Fire and Blood. Scales, too.

Unbelievable!!! But NOT! Because we knew this was going to happen. And to pretend otherwise would be like putting our heads in the sand, like Moses burying the Egyptian he’s just killed—although this is the opposite situation, of course.

Anyway, I feel compelled to re-blog this morning, as what I posted yesterday at mid-day did not address the alarming—and not unexpected!!—events that occurred later in the day and into the night in our “Great American Democracy’s” capital.

What Trump, our own Pharaoh, caused to happen is no more surprising than what we’ve been seeing over the past five years, or in light of the history of this country, and as much as law enforcement officials want us to believe that they were caught unprepared, we know that they were complicit in the attempts to incite a coup: A small taste of our own medicine—a reflection of what our government has been carrying out in other countries for decades and decades (watch/listen to today’s show on Democracy Now! for a non-mainstream analysis of the current events). As Cory Booker said, “We brought this hell upon ourselves!”

Our own Pharaoh may be on his way out, while the Torah’s Pharaoh has just been introduced to us in this week’s parsha, but he has shown that he is very capable of doing so much more damage, spilling much more blood, before leaving office in a little under two weeks. Invoking the 25th Amendment for the first time in American history would be totally appropriate in this case—and there should be no shaking of hands across any aisles!! When will that stop??

I still stand by my statement yesterday at the end of my blog post, and add to it:

We may be transitioning from a wannabe-dictator, but we are not out of danger, and we have not yet created a new kind of society. Not only are the problems of the world not solved through a vaccine, our problems are so much bigger than Coronavirus, because the inequity that exists—highlighted by the lack of police arrests yesterday of those attempting a coup, with the police literally moving the barriers back to allow violent people carrying Confederate flags into the Capitol in contrast to all past responses to protesters demanding a more equitable society (you know what would have happened had they been Black)—well, we have a long, long way ahead of us.

Again, our hearts don’t have to be pure to speak up for ourselves nor to speak up for those who need speaking for, any more than Moses’ heart was when being assigned the role of Great Liberator.

And again, we do need to reach into our hearts, scaly or not, and have more faith in ourselves and in each other as vehicles of the Divine, capable of bringing about liberation, not only for our country, but also the world.  

It is this that is required of us, whether it be loudly clambering, or quietly resisting, like the midwives Shifra and Puah.

All are valid. All are necessary.