https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bcKfeK7iz00
And they were grieved because of the children of Israel. And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor. And they made their lives better with hard bondage in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field. All their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigor. There’s really this idea that what the Pharaoh is doing is reducing, wants to reduce Israel to potential for Egypt, basically. And you’ll see it later when he wants to get rid of the men, he just wants women. And so in this image, it repeats even the story of Abraham, how the Pharaoh wants to take his wife. It’s about taking the potential of another people and try to subjugate it to yourself. So it’s a reflection of instrumental usage. That’s right. And so you can see that in people’s proclivity to use one another interpersonally, because when you’re talking to someone, you can decide a priori what you want from them. And then you can bend your words and your interactions so that you exploit what they have to offer for your purposes. Or you can engage in honest dialogue where the purpose is mutual enrichment, and that, what would you call it, instrumental end doesn’t dominate. Yeah. And you can experience it, like at least the mystical fathers, they talk about Egypt also as representing your own passions. That is, you become a slave to something, and then you become an instrument of that thing. Right. So it’s like, I don’t know, anything that you have that you’d like to eat. And then you’re there. And at first, when eating knows you, like when your passion knows you, then you’re fine. It’s in the right order. Things are in the right order. But when your passion or desires or whatever behavior you have forgets you, then you become an instrument of it. Like think of a drug addict, where everything they do serves this tyrant. And so all their potential gets, you get reduced to a potential for behavior. And that can be seen politically too. And so that’s for a subordinate deity in some sense. That might be your stomach or your lust. And so that’s very interesting too, because the word Israel means we who struggle with God. And so what that would mean psychologically is that the, that which should be at the highest place, which is the part of you that’s struggling with the highest is then subordinated instrumentally to something that should be lower in the ethical hierarchy. And that could be your own inner tyranny. And it could be someone else’s instrumental will or some state’s instrumental will. And that’s portrayed as fundamentally inappropriate in this text. And you’ll see, and it’s imaged as this idea of making bricks, you know, and that’s a reference to Babel as well. It’s like this idea of wanting to be higher than God or wanting to replace God. And so we make civilization. That’s what bricks are. We make civilization and then we think that civilization replaces the highest ideal. I don’t know if Dennis would agree with this, but I know some rabbis believe that Israel was judged when they were divided because Solomon was becoming almost a second pharaoh with a corvée of the people and forced labor and so on. And he was bringing a kind of slavery in at the end and getting too much. Israel is called to be an anti-Egypt. Constantly. Becoming too much. For your interest, there are two tyrannies. This is the overriding theme, I believe, of the whole Torah. External tyranny to pharaohs, internal tyranny to your lusts, etc., to yourself. And the Torah actually has a law, which many Jews still observe, where you count every day between Passover and Pentecost, Shavuot. Shavuot is the seven weeks after. You do this for seven weeks. Every day you actually count with a blessing using God’s name. This is the seventh day of the 49 days and so on. Why? You can’t have freedom from pharaoh if you don’t have freedom from you. So Sinai is the second freedom. Now you have to be liberated from external tyranny and now the liberation from internal tyranny is the Ten Commandments.