This year, like every year at this time, we read in Torah the story of the exodus from Egypt. This week, in our portion, Parashat Bo, we read of the last few Plagues of the famous Ten. A great tug-of-war between Moshe and Pharaoh is at the center of this, with Pharaoh repeatedly agreeing to free the Hebrews from enslavement, and repeatedly changing his mind.
This year I read the story again and this year I found myself wondering, where were the Egyptians in all of this? How did they live through all those years witnessing the slavery and exploitation of our ancestors and not raise a voice in protest?
Or maybe they did protest, but if so, Torah doesn’t tell us. Late in the plague game some of Pharaoh’s courtiers encourage Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go. And at the very end, after the tenth plague, the death of the firstborn, at last the Egyptians raise up a cry.
But until that moment, Torah doesn’t tell us how they reacted either to the plagues or to the long suffering of the Hebrews underneath it. I find myself wondering if it would’ve changed anything if the Egyptians had stood in solidarity with the Hebrews at some point.
Yes, the Egyptians presumably benefitted mightily from the slavery imposed on our ancestors, but what if at some point they had refused to go along with it anymore? What if they had declared a general strike? If they had gathered at the palace in protest? If they had decreed a day of fasting and crying out to their gods or to ours? Would it have made a difference to Pharaoh? Even if it didn’t, mightn’t it have made a difference to us? Knowing that others were witnessing and offering their solidarity. It might’ve made a difference to us. Our exodus story and our Passover seder might looked different. We might tell a story every year, like we do about the midwives Shifrah and Puah, about the brave Egyptians who fasted and protested and brought Mitzrayim to a standstill, without whose acts we would still be slaves to Pharaoh.
Protest, strikes, fasting, prayer. These are not empty acts. They can change hearts and minds. When they happen. But more often than not, they don’t.
Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I am reminded of the words of the late Rabbi Harold Schulweis, the founder of Jewish World Watch, who called on the Jewish world to stand up against the genocides of our own time and provide the witness that the Jewish people did not receive during the Holocaust. He said, “I need you to do what we expected [others] to do. I expected them to fast. I expected the priests to organize their churches and to stand in front of the embassies and to cry out against the genocide against our people.”
Rabbi Schulweis identifies fasting and crying out as the quintessential acts of moral witness and protest, as the most powerful spiritual and moral tools available to us. And it is fasting and crying out that he expects of us.
There is something about fasting that is undeniably powerful. To join together as a community and doing something that is so contrary to our human instincts. To climb beyond our physical needs and respond to a higher or deeper moral call. Any of us who has fasted through Yom Kippur all the way to n’ilah knows that when we fast, we free ourselves from the Mitzrayim – from the narrow place – of our bodily needs in order to reach the merchav-Yah, the expansive landscapes of vision.
Fasting has always held an honored place in our history. Yom Kippur is what we moderns know best, but there’s more. Talmud teaches about how the Jewish communities in ancient times would declare a fast because the rains had not come and drought was imminent. Or because there was a pestilence or a plague. Or because there was an army invading. In times of community peril, fasting was our first resort.
What’s more, ancient Jewish communities would also declare community fasts when another community was facing a peril. A kind of solidarity fast.
In some ways, fasting might have been self-serving – a show of contrition and humility before the Master of the Universe who could dole out life and death. And fasting when a neighboring community is in danger could be read as a communal petition that our town not be next.
But it feels to me that there is more. This is an ancient kind of magic and an ancient kind of theater. Fasting in solidarity with the neighboring town was a way of standing with them, of not abandoning them to their fate, of giving them courage, offering some of our strength to them. Engaging in fasting is also a kind of enactment of our own deaths – acting out what will happen if the danger at hand – drought or disease – does not end. And that bit of theater is a sly protest, a kind of finger-pointing at the Divine. “O dear God, if you withhold water, we will in fact starve, and this is what it will look like. Is that really what You want to happen?”
Last year on Shavuot, I offered a teaching in which I raised a question about the the theatrical and moral power of fasting, and whether this might be a practice that would be meaningful right now in our lives and our culture, in response to the vast constellation of perils we face. What would happen if – well, what might’ve happened this week in response to two mass shootings in our state – if we could have declared a fast. If we had offered a way to stand in our brokenheartedness and share some fraction of the suffering; a way to protest that is different from the petitions we sign every time something like this happens; a way to grieve in public and in community, and not just read the news and go back to business as usual.
Others at the Shavuot teaching were excited by the conversation and interested in taking it further. Rabbi George Gittleman at Shomrei Torah, and Leiah Bowden and Shari Brenner of Ner Shalom took it up. And then old friends from the Interfaith Council of Sonoma County came and then our clergy friends joined, and soon it evolved into a coalition of more than a dozen churches, synagogues and organizations in the County, committed to a shared fast in response to tragic events or pressing dangers.
While we are using an ancient tool, we are not an ancient people. While our ancestors fasted from food, we know that for many people fasting from food does not work. It might be medically problematic. Or it might be that our individual and communal traumas around scarcity and our legacies around body shaming make food fasting the wrong vehicle for sacred protest. So we are inviting people to choose fast in other ways, to fast from whatever it is that most powerfully sucks our time and attention. We offer a Carbon Fast – abstaining from driving for a day. Or a Consumer Fast – a day without shopping or any other sort of participation in the economy. Or it could be a day without entertainment or devices or small talk.
Mostly, the invitation is to come together in community and do something that shifts our daily lives in ways that open us up. That open up space in which our souls can expand. Space in which we can feel our connection with others. Space in which we can, like our ancestors, entreat the Divine. Space into which new ideas and inspiration can flow.
You will hear more from me about this because we have in fact declared our first countywide public fast, and I want to invite you to be part of it. It will take place on Thursday, March 2 from sunup until sundown. It will be in witness of and solidarity with the homeless and unsheltered people of this County. We will each fast in whatever way works for us. We will offer opportunities for learning and for volunteering for those who are so moved. And we will gather at the end of the day to speak powerful and prayerful words and to break the fast together.
Our intent is to do one planned fast a year. And otherwise to be at the ready to call a fast on a moment’s notice if something happens locally or nationally or internationally that requires our powerful witness.
So mark your calendars for March 2. Go visit our beautiful new website at interfaithpublicfast.org. Read, learn more about homelessness in Sonoma County, and learn more about fasting as an ancient and still powerful spiritual tool.
I began this drash by asking, “Where were the Egyptians in all of this?” Nowhere to be found. So I invite you to join me in fasting so that when future generations look back and ask, “Where were they? Where were the communities of faith and the people of conscience? Where was the prayer and the protest? Where was the fasting?” When future generations ask that, they will find the answer.