Maidenhead Synagogue, 23 January 2026 – Sh’vat 5786 – Parashat Bo (Book of Exodus)
Today, I have allowed myself to be more political than usual. I do so because I believe that what is happening in our Western democracies is not a partisan issue but a profound political one: a shift in the way international relations are conducted and an erosion of liberal democracy, an erosion of the values we once held dear to our hearts. We live now in the era of fake news and post-truth, where reality itself becomes negotiable. Trump is only a symptom, even though a dangerous one, that reveals something deeper in this shift. But curing the symptom is the first step toward healing. And I believe our Torah portion is actually a political manifesto about how to resist political bullies and tyrants.
This week in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before the World Economic Forum and named what many had been too diplomatic to say aloud. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” he declared. “Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, and financial infrastructure as coercion.” He advocates for a middle powers’ alliance.
The American response came swiftly. “Canada lives because of the United States,” President Trump warned. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” On Greenland, the message to NATO allies was equally blunt: you can agree to American demands, “and we’ll be very appreciative. Or you can say, ‘No,’ and we will remember.”
This is the voice of Pharaoh, reaching across millennia.
What makes Pharaoh recognisable is his method. In Parashat Bo, something shifts. Pharaoh’s stubbornness is no longer explained only as his own act but as something that God makes “heavy.” The tyrant has passed a point of no return; his capacity for moral reasoning has been diluted through disuse. Three features define his rule, each with contemporary resonance.
First, the manufacture of crisis. Pharaoh’s enslavement begins with a fabricated emergency: “Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase” (Exodus 1:9–10). There is no evidence of Israelite disloyalty, only the spectre of threat engineered by Pharaoh himself. Modern autocrats follow the same playbook: migrants at the border, enemies within, and civilisational collapse always imminent. The crisis justifies the crackdown.
Second, the exhaustion of the people’s capacity to organise. When Moses and Aaron first approach Pharaoh, his response is not to negotiate but to intensify the burden: “Let the labour fall heavy upon the men, that they may attend to it and not attend to false words” (Exodus 5:9). The strategy is precise: make the people so consumed by survival that they cannot listen to their own leaders. It works. After the crushing of their hopes, the Israelites “did not listen to Moses because of shortness of spirit and hard labour” (Exodus 6:9). Tyranny need not abolish leadership; it need only ensure the people are too exhausted, too demoralised, and too fragmented to follow.
However, exhaustion as a strategy carries inherent risk for the tyrant. When the burden becomes unbearable, it can catalyse precisely the solidarity it was designed to prevent. The murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis earlier this month by the US immigration police ICE illustrates this inversion: rather than fragmenting resistance, the act generated mass demonstrations. Pharaoh’s own weapon turned against him.
Third, the use of unpredictability. Pharaoh promises release, then retracts (Exodus 8:28–32, 9:27–35, 10:8–11). This approach is also an old strategy. People who cannot predict the ruler’s behaviour remain perpetually off-balance. The question facing America’s allies, “Does appeasing President Trump buy security, or does it only invite further demands?”, is precisely the question the Israelites faced.
Having identified Pharaoh’s three mechanisms, manufactured crisis, exhaustion, and unpredictability, we can now examine how the Torah constructs specific countermeasures to each. The resistance is not incidental to the narrative; it is embedded in the commandments that flow from it.
The first counter-strategy addresses Pharaoh’s manufactured crisis directly. Against the tyrant’s false narrative that the Israelites posed a threat, the Torah commands perpetual counter-narration: memory as a political act. The commandment to remember the Exodus appears some thirty-six times in the Torah. But these remembrances have a dual character. Some command us to remember liberation: “Remember this day, on which you went free from Egypt” (Exodus 13:3). Others command us to remember subjugation: “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt” (Deuteronomy 5:15, 15:15, 16:12, 24:18, 24:22).
This is essential. To remember slavery is to preserve identification with the vulnerable. The thirty-six remembrances correspond to the thirty-six commandments regarding justice toward the stranger, orphan, and widow. Memory of our degradation becomes the foundation for ethical obligation toward those now degraded.
Here lies Torah’s most potent resistance: the refusal to collaborate in the oppression of others. Pharaonic politics requires a population willing to accept that those people deserve their suffering. The Israelite who remembers bondage cannot be so easily conscripted. “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9).
The second counter-strategy addresses Pharaoh’s unpredictability. When people cannot predict the ruler’s behaviour, they default to passive compliance—performing loyalty they do not feel. Torah’s response is counter-formation through ritual. Carney invoked Václav Havel’s essay, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978). Havel asked how the communist system sustained itself, and his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He does not believe it. No one does. But he places it anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, and to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists. Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this “living within a lie.” “The system’s power comes not from its truth but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true,” Canadian PM Carney declared. The seder functions similarly: an annual practice of refusing to accept “this is simply how things are.” A people trained in questioning authority are harder to subjugate.
The third counter-strategy addresses Pharaoh’s atomisation of the populace. Against the exhaustion that isolates individuals into private survival, Torah mandates collective departure. Solidarity and community serve as structural resistance. The Israelites leave Egypt as a community—not because logistics required it, but because tyranny cannot be escaped alone. “Middle powers must act together,” Carney argued, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” There is no private salvation from Pharaoh. Trump has succeeded in one point: the Europeans are more united than ever, and even the United Kingdom, once a “special” ally of the US, is now speaking out against a bully.
Let me draw the threads together. Pharaoh’s tyranny operates through three mechanisms: manufactured crisis to justify oppression, exhaustion to prevent organisation, and unpredictability to enforce compliance. Torah counters each in turn: memory as counter-narrative, exposing the lie at the heart of the tyrant’s emergency; ritual as counter-formation, training a people to question rather than comply; and community as structural resistance, ensuring that no one faces power alone.
This is not merely ancient history. It is a standing instruction. In every generation, Pharaoh rises not as a metaphor, but as a method. The mechanisms remain constant; only the names change. And in every generation, we face the same choice: whether to remember or forget, whether to stand alone or together, whether to extend to today’s strangers the solidarity we wished someone had extended to us.
Shabbat Shalom.