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75  thirteen Making Noise for Social Change Parashat Shemot (Exodus 1:1–6:1) Elliot Kukla I was raised in a culturally Jewish family that practiced Buddhism. When I was a small child we lived in Hawaii, and my family was involved with a Tibetan Buddhist temple housed in a beautiful wooden building painted orange, red, gold, and green. It was located in the midst of a lush rain forest, ringed by a rolling lawn that had been carved out of the trees. Inside the temple there was a dimly lit, barefooted, hushed atmosphere . An altar was filled with photographs of Tibetan monks, bowls of fragrant fruit offerings, and curling tendrils of incense. In the middle of the green lawn hung a large brass gong that was periodically rung to signal the beginning of feasts and celebrations. When I was five years old, I developed a bad habit. While the adults were inside in silent meditation, I used to sneak into the middle of the lawn and ring the gong. This happened often enough that the problem came to the attention of the Rimpoche, the spiritual leader, of the temple. He asked to speak to the small, chubby gong-ringer, and I was summoned to his room for a private chat. I was terrified. My parents dropped me off at the doorway of his chamber, and I entered trembling. I was braced to be humiliated by this religious authority figure. But when Rimpoche began speaking, he told me that gong-ringing per se was not a bad thing. He told me that he could see that I had a lot of energy, a lot of anger that could be used to change the world. The key in growing up, he told me, would be to figure out the right moments to ring the gong and when I needed to respect the silence. Even after years of rabbinical school and advanced Jewish study, this simple teaching remains one of the most influential religious lessons that I have ever received. As an adult, what I gleaned from his message is that there are times for each of us to sit in silent meditation. And then there are moments when we are called to make as much noise as possible, in order to call attention to exactly who we are and how we want our world to be. Ringing a gong at the wrong moment (like I did) is a mistake, but so is failing to sound one when the situation calls for it. Although I learned this lesson from a Buddhist teacher, Judaism has its own form of gong-ringing. We find an example in Parashat Shemot, which tells the story of the people’s crying out for liberation and change. The first verses of the portion open the second book of the Bible with a terse and action-packed account of both the 76 Elliot Kukla beginning of the Israelites’ oppression as slaves in Egypt and the seeds of their liberation . In just a few opening verses, the Israelites grow into a flourishing nation, threaten the Egyptian oligarchy, and become enslaved. This passage (Exodus 1:1–14) tells a primal tale of subjugation that has been repeated in various forms throughout history. At first the Hebrew people become a powerful minority group within the nation: “The Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased more and more, so that the land was filled with them” (Ex. 1:7). According to many of the medieval commentators on this text, including the pivotal medieval commentators Ibn Ezra and Rashbam, the nearly synonymous verbs used in this verse for fertility (“were fertile and prolific” and “they multiplied and increased”) indicate the ample abundance and hardiness of the growing Hebrew nation. The language of this verse echoes the narrative of the creation of the world in Genesis (Gen. 1:20, 28) and suggests abundant fertility—the rapid creation of a Jewish world within the world of the Egyptians. In the next verse, we learn that a new Pharaoh who does not “know” Joseph arose over Egypt. The Hebrew word yada, “to know,” is central to the Exodus narrative, and it appears more than twenty times in the following fourteen chapters. The implication here is that the new leader of Egypt does not have a personal relationship with the Hebrews and sees them as a faceless mob to be controlled. Fearing an uprising within the growing group, he begins to repress the people and keep...

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