“They set over them taskmasters, to afflict them with their burdens; and they built for Pharaoh treasure cities: Pithom and Raamses ... And the Egyptians worked the children of Israel with harshness.” (Exodus 1:11,13)
The Hebrew word used for ‘harshness’ – at the end of these verses, from the start of the book of Exodus, which we read this week – describing the manner in which the Egyptians drove the Israelites in labor, comes from a very ancient root, in some forms and senses archaic already in the time of our scriptures’ origins. The word is perekh – which, etymologically, has to do with breaking apart, with fracture.
Especially when forced and unloving labor is in the picture, but at other times as well, so much of the construction we undertake as human beings seems to have something of that root of harshness to it. Hewing, chopping, drilling, hammering – just think about the noise of most present-day construction sites – loudly hacking against the grain and the relative quiet and harmony of the natural world.
“From the beginning of the world,” says one classical rabbinic teaching, “the Blessed Holy One desired to form a partnership with those who dwell below.” (Genesis Rabbah 3:11)
Rabbinic tradition urges us to see ourselves as involved in the process of creating our world – an actuality that is quite evident in our own times. But today, the results of all our harsh construction, as they play out in our environment, are waking us to the urgent question of whether we can take up the work of world-making with less breaking, less fracture.
Can we build with love and care, and without breaking ourselves and our works apart so harshly from the rest of the world and the ways in which it comes into being?
It seems we need to recognize that our buildings, our roads, our farms, our laboratories, our factories, and their products, are not merely contrivances for surviving and making our way through an often challenging world, which we often seem to think exists apart from us. Rather, these creations of ours are themselves part of the world – just as oceans and forests and ravines and savannahs are parts. If the works of our hands are often much less elegant, and if our creations hack destructively against their surroundings, rather than harmonizing sustainably and constructively with them, a rabbinic assessment of the situation may suggest this is because we have not yet achieved what we must in fathoming and carrying forward a Torah – a teaching, a wisdom – of world-making.
The essential message of our Jewish legacy of covenant, for our times, may be: that we human beings are answerable for the state of our world to the extent that we shape it – societally, and physically. That message calls for ways that are different from the Pharaonic paradigm, so to speak, of harshness and of breaking.
We can wreak havoc to such an extent that we may seem to drive the very presence of the Divine out of our world. On the other hand, we are capable of doing our part on this earth with such beautiful and redeeming creativity that the places we shape may be manifestations of world-making wonder, and may even approach being shining habitations of divine glory.
We sorely need a spiritual sensibility in which our own hands figure as significant in the scheme of world-making. We know today that the current chapter in the story of our world truly is in our hands. That awareness is very much like the alertness of mind and the sense of sacred imperative that our Torah and our tradition have tried, for centuries upon centuries, to teach us.