The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
August 24, 2008
Vol. 11 no. 33

Everything But...
           You would think that getting through Genesis means that you are home free. Genesis, of course, is merely the beginning of the story we keep living and a lot of it is spent away from home, way down in Egypt land for this episode. Things change and after such success there came a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph.
           An odd phrase - do you have to know someone not to enslave him or her? Perhaps that is what it takes, to not know anything about someone else and then transform him into a stranger, a foreigner, and inevitably into an enemy. Add a proud and different or even strange religion into the mix and it gets quite ugly. Does any of this sound familiar and contemporary? Are we the new Egypt? Who does Pharaoh know?
           It’s funny how oppressed people always seem to have fun fooling around with the Oppressor. You play along, act subservient and not too smart, then zing him for what you want, and he seldom seems to know the difference. Moses’ mother and sister play a sophisticated version of the game, filling a basket full of the baby Moses, sending it strategically up the river into the midst of the Pharaoh’s daughter’s party, and sure enough she wants to adopt the cute one. His sister is standing innocently by and happens to know just the right nurse for the baby - his own mother.
           Funny too how the politics of the Biblical world shift and affect what happens and what we learn about God and ourselves. The central characters of the Bible - Hebrews and Jews - live roughly half the time as a free people, and the other half as an enslaved and occupied nation. Canadians assume freedom as a natural birthright, but not all Canadians have that early experience, including some of us here.