injustice and suffering.
And so a cactus blooms over a grave that friends had to take up a collection to buy. And the cactus stands as a symbol of a woman who could bloom in the midst of an arid desert of injustice and hatred.
And, speaking of Martin Luther King, he is often quoted as saying, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Pharoah’s daughter and Fannie Lou Hamer teach us how it bends. It bends when we get close to those who suffer. And all that takes is a small walk from our lives of relative comfort and luxury and justice down to Nile Rivers where suffering and abandonment can be easily found.
