Religion in Technicolor
A different kind of holiday celebration at the School for Creative Judaism
Dear friends,
Every spring, exactly one week before Passover a unique ritual takes place in the South of India. The local Jews leave their towns, cities and villages, and make pilgrimage to a small, holy mountain tucked away to the east of the backwaters. As the sun sets, they climb the 1800 steps that lead up to the mountaintop shrine, where they gather to watch the play that they have seen every year since their birth. It depicts the Pharaoh of Egypt’s struggle to understand how he brought about the death of his first-born son in the tenth plague.
After lighting the ritual flames, they watch him tell the story we all know of the Hebrew slaves’ leader Moses, and the ten plagues he brought upon Egypt in order to secure their release from slavery. They hear Pharaoh’s reasoning for refusing to let the Hebrews go and watch him turn from an all-powerful god-king to a sad, broken father. And then they walk down the mountain singing a psalm of humility.
They have felt the pain of their enemies. They have witnessed the consequences of their fight for freedom. They have internalized their adversary’s perspective. They have shed a layer of certainty and gained a layer of understanding.
Now they are ready to celebrate Passover.
There is no lost Jewish tribe of South India that performs this ritual. I made it up when I sat down this week to write my playwright's note for my play, PHARAOH. But what if there were such a tribe with that ritual? What if this were a tradition right here in New York City, which would take place at the highest point in Fort Tryon Park, or on Mount Prospect Park, or up the river over the Hudson? How would it change our experience of Passover? Our relationship with liberation? What would the inclusion of a ritual play in our religious practices do to our experience of our faith tradition? What would preparing for Passover by diving into the inner world of Pharaoh do to our national psyche and our political behavior in the world?
It has always seemed to me, and I’m oversimplifying here, that Jews have a hard time imagining the Palestinian experience. “There is no Palestinian people,” they would tell me as a kid, even as I would see people hanging up a Palestinian flag on the lamppost beyond the fence of my elementary school in Jerusalem. I was never taught anything about the history and culture of those we shared the land with. They were often represented simply as terrorists. There was an incredible flattening of the humanity and the culture of our neighbors.
The story of the telling of the exodus is not dissimilar. We grow up with a stick figure cruel king who kept saying "No, no, no," for no reason whenever the Hebrew freedom fighter would ask him to let the slaves go. That's not far from how the Haggadah tells it too.
The Torah, however gives a richer depiction of Pharaoh. in several interactions he listens quite carefully to Moses, and makes him offers that seem like they should satisfy his requests. "חטאתי ליהוה," the king even says to Moses a few plagues in, "I have sinned to YHVH." Is that not at least the beginning of a repentance process?
Furthermore, the king of Egypt offers perhaps the thorniest problem regarding free will in the entire Torah. Over and over again we are told that "YHVH hardened Pharaoh's heart." It appears so many times that the commentators have to excuse this breach of human freedom - upon which the entire belief system is founded! - with the excuse that God only hardened Pharaoh's already hard heart. Not only is this a weak excuse, but it also negates a prime principle of rabbinic biblical exegesis, that every word in the Torah is exactly right, and holds both straightforward and deeper meanings. The matter serves to further enrich the king's character, who appears to be moved to denying the Hebrew's demands by God, rather than his own impulse.
The Torah, in other words, offers us a nuanced character, Since then, this biblical character has been systematically flattened into the one that appears in our children's songs, out of a human desire for simplicity. We seem to be wired to need black and white in order to function. But that is precisely what creates a colorless reality.
PHARAOH, which opens a week from today was the play I wrote as my main project toward becoming a rabbi. I wrote it as a rejection of the black and white that led us to October 7th, as well as October 8th through today; a rejection of the knee-jerk vilification of those we disagree with; and an invitation to recreate our ancient faith traditions as complex, forward-looking frames, through which we can see all the colors of the rainbow.
I hope you can join us this evening for a colorful New Shul Shabbat of Peace, which will include an array of incredibly talented Broadway singers and musicians, freedom songs by the inimitable Rob Kaufelt and prayers for a better world.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha