Mark Carney vs Pharaoh

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Last week’s guests were two Jewish brothers who disagree politically. This week, the intra-family disagreement will be between two Palestinian brothers. Daoud Kuttab is an award-winning Palestinian journalist and author of State of Palestine NOW. He supports two states, because “the most urgent and doable solution now is the creation of an independent state of Palestine that can live at peace with Israel.” His brother, Jonathan Kuttab is a co-founder of the human rights groups Al Haq and Nonviolence International and author of Beyond the Two State Solution. He believes two states “is no longer feasible.” He therefore supports “solutions that truly address the fundamental issues and the needs of all parties, including settlers, and Palestinian citizens of Israel, which the two-state solution failed to do.” Daoud and Jonathan will offer their competing perspectives on Friday.

Ask Me Anything

Our next Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY, will be this Wednesday, January 28, from 11-12 AM Eastern time.

Cited in Today’s Video

Parshat Bo in the Book of Exodus.

Donald Trump’s interview with the New York Times.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane reports on whether congressional candidate Brad Lander can recreate Zohran Mamdani’s coalition between liberal and anti-Zionists.

In The Guardian, I argued that Donald Trump is just the latest president to fall in love with war.

In Haaretz, Libby Lenkinski asks whether the Netanyahu government will destroy independent cinema in Israel.

Former Clinton official Abby Ross argues that it’s time to disband NATO.

Because of bad weather, my talk to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina has been rescheduled from January 26 to March 9 and the subsequent fundraiser for Gaza has been rescheduled from January 27 until March 10.

On February 3, I’ll be speaking at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

On February 12, I’ll speaking at the Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University.

On March 3, three descendants of Americans punished during the red scare will discuss America’s new McCarthyism.

On March 8, Smol Emuni (the Religious Left) will hold a conference in New York.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there’s this famous line by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach where he says that Torah is a commentary on the world, and the world is a commentary on Torah. By which I think he meant that we see new things in Torah, just as people could see new things in any religious text, because of our life experience, because of what we see happening in the world in our time. And, I thought there was a kind of interesting illustration of this in last week’s Torah portion in the book of Exodus, Parshat Bo, which is particularly powerful to read in the age of Donald Trump.

There’s one particular line. It’s during the last of the three plagues in Egypt. And Moses and his brother Aaron go to Pharaoh to announce the eighth plague, the plague of locusts. And when Pharaoh still refuses to allow the Israelites to go, to leave, the text says that ‘Moses turned and left Pharaoh’s presence.’ And the medieval commentator, ibn Ezra, interprets this phrase as suggesting that Moses left Pharaoh’s presence without Pharaoh’s permission, which, for an all-powerful ruler like Pharaoh, was potentially, risked death. There’s a bit of a parallel between the line we read in the book of Esther, in which Esther enters the presence of the Persian king without his permission, also an act punishable by death.

And this is considered an act of tremendous courage, and it’s considered a kind of defiance, not only of Pharaoh’s tyranny, but of Pharaoh’s idolatry. Because in Jewish tradition, the fact that Pharaoh considers himself a god is intimately linked with Pharaoh’s tyranny and brutality. And so, to suggest that Pharaoh is not all-powerful, that Pharaoh doesn’t have some kind of divine status is not only part of a struggle for freedom, but it’s actually a rejection of idolatry itself. And so, Pharaoh becomes a kind of anti-model for the Jewish kings in the Hebrew Bible who are required to write a Sefer Torah, to write a kind of book of law, to show that they are not the law there, that the law binds them, and indeed, that they are not God.

Now, Donald Trump, in his own kind of more modern secular language, also, I think, suggests often that he is a kind of a divine figure, right? He said to the New York Times recently that basically he is bound by no law other than his own sense of morality, kind of warped as that sense is. He also said, in speaking about his first year in office, or in his first year since returning to office, he said, God is very proud, right? So, if Donald Trump doesn’t explicitly think that he is God, he thinks that he should be bound by no domestic or international law, and that he has some kind of access to the mind of God. And so, I think you again see the message of Torah in that this linkage between idolatry and tyranny.

There’s another interesting moment in Parshat Bo, after the ninth Plague, the Plague of Darkness, where there’s this very surprising line where the Torah says that Moses was much esteemed in the land of Egypt, which might seem very surprising. After all, Moses has defied the leader of Egypt, and is the leader of a slave rebellion, essentially. And yet, near the end, by the 9th or the 10th plague, it says that Moses was much esteemed in the land of Egypt.

And I found that very resonant today, thinking about the way in which different people deal with Donald Trump, right? Think about figures like J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham, right? These people who essentially are on perpetual bended knee towards Donald Trump, right? We know what they actually think of Donald Trump, because they, like so many other Republican politicians, when they didn’t fear Trump so much, they said what they thought of Donald Trump, which is pretty much what most of the rest of us think about Donald Trump: that he’s a liar, that he’s an idiot, and that he’s a would-be tyrant. He’s also a rapist, and a cheat, and many other horrible things. But they knew these things because these things are obvious, right?

But now, in order to gain access to power, they act as the most fawning kind of sycophants, right, towards Donald Trump. And so, in doing so, they really lose, I think, the respect of even many, ultimately, in their own party. Maybe those people won’t say so, because they’re afraid too, right? But I think they’ve really surrendered their self-respect, whether they recognize it or not.

Contrast that with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, right? Who, at Davos, gave a speech that publicly defied Donald Trump, really said things that many other foreign leaders feel, but were unwilling to say about what Trump has meant for the destruction of any notion of international law in the world. And you saw that Carney got a standing ovation, that he’s gotten widespread admiration, just like Moses had, you know, had the admiration not just of his own people for defying Pharaoh, but kind of very broad admiration for his attributes of courage and self-respect that we see that Carney’s courage and self-respect actually wins him many, many admirers across ideological divides and across nations.

And I think this is really the model for those of us in the United States: the model of Moses, the model of Carney, which is to never, ever cower, to never, ever self-censor, to defy Donald Trump again, and again, and again, to laugh at him, to ridicule him, to oppose him in every way we possibly can in accordance with the rule of law. And also to recognize that people outside the United States, whether they’re foreign individuals, or indeed foreign leaders, like Carney, or like the leaders in South Africa, who defy Donald Trump—if they’re defying Donald Trump in the name of human dignity, in the name of the rule of law, they are our allies, even though we are in foreign countries. And that it is not anti-American to try to work with foreign governments in order to oppose the tyrannical and destructive policies of Donald Trump, any more than it was anti-South African for South Africans to ask countries to oppose apartheid, or that it is anti-Russian when Russian dissidents ask foreign countries to oppose the war in Ukraine, or that it is anti-Iranian when Iranian dissidents ask other countries to denounce their theocratic regime.

That there is actually the best understanding, the best definition of what it means to be truly American—to be a patriotic American—is actually to stand up for America’s best traditions of human freedom, and of the rule of law, and to do so in alliance with anyone—anyone in our own country, anywhere around the world—who also cherishes those values. I think that’s what we see people doing on the streets of Minnesota right now, and their struggle is really a model for those of us all around the nation.

And that this struggle, I think the lesson of this week’s Torah portion, is that this struggle, this model of courage, is not only essential in struggles for freedom, they are essential to self-respect. That what is on the line in the way that we respond to Donald Trump is not only the survival and fate of American democracy, of American freedom, of the rule of law, it is our self-respect as a nation. It is our self-respect as Americans. How can we respect ourselves if we act in the cowardly, subservient way that people like Vance and Rubio and Cruz are doing? But if we act in the opposite way, and we speak truth, even recognizing that there are potential dangerous consequences, we maintain our self-respect as a nation. And I think a nation that has its self-respect is a nation that stands the best chance of remaining free.