A design challenge for you. Design something that produces oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy, creates complex sugar for foods, keeps soil in place, creates microclimates, changes colours with the seasons, and self-replicates. What is it? The natural phenomenon which we celebrate yearly this week in the Jewish calendar when the festival of Tu B’shevat takes place. The Jewish New Year for trees. Ok so why don’t we knock that down and write on it? Make it into a piece of paper. We can. But in our generation we know that if we do so to too great a scale then we denude the world of these remarkable and amazing resources with potentially catastrophic results. Cut down too many trees and soil erosion and carbon dioxide increase will ruin our living environment. Every year millions of acres of rainforest are lost. An average sized pine tree can produce 80,000 pieces of A4 paper but you would be amazed how much of the stuff we use. We must not abuse our power to harvest nature.
Next design challenge. Now design something that can love, create poetry, design things itself, communicate to any person, do complex mathematics, behave with care and compassion, build a house, think the deepest thoughts, bring up children, live within a religious system, make community, write, sing, dance. What is it? The natural phenomenon who we celebrate this Shabbat and every Shabbat – the person. Now own one of them. Make them a slave. Restrict their movement, own their labour, trade in their children. No wonder the Israelites sing when they are released from captivity in Egypt as they cross the Sea of Reeds. No wonder freedom and the urge for liberation of all peoples is so central to Judaism.
The great challenge for humanity is that every one of us has the capacity to abuse the power in our hands. We have the power to despoil the natural environment so easily. We have the power to control other people and remove their freedom from one day to the next.
At the roots of Judaism is a continuous protest from generation to generation against the abuse of such power.
Judaism always recognises that within every one of us is a yetzer tov – an inclination to do good and a yetzer ra – an inclination to do bad. No person is inherently evil or good. Our task as human beings is to so balance the two that we never abuse the power in our hands, so that our good inclination comes out on top. A measure of ambition and greed are necessary for the creativity to solve the world’s challenges. Unless we have the urge to do better we will never be driven to cure other’s diseases, to help with the problems and challenges suffered by others. But ambition and greed out of control and event response to national trauma leads to trampling upon other people, putting them into situations not so far off the slavery which Judaism condemns.
Maimonides most cogent explanation for the laws of Kashrut is not that kashrut exists for reasons of health, the idea that pork and shellfish are potentially harmful, because if this were the case why are field mushrooms which could contain deadly toxins perfectly kosher! Rather it is his explanation in his Guide for the Perplexed (Chapter 3) that kashrut is a training ground for self control, to teach us every day in the most basic of needs, the need to eat, that we have to live within the acceptable boundaries of our power if we are not to abuse the world. We can kill and eat anything from a cow to a cat. Kashrut trains us to set limitations to our exploitation of God’s world.
Very often in the Torah the social legislation is a protest against the abuse of power.
The Hebrew slave, who was normally a person who worked off his indebtedness by working for a period of years for his creditor, could not be kept in this condition for more than six years under any circumstances save that he himself chose to remain in the household of his creditor. An employer could not keep the wages of a worker overnight. The employer has the power in this relationship – he must not abuse it. A lender could not keep hold of basic necessities as pledge for a loan – he had to return the clothing taken in pledge for his debtor to use on a cold night. The wealthy and well known could not abuse their power in the courts. Neither could the poor abuse the power of sympathy to escape justice when justice must be done.
One of the most striking examples of Judaism’s protest against the abuse of power is the Torah verse which says do not follow a majority of people to do something bad. When the whole of society seems to be doing something you cannot agree with a Jew must go against the trend. This is our basic protection against popular racism, against destruction of the environment, against destructive tribalism and enables us to vote against a popular govenment.
God’s place in Judaism is as the guarantor that abuse of human power will never triumph in the long term. The powerful who abuse their power will always fall. The message is driven home at the end of every Passover Seder service, when we gather as the Jewish family to celebrate that now we live in freedom, that we have come through the Sea of Reeds and we will never accept enslavement again, nor enslave others.
The final song of the Seder gives this message in code – it seems like a bit of fun but it is much more than that. It is Chad Gadya, a song in Aramaic about one goat (that is us, the Jewish people) whom our father (that is God) bought for two zuzim (that is the tablets of the Ten Commandments representing Torah). In this song, which first appears in the fourteenth Century, though first seen in print in a Hagaddah in Prague in 1590, a dog beats a cat and a stick beats the dog and the fire burns the stick and the water quenches the fire and ox drinks the water and the shochet, the slaughterer, kills the ox, and the shochet succumbs to the Angel of death – but even this great power cannot reign for ever for above all is the Holy One of Blessing – Ha Kadosh Baruch Hu.
Who are all these creatures among whom the Jews, the little goat, are blown like so much flotsam and jetsam. They are the empires which abused their power from generation to generation, eating each other up until the writer of Chad Gadya in the fourteenth century said let’s not only celebrate our freedom from Pharaoh’s abuse of power but also that from all of the empires of humanity which oppressed us. The cat is Assyria, the Dog is Babylon, the Stick is Persia, the Fire the Greek empire, the water the Romans the Ox the Muslim Caliphates, the Shochet the Crusders and the Angel of Death the Ottomans. So far up to the fourteenth century! But the author of the song had confidence that somehow the Holy One of Blessing would stand above Jewish values that abuse of human power would always be challenged and never last.
This key Jewish value challenges each one of us. Are we careful about how we use our power in personal relationships, neither abusing our ability to influence nor submitting to the unacceptable? Do we properly balance our power in business so that we do not exploit suppliers or let down customers? Do we ask of our politicians that our country be fair to the needs of all? Do we support Israel, the place in the world where Jews have substantial political power, to exercise its power with compassion and ambition for the peoples who live under its control, Jews and Arabs alike, Israel’s citizens and the people of the West Bank and Gaza? Do we enjoy the fruits of nature with consideration for a sustainable future not only for ourselves but also for the poorest of the world whose natural environment can be so degraded by our consumption of their resources?
As this Shabbat we cross the Sea of Reeds we not only leave slavery behind but we take on responsibility as partners of the Holy One of Blessing – ha Kadosh Baruch Hu.
