Seeds of Change

In only six verses in this week’s Torah portion (Exodus 1:7-12), the Israelites go from honored VIP family to enslaved people. Of course, those verses cover some elliptical number of years and culture shift. They leave unsaid so much about this shift. How did this happen? Did it take decades or only months? Why was the new Pharaoh so suspicious of the Israelites? Did anyone resist? Did they notice it happening gradually or did it happen all at once? How did the Israelites feel during this transition from the top to the bottom of society? What did they think of this dramatic change in their lives and their place in the world in which they lived?

The experience of the Israelites becoming enslaved and becoming free again makes me wonder about the mechanisms of change. The story is not only a Jewish story but a story of the changes in the whole society of ancient Egypt at the time. I’m thinking a lot this week about change. Quick change and slow change. Easy change and hard change.

Ron Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky teach about what they call “adaptive leadership” – that is, leadership in a time when there are no clear answers and the whole status quo might need to change, instead of just one small tweak. In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, they write:

“There is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the organization needs to change because it is broken. The reality is that any social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way. In that sense, on the whole, on balance, the system is working fine, even though it may appear to be ‘dysfunctional’ in some respects to some members and outside observers, and even though it faces danger just over the horizon.”

In other words, the way things are works for someone. In fact, it works for enough people. It might not be the best version of how to do things, but it works for those with the most power or investment.

Family therapist Assael Romanelli taught a fellowship group I was in that you can think of the status quo, of the homeostasis the system is in, as a sort of dance. We’re all holding hands and doing the steps in a circle. There are two kinds of change in family systems therapy: first order change and second order change. In first order change, maybe we do the steps a little differently –- we kick higher, we put a hand into the circle instead of out of the circle. In second order change, we do a whole new dance. We let go of the hands. It’s hard to do this kind of change because our roles depend on each other; if I stop dancing this circle dance, everyone else is going to crash into me. Everyone else also needs to change if I change. That’s why, as Assael puts it, “There’s no applause for second order change.” People don’t generally appreciate being forced to change their dance.

In fact, we might have to try numerous times to change our own role and thereby change the status quo, because the status quo keeps trying to pull us back into the original dance. When we change a whole system and want that change to stick, we need to take actions to guard against returning to the previous homeostasis. 

Although the enslavement of the Israelites is conveyed in only six verses, those verses hold years of societal transformation. Pharaoh decides to increase hardships on the Israelites during their enslavement. In this lens, I would say these are his efforts at making the slavery “stick,” to further degrade the Israelites until there’s no possibility of their freedom – to make the change permanent. There is even a midrash that says that the reason Pharaoh decreed that the Israelites would not only have to make the bricks, but also to gather (kosh’shim) the straw for the bricks (Exodus 5:7), was so that they wouldn’t have free time to read the scrolls of creation that reminded them of God’s redemption. Pharaoh wanted to remove the Israelites’ hope of ever changing the status quo.

In the other direction, once the Israelites have escaped slavery in Egypt and received Revelation from God at Mount Sinai, a striking incident occurs. A man is caught gathering (mi’koshesh) sticks on Shabbat (Numbers 15:32-36). Moses doesn’t know what to do, and God says the stick gatherer should be put to death. Later Talmudic comments on this incident explain that this wasn’t meant to be a rule that set precedent, but rather the case warranted a one-time, unique judgment. It was so important to keep the Israelites from working on Shabbat that a one-time enforcement rule had to be created. I see this, too, in light of first order and second order change, as a time when special action needed to be taken to prevent slipping back into the old dance. (Note: I’m not advocating that the death penalty be used as a tool of change…) If one person starts collecting sticks on Shabbat, everyone else will feel they have to as well or they will miss out on all the sticks. If one person checks their work email on Shabbat, everyone else will feel that have to or they will fall behind. We’re trying to be free people, but there are seeds there of slavery if we aren’t careful – we might start collecting sticks every waking moment.

A final thought on change: It seemed like once the Israelites were enslaved, they would never be free. But within their slavery were the seeds of their freedom. Within any status quo are the seeds for its opposite. Within any status quo are those for whom it works, and those for whom it doesn’t. This is why in our societies there’s a feeling of a pendulum swinging, of a shift and its backlash and a new shift again. The great scholar of societal interconnectedness Robert Putnam, in his recent book The Upswing, describes trends of social cohesion – which he traces through political pluralism, relative income parity, a sense of interdependence and mutual obligation. He finds that there was a 60-70 year upswing in social cohesion peaking in around 1970, and since then, a downswing of almost equal length. As we shift next week into a new presidential administration in the U.S. and a Federal election season in Canada, I’m thinking about that pendulum swing and the seeds within it. Even at times when it might seem to us that society is hurtling toward a new status quo that frightens us, we need to nurture those seeds that will help swing us back from the brink.

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