Topic: A dialogue on Exodus and slavery – Christian News 30 April    2023 – Faithwheel.com

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A dialogue on Exodus and slavery

Rowan Williams, Irene Lancaster  30 April 2023 | 8:36 AM

Lord Williams of Oystermouth, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Dr Irene Lancaster, chair of Broughton Park Jewish Christian Dialogue Group, discuss the relationship between the book of Exodus and campaigns to end slavery.

Irene: Rowan, I hope you had a good Easter. As you know we have just finished Pesach and are starting to count the Omer towards Shavuot. During this period we commemorate the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron and Yom Atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, which took place this year on 26 April and saw Israel turn 75.

This year also coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which started on Pesach, 19 April 19, a heroic act of defiance by people who had never fought in their lives, including we think, my own grandmother, called Regina, after whom I’m named. We think that she was then transported with many others to Treblinka and exterminated.

It is not for nothing that the day when Jews worldwide commemorate their first Exodus from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land has meant so much to other peoples around the world who have been the victims of slavery. And some still are.

I remember when many years ago I acted as interpreter for refugees from Rwanda, hearing their stories in Manchester town centre. Inevitably this would be on a Friday, and when I told them I had to leave because Shabbat was coming in and I had to get home, their eyes would widen in wonder; their English would improve; and they would tell me how much the Exodus story meant to them, who had endured unspeakable atrocities in their home country. Their attitude to Jews was one of huge respect and admiration. And all of them wanted to visit Israel one day!

The link between Exodus, slavery and the Shoah came to a head for many of us in recent weeks, with the hearing in Parliament on the hybridity of a Bill going forward in Parliament, which if passed, would lead to the imposition of a brutalist monument in Victoria Tower Gardens, which would overshadow the beautiful Buxton Memorial, graceful, elegant, and harmonizing with the small park, which the Government in its wisdom has called the ‘Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre’, when it is anything but.

The Buxton Memorial is there to honour the person and family of someone who did more than most to bring in the 1833 law to abolish the slave trade. And this was at a time when the American greats, the big founding fathers, were indisputably in favour of the practice – one reason they went to war with England, according to the most recent historians!

You and I have written many joint letters on the subject of the proposed Holocaust memorial, explaining why the whole concept is flawed – given the indisputable rise in antisemitism since the construction of around 300 Holocaust memorials from the 1970s and 80s.

We need resources spent on high quality educational programmes about Jewish identity and integrity rather than ambitious prestige projects. And yet the detailed case that has been set out to Government by so many experts – and Holocaust survivors – has not been acknowledged or seriously engaged with. To me, at least, this whole saga reminds me of how Jews are both disregarded and taken advantage of at one and the same time. Even when Holocaust survivors speak out against the proposition, they are simply ignored.

This happened yet again a few weeks ago when they were told in Westminster by government lawyers that they were ‘irrelevant’ to the discussion. Doesn’t this strike you as tragic? How can Jewish interest and expertise on the subject be irrelevant to the fact of a Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre which everyone knows will simply make things worse for Jews on the ground and turn this country into a pariah.

Rowan: As you know, I very much share your concerns here. The project seem to me another example of the dominance of what I’ve called ‘cosmetic’ politics, a focus on gestures and slogans that don’t cost anything. I worry too about the way in which some people seem to want to make it a kind of celebration of the UK Parliament’s support for Jews in the 1930s, when the truth is rather less flattering to us.

And the overriding of local concern and local needs is, as you’ve often said, not exactly in tune with Jewish ethics. It isn’t clear that anyone here has done the necessary work of assessing the real effectiveness of various styles of Holocaust education. And part of that is surely education in the contribution of Jewish faith and practice to the whole history of emancipation in its widest sense.

Irene: As we know, slavery is discussed in Exodus chapters 20 and 21 of the Hebrew Bible. Crossing the Reed Sea is not the hardest part. The hardest part is to leave Egypt in a terrible hurry, and once on the other side, spend 40 years in the Wilderness, unlearning slavish habits. Moses is of course the role model in all of this, but even he can’t do it on his own, which is why his father-in-law, Jethro, advises him to learn how to delegate. Jethro has a chapter devoted to him in Exodus 18:1-20:23 (Yitro). And later on, Moses’ successor, Joshua, has learned so much from Moses that, on actually entering the Promised Land of Israel, he knows very well how to delegate.

However, it has always struck me that there is a difference between servitude and service. These words have the same root in Hebrew and have sometimes been confused. I wonder if you have anything to say about your own view on servitude and service. And is there anyone in the life of this country who you feel understood the reality of slavery as rooted in the Hebrew Bible before you came on the scene?

Rowan: The distinction is crucial, isn’t it? Service is something that is undertaken by a person’s free choice; servitude is imposed by the will of another. Our Prayer Book describes God as the one ‘whose service is perfect freedom’ – the free decision to obey God is the highest form of liberty because it represents our liberation from the slavery of self – service. To grow towards that kind of liberation is not possible if you are still literally enslaved to the will of other humans.

Your comments reminded me of the fourth century Christian writer, Gregory of Nyssa, who wrote a long commentary on the life of Moses (very much influenced by the work of the Jewish philosopher Philo), in which he has quite a bit to say about the persistence of ‘slavish habits’, and the longing to go back to what might seem a more secure environment where you’re less responsible for your decisions. What you’re talking about in terms of service is of course the exercise of true responsibility.

Interesting that you should ask about people who had made some of these connections in the past. One of my heroes is a predecessor as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, in the late eighteenth century, the Rev Peter Peckard.

He was a consistent advocate of religious liberty (he opposed the restriction of admissions to the university to Anglican Christians) and wrote some fierce pamphlets against the antisemitic riots that occurred in London in the 1750s.

Then when he was at Cambridge and became Vice-Chancellor of the university he encouraged anti-slavery campaigners in all sorts of ways. He is believed to have composed the famous inscription used by the anti-slavery movement in their publications – the image of an enslaved man holding out his hand with the words, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’

When I was at Magdalene, we set up an annual ‘Peckard Prize’ for an essay on modern forms of slavery. He was very clearly someone who saw the vital connection between inhumanity to Jews and inhumanity to others, and whose ethics were shaped by awareness of the Jewish legacy.

Irene: The whole point of commemorating the lives of Holocaust survivors, especially in Israel, is that now they have a home to which they can go to and be cherished.

Although Holocaust survivor numbers are dwindling, the average age of survivors in Israel is 85, with quite a few hundreds aged 100. The influx from Ukraine in the last year has added to their number, and there are therefore nearly 150,000 still living in Israel, which is a tremendous achievement. Incidentally, most of them live in Haifa, where there are a number of excellent old age homes.

As I come from a survivor family myself, and actually had an uncle on my mother’s side who survived Auschwitz and was barred from entry to the UK, I know what it is like to be treated as a second-class citizen in diaspora. That is why the same Book of Exodus speaks at length about how we treat not only our family, friends, immediate community and the like-minded. We also have an obligation to treat with equity the resident who is not one of us, and this injunction is specifically related to our millennia-old experience of being strangers in a strange land.

Not only did Moses, in the same book of Yitro (Exodus 18:3), name his son ‘Gershon’, because ‘I was a stranger in a strange land’, thus embedding the Jewish psyche down the ages with the feeling of empathy, but between 1975-7, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, unadmired in the West, was the first world leader to rescue the Vietnamese Boat People, who became welcome Israeli citizens. After that, in 1979, Begin signed a peace treaty with Egypt which was nothing less than a miracle.

In a way that brings us full circle. Who would have thought that the very same small group of slaves, the Jews, who escaped Egypt with G-d’s help in around 1440 BCE would, in 1979, sign a treaty with the very same country from which they had fled so many years earlier.

I would like to offer you the final word on the idea of the proposed Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, which won’t be about the Jewish experience at all, and which was not discussed at all with the jury panel of which I was a member.

It is bizarre that the government should choose to impose a Holocaust memorial in honour of a people who are still so much at risk in this country (as elsewhere in the West) rather than work for real understanding of their contribution – and to do so by overshadowing a monument commemorating the ending of the slave trade in 1833, an achievement this country should be proud of in my view.

The risk of increasing antisemitism on the ground is very real to many of us. I am sure that readers will be very interested to hear your views on this and what if anything, we can do about it, even at this 11th hour. We owe it to the original Book of Exodus, if nothing else.

Rowan: Fortunately there is quite a bit going on in and out of Parliament, but it is essential for concerned individuals to contact MPs and to explain that opposition to this project is nothing to do with any indifference to the horrors of the Shoah – quite the contrary. The issue is what kind of commemoration is appropriate and effective. And, as we’ve said, part of all this entails recognizing and exploring the ways in which the Exodus narrative has again and again come alive for enslaved and oppressed people worldwide – one of the most profound and long-lasting gifts of Judaism to the human world.

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