The Nazis and the plagues

I have a confession to make. Last week I found myself peeking several times at the photos of the Far-Right extremists who, on January 6th, stormed Capitol Hill.

I am not particularly disturbed by the odd Israeli flag that these people display. I know that some of them, though anti-Semitic, worship Israel for all the wrong reasons. I know that physical strength is the only language that they understand. Do they know that Israel is strong? Good for us, chances are that some of them (at least) will think twice before attacking a synagogue. The common thread that allegedly unifies the disciples of Jabotinsky with White supremacism is just a laughable fantasy. These people hate the Jews, and if there is a regime in the Middle East that they support, it’s Iran, not Israel.

I somehow found myself against my own will, looking at these angry expressions, at their customs and flags. Norse customs, horns and Viking paraphernalia are -unfortunately- nothing new for me. You can see many of them in Italy, at the yearly convention of Matteo Salvini’s racist party.

And they convey the same message: rage, hate against blacks, against Jews, against immigrants, against LGBT, against every minority. These Americans show off the Confederate flag, a symbol of a bygone era when slavery was the norm. Their European friends show off the symbols of an imagined Medieval society when all Europe was (they think) Christian and white. And on both sides of the Atlantic, they show off swastikas, nooses and other symbols of violence.

Besides the symbols, these people share a culture. Paranoid narratives such as “only 3% of Americans fought the British in the War of Independence”, a war that they see themselves fighting again, this time against the USA Government, the New World Order or whatever international conspiracy. And the Q Anon cult, the allegation that Donald Trump is the only world leader fighting against an international network of paedophiles and human traffickers, all the “global elites” are part.

I wish it was only an American phenomenon! Last year, between one lockdown and the other there. have been Q Anon rallies in at least ten cities in the UK. These crazy ideologies have followers on this side of the Atlantic too. And when they mention “the elite”, “the bankers”, “the mainstream media”, in short: their enemies, they mean the Jews. They mean us. They hate us.

But why? What is the source of their anti-Semitic hate? What do these people believe? Some may call themselves pagans; they may claim they believe in some Northern deity: Wotan, Thor or whatever, of which probably they know nothing. Others, based on some third rate prophecy book, perhaps are persuaded that a racial war is coming. They have been stockpiling weapons because of that. But those things are only the surface of their ideologies. If you scratch the surface, you see that Nazis, white supremacist and Far-Right radicals believe in one thing only: power. They worship power.

Power is the centre of their worldview. They believe that power is everything and that at this moment, power is in the wrong hands. They see themselves as those who are restoring things as they should be. They are fighting a war to give back power to those who are entitled: themselves. In such a worldview, either you have power, or you are powerless. Either you rule, or you are ruled. Either you dominate or you are subjugated.

To these people, politics is a zero-sum game. Democratic politics as we know, coalitions and compromise, is a foreign planet. In their world, there are only masters and slaves. And they believe to be oppressed, to be the slaves who are revolting against their masters: the elites, the bankers, the Jews, us.

If we look at Egyptian society, as it is described in the Torah portions that we read during weeks, we find a kind of society whose basic values are the same. In Ancient Egypt, power was everything. Whoever was in charge, whoever had the power, decided what was good and what was moral. The Powerful was the Good.

For example, when Pharaoh ordered to murder all the Jewish male children, only a few Egyptians refused to obey. The vast majority of the Egyptians did not. It was an order by Pharaoh; it must, therefore, be good. In such a world, Pharaoh is in power and whoever is in power decides what is right and what is good.

This is the world from which the Israelites are commanded to escape. By whom? By God. Which Pharaoh refuses to recognise: in Egyptian culture, there is no one above Pharaoh.

We are used to reading Exodus story; we read as the story of a group of slaves that escape slavery and become one people. It is a legitimate reading. Not by chance, Exodus has inspired fights for the freedom and dignity of many minorities. There’s a lot of Exodus in Afro American music, for example.

Nonetheless, in the Jewish reading of this Jewish story, there is an additional element — a confrontation between God and Pharaoh. Pharaoh is so devoured by the desire for power that we do not even know his name. He doesn’t have a name. He only has a title: Pharaoh. Like all the dictators, Pharaoh is obsessed by order. This is the reason for the plagues: With the plagues, God destroyed the order of nature and shows to Pharaoh that he is only a human being, not a universal ruler.

In the account of Creation, in Genesis, God separated the water from the land. With the plagues, God turned the water into blood, mixed two elements that, in nature, are separated. The fish and creatures that live in the sea’s depth do not have much blood in their veins, but creatures that live on land have blood. God created light in the beginning and towards the end of the series of plagues, God causes three days of darkness over Egypt, so thick that no one can move, and Creation comes almost under paralysis. The highest point of Creation is the creation of the human being. The harshest of the plagues is the death of the Egyptians’ firstborn. This is the rationale of the plagues: to prove that the ultimate source of power, and of morality, is God and not human kings and sovereigns, however powerful they are.

You know these folks who wear kitschy Viking customs and wave the flag of racialist utopias..?. Those Fascists and racists that plan a coup against American democracy? They hate many minorities: LGBT, Afro American (and Black in general), Travellers, Asian, Latinos, Italians… But in their hell, in their gallery of enemies, we Jews have a special place.

Have you ever wondered why? I did. And I think the answer is here.
We Jews, with our existence, with our faith, are the enduring proof that power is not everything. We prove that power can be resisted, whether the power of the Roman Empire or the Soviet Empire or of Arab autocrats. These enemies, in the end, fell. We still exist. And we do not worship power; we worship God. Perhaps not always and not properly as we should, but we Jews are aware that the source of power and morality is not, and cannot be a human being.

I don’t know what’s happening in America these days. Nobody knows. Hopefully, the police are arresting these Nazis, one after the other, catching them in their homes, the way they did with Islamists after 9/11. I hope so. My great fear is that White supremacist and Far-Right extremists may have supporters in the American police and in the American armed forces. As an Italian citizen, I know how deeply this kind of ideology can penetrate the police forces. Let’s hope America is different.

But I refuse to be intimidated by the Fascists, the Nazis, the QAnon, the conspiracy theorists and similar extremists. On the contrary, I continue to be Jewish, to study and teach the Jewish tradition, and to live according to the Jewish faith. We all must refuse to be intimidated by Pharaoh and by his thugs for one simple reason: because we are all Jews and our God knows better than any human ruler.

Brighton & Hove Reform Synagogue, 16 January 2021–3 Shevat 5781 Parashat Vaeyra