Bo: Stalemate.

Wow, what an epic showdown! Can you believe it?? The two of them, leaders of the opposition, came before the head honcho for yet another meeting, and they firmly stood their ground. He, in turn, blew up at them, yelled and screamed, refused to

listen to members of his own team, abruptly ended the meeting, and thus the stale mate persisted. I mean, how often do you see that level of drama on a world stage?? I am talking, of course, about the beginning of this week's Torah portion. I suppose some of you *might* have thought I was describing a recent meeting between the president of the United States and the Democratic leaders of Congress, in which they tried to end our current government shutdown. And I couldn't blame you for thinking that. Incredibly, the description I offered above encapsulates perfectly *both* of those meetings... separated in time by a mere 4,000 years.

Our parashah begins after seven plagues have struck Egypt, and Moses and Aaron once again come before Pharaoh to try and convince him to let the Israelites leave; to remove the metaphorical barrier that is blocking them from crossing the Egyptian

border. The meeting starts off pleasantly enough, and Pharaoh begins to relent, especially after his advisers plead with him to change his mind, declaring (ominously...): "Are you not yet aware that Egypt is lost???" (Ex. 10:7) Pharaoh acquiesces to let the *male* Israelites leave, just to go worship Adonai in the desert, but Moses insists that all of Israel must be allowed to depart. They are not interested in negotiating and finding some middle ground between evil and good; all the slaves must be allowed to leave. Pharaoh throws them out of his Oval Off... err, court room, and the plagues persist.

The parallels to this week's political confrontation are truly uncanny. In fact, the part that is perhaps the *most* similar is also the most tragic; the victims. In Exodus, Pharaoh is both the perpetrator and the one being intransigent, while the ones who suffer the most are the people of Egypt. Plague after plague rains down on them,

destroying their crops, homes, health, animals, and ultimately even killing their children. Pharaoh seems unperturbed by the pain his stubbornness is causing his own people. Our modern-day political battle over a border wall also has real-world consequences, much like the Biblical story, and here too, the ones feeling it the most are *not* the elected politicians. Families without paychecks, security gaps at airports, national parks unmanned; these are just some of the ways that people's lives are negatively impacted. Yet the logjam continues. The sad reality is, regular citizens are essentially treated as bargaining chips by their leaders; whether in ancient times or present-day.

While chanting the Torah reading in services on Thursday morning, I was truly stunned by the similarities between the Biblical text in the Scroll and the headlines I see on my phone. One lesson I take from this is the importance of weighing how our own actions affect the lives of those around us:
When parents fight, children are distressed; when bosses yell at their assistants, everyone in the office feels anxious. Our behaviors and our choices are *never* made in a vacuum, so we must remember to consider the impact we have on those around us. It really is true what we read in the Book of Ecclesiastes: "There is nothing new under the sun" (1:9). 4,000 years have gone by and so much of our day-to-day lives have changed... yet poor leadership looks the same, innocent victims suffer the consequences of someone else's politics, and our lives are still intertwined with one another. And there are lessons we all can learn from watching the behaviors of others, and being mindful, intentional, and considerate with our own actions. Also, we can still marvel and be awed when the Torah is eerily current. Just scary...


Images in this blog post:
1. CC image courtesy of z22 on Wikimedia Commons
2. CC image courtesy of Wikipedia
3. CC image courtesy of Ron Sanderson on PublicDomainPictures.net
4. CC image courtesy of Severino Deoliveira Jr. on Flickr