I’ll be candid. I’m struggling to cling to the faith King espouses in his sermon, “The Death of Evil Upon the Seashore.”
I began writing this reflection during Passover, the Jewish holiday commemorating and celebrating the liberation from oppression King uses as the archetypal symbol for the worst of all evils. One goal of the central ritual of Passover, the telling of the story of this liberation, is to edify our faith. Year after year, from generation to generation, when telling this story Jews are asked to see themselves as if we were there, in Egypt, so that we will know a better future is possible. But this year I’m finding it quite hard not to give into the “crippling pessimism” King warns us about. Why? Because, as King writes in this sermon, lately it feels as if “the death of one tyranny is followed by the emergence of another tyranny.”
On the second night of Passover, as we worked our way through our homemade haggadah (Passover prayer book), a guest at the Seder gathering pulled out a reading supplement compiled by Rabbis Against Gun Violence in 2016. It was a list of 10 tragic mass shootings to be read in conjunction with the 10 plagues. As we sat at our table and looked at the list of places—Sandy Hook, Aurora, UCSB, Charleston—an overwhelming grief washed over me, settling heavy in my heart. These sites of extreme gun violence had become parts of history. Had I made an updated list this year, would I have even included them? In 2016, Pulse and Parkland had not yet taken place, to say nothing of the recent tragedies in Nashville, Louisville or Alabama (What about those that don’t even make the news!) To put it mildly, gun violence is clearly just one of the many tyrannies rising up around us. But right now, at this moment, for me the cascading torrent of mass shootings feel utterly maddening and oppressive because they seem to be so humanly preventable.
At the beginning of this sermon King writes, “Is there anything more obvious than the presence of evil in the universe?… Evil is stark, grim, and colossally real.” This feels like gun violence in America today. Yet, if evil is so “crystal clear” where is the change we need? As a student of history, I connect intellectually with King’s words about change taking time, the need to focus on incremental shifts, like when he writes, “But at least we have left Egypt, and with patient yet firm determination we shall reach the promised land.” The examples he gives in his sermon of the change that has been made are monumental—from 3 independent African countries to 32 at the time of his sermon (to today 54), from Plessy v. Ferguson to its reversal. But is this slow change really enough? I want change now. I want action now. I want gun violence to stop now. I want to see this change with my own eyes just as the Israelites did.
“And Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore” (Ex. 14:30).
ַוַּי֤ ְרא יִ ְׂשָר ֵאל֙ ֶא ִ ת־מ ְצַ֔ריִם ֵ֖מת ַעל־ ְׂשַ֥פת ַהָּיֽם.
In Jewish biblical commentaries, the key element of this verse is not that the Egyptians were dead, but that the Israelites saw that they were dead. As an 11th century commentator, Rashi, writes, “the sea threw them out on its shore in order that the Israelites should not say, ‘Just as we have come up from out of the sea on this part, so they have come up on another part of this shore, but far away from us, and they will pursue us’.” For Rashi, if the Israelites hadn’t seen with their own eyes that the Egyptians were dead they wouldn’t have believed they were free, they wouldn’t have known that this change was possible. It makes me wonder what I might need to see for myself in order to overcome the defeat I’m feeling. What must we see in order to know that we can be free? What must we see in order to know that change is possible? What must we see in order to take action to make change real?
The Hebrew word vayar means to see. It is used at many pivotal moments in the Exodus narrative. It is precisely the ability “to see” at moments of choice when change happens in the story:
- Pharoah’s daughter “sees” that the baby she finds in the basket is a Hebrew child, and she makes a choice to keep him.
- Moses “sees” an Egyptian taskmaster beating an enslaved Hebrew person and strikes down the oppressor.
- Moses “sees” a burning bush and chooses to stop and turn aside from it.
- God “sees” Moses turn aside and therefore calls out to him.
So what is it that each of us needs to see? There is so much evil to see in this world and it is so easy to see it in graphic detail 24-7 through social media. How do we let what we see impact ourselves and our souls? And what does it even mean to see in this era of social media and recorded killings? Whereas in Exodus, seeing allowed the Israelites to believe, nowadays seeing seems to desensitize us, thereby allowing evil to persist.
At the end of his sermon King writes, “God has two lights: a light to guide us in the brightness of the day when hopes are fulfilled and circumstances are favorable, and a light to guide us in the darkness of the midnight when we are thwarted and the slumbering giants of gloom and hopelessness rise in our souls.” Whether we need the light of day or the light that shines in darkness to help us see, may we and all people see what is needed to make the change we need now.
