When the Israelites arrived in Egypt, Pharaoh welcomed them with open arms – much like we welcomed our new democracy. For a generation it all seemed wonderful.
But, the Israelites looked up and realised Pharaoh's son wasn't the man his father was; and they had become slaves. So too South Africans have realised that Pharaoh Zuma isn't the man Nelson Mandela was.
From being led by a generation of gentleman leaders into our own "land of milk and honey" as equals in a democracy in 1994, just over 20 years later we discovered we are now virtual slaves to an out-of-touch elite who have fostered a kleptocracy. They might as well be Pharaohs bathing in milk, oblivious to the suffering of the ordinary South African, living large while their own people starve. I'd call us slaves but with unemployment scandalously high at 25.5% you can only describe people without a job – or any prospects – as despondent, dejected. And betrayed.
It’s painfully ironic that last week's disastrous midnight Cabinet reshuffle came in the week of the first anniversary of Zuma being found to have “failed to uphold, defend and respect the Constitution” by South Africa's highest court
After last week's firing of the respected finance minister Pravin Gordhan – in which South Africa's banks had R86bn shaved off their share prices and the currency lost 11% – the country stands on the precipice of ratings agencies downgrading government bonds to junk status. When Zuma fired Gordhan's predecessor (and successor given Gordhan held the post before him), Nhlanhla Nene in December 2015, #NeneGate left the country R169bn poorer on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and lost 10% in currency exchange.
It’s painfully ironic that last week's disastrous midnight Cabinet reshuffle came in the week of the first anniversary of Zuma being found to have “failed to uphold, defend and respect the Constitution” by South Africa's highest court for the R250m spent on his own rural home, Nkandla.
Coinciding with Easter, Pesach -– or the festival of Passover -– celebrates how the Jews were delivered from slavery in a universal story of emancipation and freedom from cruel and unjust rule. It is analogous to the way we obtained our democratic freedom from Apartheid. Even more so, the parallels with today's political climate are striking, especially given the way our leadership has hardened their hearts.
The tragedy is that our leaders, quite simply, have forgotten where they come from. They have forgotten their people. They have forgotten us.
Similarly, once welcomed into Egypt, the Jews had become slaves under a nasty, self-serving leader who forgot the symbiosis fostered by his father. This new Pharaoh was the John Vorster of his day, the blue-eyed Afrikaaner nationalist and right winger who promulgated Apartheid.
Like so many other power struggles, and like the mining industry on which South Africa was built, it was a tale of cheap labour. Despite numerous attempts at a negotiated settlement (let's call that the ten plagues), it resulted in an armed struggle (the Angel of Death, who killed the first born of all Egyptian families, but "passed over" the houses of the Israelites). This finally inspired the now-grieving Pharaoh to heed the call of Moses, the Nelson Mandela of his era, to "let my people go".
Higher laws
Growing up I loved stories from the Bible. I thought they were all true. I still do. They taught me my morality. Judaism, as explained to me by my father, imbued me with the value system I live by. My moral universe is defined by how my father explained what it meant to be a mensch (a good person). How to live in a country with unjust laws (Apartheid) but to live according to higher laws (the tenants of humanity, as described in the Torah).
If I learnt anything from biblical stories, it's that religion requires sacrifices – not least an enormous vacuum in critical thinking
And yet, it's hard to reconcile this scientific world we live in with stories of an almighty deity, who is mostly benevolent but bizarrely cruel towards his own dedicated followers.
I never understood, as a kid, why bad things happen to good people. I never understood why the Jews, so often called G_d's "chosen people" in our internal propaganda, were always the ones being beaten up. I never understood what "test of faith" truly meant, even if I knew what the words stood for.
The times are much changed since those days as slaves in the desert. We live in a vastly more educated age with infinitely more complex moral dilemmas.
Explanations of religious belief have tried to keep pace but they still hark back to a "blind faith" argument. If I learnt anything from biblical stories, it's that religion requires sacrifices – not least an enormous vacuum in critical thinking.
The way I've managed to reconcile the problem – which occurred to me during my intellectual coming of age as a teenager – is to separate "religious belief" from "organised religion".
Any organisation is fundamentally focused on its own organisation. You only have to look at how communism collapsed once it lost its core; or the tragic state of teacher unions in South African schools where organisation has trumped education.
The history of organised religion, to perhaps oversimplify it, is a terrible tale of empire building. But it is true of all organised mythologies or belief systems, of which religion is just the oldest. The dark side of human nature has this remarkable tendency to assert itself. Evil, power-hungry people use whatever mechanisms of the day to achieve their goals, to feed their greed, to make their fortunes.
More evil has been done in the name of good than any other cause. The crusades are the most often cited example of religious fervour gone wrong, but we have enough painful examples in modern times. The price is always human suffering. The children, tragically, always starve first.
Children of the Freedom Charter
The greatest religion – which is really another word for belief system – in the world right now is politics. Organised religion evolved into being a controlling mechanism, as much as providing spiritual belief. Stripped of the latter, all we have is the organising principle. Millions of people who live in near starvation around the world, or the victims of the Lord’s Resistance Army, or are refugees fleeing conflict, have little faith in the organising principles that govern the world. Why should they? Their faith is being tested, not by a god, but by power-hungry war-mongers. Their purpose is not to instil in us a purer spiritual belief, it's to dig up diamonds in Zimbabwe or metals in the Congo or rape mines like Aurora in South Africa while the workers starve.
Politics, as we can see from the current implosion of credible leadership in African National Congress (ANC), requires a disproportionate amount of blind faith and personal sacrifice. The country's ruling party is no longer Mandela's party, with a benign, beloved leader. Instead it is run by Zuma, a man found by the Constitutional Court to have breached his oath of office for not upholding the Constitution; and whom another court has found should be charged with 783 counts of fraud and corruption – charges which were dropped paving the way for him to become president in 2009. Last year a judge found the dropping of the charges was “inexplicable” and “irrational” and ordered they be reinstated, which they have still not been by the Zuma-appointed head of prosecutions.
The painful difference is that this post-apartheid government -– the children of the Freedom Charter -– are more interested in self-enrichment, personal advancement and as long a time at the trough as they can get. The organisation -– the party -– has become more important than the reason it was formed. The struggle (for freedom) has been replaced by greed, power-mongering and personal glory.
It's hard to believe men who fought against apartheid for freedom, now defend R1-million cars (two of them) as their ministerial right when the Aids orphans will go hungry during the Easter weekend of abundant food on middle-class tables. There's already an uncharacteristic chill in the April air, like there was before the long dark winter before the ANC conference in December 2007 where Zuma became the leader of Africa's oldest liberation movement. There was justifiable fear for the horrors of what country we will have afterwards now that freedom fighters have turned to greedy gluttons.
Painful parallel
There is a painful parallel between today's political Pharaohs, who once welcomed Abraham's people, who now need a new Moses to save South Africa from the strange, inexplicable slavery we find ourselves in today.
No wonder we all have such a hankering for a man like Chris Hani, a natural leader I heard speak in person only once but would've followed into any battle. Given the anaemic leadership of the ANC today, it's no wonder so many people ask what would've happened had he been Thabo Mbeki's deputy. There used to be not-so-silent cries for Cyril Ramaphosa to return from his self-exile and be a leader of which the country can be proud of. Now the country's vice president, his past few years in government have revealed him as spineless in his silence over all of Zuma's outrageous self-serving, self-enriching, Constitutionally-confounding behaviour.
To use that beautiful African metaphor: we are the grass that needs to be saved from the fighting elephants who have forgotten, not only that we elected them, but what they were elected to do.
Faith
I would not describe myself as a religious person. But I do have a deep-seated sense of faith.
My faith is in humanity. People are inherently good. I truly believe it. Even if the converse so often proves this theory. People do bad things to each other, to be sure, and are selfish, self-serving, vicious, destructive and sometimes just plain evil.
But history shows us we can always triumph over evil. My forebears walked out of slavery in Egypt, and the hell of the holocaust. South Africa survived apartheid. Anything is possible.
I'd say sometimes faith needs to be blind, but that's the problem. It's been too blind throughout history. Sometimes, most times, we need to be critical. We need to think about the problems that confront us. We need to see things as they are, not as our belief system has taught us they appear.
And that's the problem with organised belief systems, whether they are society-wide or just our personal ones. When they break, or can't adjust to new stimuli, new events or even challenges, we fall back to a blind faith. We believe in the organisation, not the original meaning. This is so painfully true of the ANC, once a respected movement that brought Apartheid to a close and has itself been brought to its knees by Zuma's kleptocracy.
Long walk to freedom
I've always loved the phrase "Red Sea Pedestrian". It typifies the Jewish humour, the resilience (we have been the victims of most major putsches power struggles for the last six millennia) and the strange tenacity of my people. Although I'm not religious, I'm proud of my heritage. I know I'm as culturally Jewish as they come. I love the abundance of my people. The Yiddishkeit ability to find good in the bad.
I have little faith that the leaders will remember their original purpose. Or that there will be some kind of divine intervention. I just know that we've survived many deserts before
On these strange Holy Days like Pesach that we tell ourselves, and our children, about the evil times and how we survived them. How good can overcome evil. How abundance can triumph over the scarcity created by our rulers scarcity - if that's what you can call mythological manna from heaven over constipation-inducing matzoh on a 40-year trek through a desert. It would come to define Judaism as much as all the other tyrants and iniquities we survived.
This month as I will reenact this journey for the children in my life, like my parents reenacted it for me and my siblings, I'm painfully conscious of the strange, repetitious nature of history. It's cruelty personified that history -– no matter what we achieve as humanity -– still repeats itself.
But it's also it's an example to us is of the tenacity of the human condition.
I don't know how I will reach the other side of the desert -– both personally and politically. I have little faith that the leaders will remember their original purpose. Or that there will be some kind of divine intervention. I just know that we've survived many deserts before. That we walked out of those concentration camps. That we can survive anything this world, or our delinquent leaders, throw at us.
Because we have our humanity. We have our humanity.
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