For those whose knowledge of Canadian politics may not extend beyond Justin Trudeau’s romance with Katy Perry, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech this week at Davos was as powerful as it was unexpected. The address created quite a stir, earning a standing ovation at the conference itself and, in the days since, generating a ripple effect far beyond the heads of state, CEOs, and global elites gathered in the Alps to discuss the world’s most pressing problems. It is worth reading in full, significant not only for what Carney said, but also because – unlike most such speeches – it was reportedly written by the Prime Minister himself.
“Today,” Carney began, “I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a harsh reality.” What followed was a sober appraisal that many of our received assumptions and long-standing alliances no longer hold, and that the world, especially middle powers such as Canada, must pivot and pursue new approaches. Nostalgia, Carney warned, is not a strategy. “The middle powers must act together,” he concluded, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
I will leave questions of global realignment to the foreign-policy experts. What intrigued me most about Carney’s speech was his turn to another, very different, history-shaping text: Václav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel, who in 1993 would become the first president of the Czech Republic, wrote his essay in 1978, in Communist Czechoslovakia, while living as a dissident, under constant surveillance and hounded by the secret police.
Reflecting on his own context, Havel drew a distinction between the brutal repression of classical dictatorships and what he calls “post-totalitarian” societies. The former are sustained by mass terror or revolutionary fervor; the latter, like the world in which Havel lived, persist through quiet repression, bureaucratic control, and social exhaustion. Classical dictatorships rely on fear. Post-totalitarian systems rely on something more insidious: the participation of ordinary people who enable authoritarian conditions to endure.
The most memorable image in Havel’s essay – and the one Carney highlighted at Davos – is that of the greengrocer. Each morning, as Carney recounts Havel’s example, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window bearing the communist slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” The greengrocer doesn’t believe it. No one does. But he displays it anyway – to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists, not through violence alone, but through the daily participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel calls 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. And its fragility comes from the very same source. There is, Havel observes – and Carney echoes – a deep human tendency, among individuals and nations alike, to go along to get along: to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will purchase safety.
So what, then, is the power of the powerless? Not mass mobilization or regime change, but the quieter, and arguably more courageous, moment when the greengrocer removes the sign from his window. When the ritual of compliance is broken. When participation in “the lie” is withdrawn. In Havel’s framing, this is the moment one chooses to stop living within a lie and instead to live in truth. And it is precisely in that act of human agency – when the illusion cracks, the lie is exposed, and the regime’s fragility revealed – that the first flowerings of freedom begin to blossom.
If there is a headline for this morning’s Torah reading – and a thread that binds it to last week’s and next week’s story of Israel’s redemption – it is the plagues. Dam, tzefardea, kinim, blood, frogs, lice, and all the others – plagues inflicted by God upon Egypt, recited at every Passover seder, and immortalized in the ever-evolving Hebrew songbook. The plagues are understood as a manifestation of divine power – God’s mighty hand and outstretched arm – to break Pharaoh’s will, to compel the Egyptians to release the Israelites, and – perhaps most importantly and most often overlooked – to serve as an extended trust-building exercise between God, Moses, and Israel, culminating not only in freedom from slavery, but in the birth of a nation, delivered through the sea.
And while such a reading of our people’s liberation from Egypt is both true and necessary, it is not the full story; at best it is only half the story. Because while liberation may have come by way of God’s mighty hand, our Torah reading also enumerates a catalogue of acts of human agency. Not top-down miracles, but bottom-up human actions – small and large, public and private, collective and individual – that the Israelites performed: the taking down of signs, if you will, without which we would not be redeemed. These acts of human agency cannot be enumerated in a tidy list of ten, but they do seem to fit into three interrelated baskets that for today’s purposes I will call the internal, the external, and the generational.
First, there is the internal: the Israelites’ recognition of their inalienable freedom. In an authoritarian context, this is not just a matter of recognition but also rebellion. “This month shall mark for you the beginning of months,” our Torah reading declares (Exodus 12:2). This is the moment when the Jewish calendar is instituted – months and years, sacrifices, Sabbaths, and festivals. On one level, the commandment is about identity formation. A calendar, if nothing else, is how a person connects to their people, the rhythms and rituals of time by which we gather, remember, and mark what matters. Passover, July 4, or even Super Bowl Sunday. The calendar tells us who we are and to whom we belong
But on a deeper level, as hinted at by Rashi in his very first comment on the Torah, the codification of the calendar signals something far more profound: freedom. Slaves – and all those beholden to the power of a dominant culture – live at the whim of other people’s time. Their days are scheduled for them; their lives are measured by the demands of someone else’s clock. Only a free person can declare Shabbat a day of rest. Only a free person can choose not to pitch on Yom Kippur. Only a free people can sanctify time rather than be consumed by it. Totalitarianism comes in many forms, not only political, but cultural and technological as well. Liberating oneself from the dictates of toil, from the tyranny of manufactured consensus and algorithmic outrage is an assertion of agency and freedom – the essential ingredient that makes every human . . . human.
And emerging from the internal comes the second basket, the external. Perhaps the most famous pre-redemption ritual of all is the commandment that the Israelites take the blood of the paschal offering and put in on the doorposts of their homes. It is, as we learned in Hebrew school, where the name “Passover” comes from, the outward sign by which God would know which homes were Israelite and which Egyptian and the Israelites would be “passed over.” Appealing as the derivation is, it fails to account for the fact that God, being God, was undoubtedly – even before “Find My iPhone” – well able to distinguish between the Hebrew and the Egyptian homes. Besides, if this was just about the Israelites’ identity, then the commandment of circumcision would have sufficed. All of which is why Rashi and Ramban, among other classic commentators, well understood that the blood on the doorposts was not for God but for the Hebrews themselves: an assertion of difference and a courageous act of public resistance by which their internal identity became external and visible and the Hebrews stopped living within the lie and began living the truth.
And then there is the third basket, the generational. Not once, not twice, but three times our Torah reading telescopes beyond the present moment, reaching toward a future day, far past the horizon of the Exodus generation itself. “You shall explain to your child on that day: It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt” (Exodus 13:8). This has always struck me as such a curious commandment. The plagues are still descending, Pharaoh’s wrath is rising, and there is not even time for dough to become bread. Is this really the moment to introduce a future curricular mandate? Is now the time to worry about pedagogy? And yet, perhaps God understood just how fickle human memory can be – that if a lie is repeated enough, it begins to feel true, that facts can be bent, stories distorted, histories denied. Perhaps God anticipated a day when someone would say the Exodus never happened, or that it didn’t matter, or that its meaning was something other than what it was: a story rooted in the radical promise of human freedom.
Why are we commanded again and again to tell this story forward? Because education, especially moral education, is not merely the transmission of information. It is the formation of moral heirs. Education as an act of defiance. Truth-telling as an act of resistance. To cultivate one’s own internal freedom, yes. To assert the external expressions of that freedom, of course. But that alone does not suffice. We are commanded to assert our agency in yet another way: to become ambassadors of our values. To tell our children and our children’s children, to tell anyone who will listen, that the struggle for liberation is not a one-time event but a generational responsibility. That the fight for freedom must be renewed in every age, in every place where authoritarianism is on the rise and human dignity threatened.
That teaching – that calling – is more urgent today than it has ever been. We are living in a time of rising authoritarianism, different in form from Pharaoh’s Egypt and Havel’s Czechoslovakia, but no less real in its encroachments on fundamental freedoms: freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, and freedom under the law. We see it in the erosion of the rule of law, when citizens are pulled from their homes in violation of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. We see it when the instruments of justice are repurposed as instruments of vengeance and vendetta rather than accountability and due process. We see it in the weaponization of favor and fear, wielded not to advance the common good, but to coerce compliance and bend the will of individuals, communities, and nations.
As a Jewish community, we see it even closer to home – when voices within our own ranks are silenced out of fear that internal critique will endanger external solidarity; when we are told we must choose between defending the Jewish people and State or defending democracy, as though our moral commitments were mutually exclusive rather than mutually reinforcing. The threats come in many forms and from many directions. But the result is always the same: a slow, corrosive drift toward accommodation, toward self-censorship, toward living within the lie.
Like the greengrocer of Havel’s parable, we too must be willing to take the signs out of the window. Ours is a moment of real consequence. Like the Israelites of old, we must begin internally by embracing the fullness who we are – American patriots, Jews, Zionists – without apology and without compromise. There is no shame, only pride, in insisting that we can defend American democracy, stand up for our people, and care deeply about the Jewish homeland.
We must then step forward, externally – from safe space to brave space – giving voice to our values, not only in private but out loud, and yes, sometimes in the streets. We must reject the passivity and enforced conformity upon which authoritarianism depends, the false and shortsighted promise that silence is the price we must pay for safety. We must call out and reject the nefarious claim that dissent is disloyalty, and we must defend the right of others to speak and act according to their conscience even, and perhaps especially, when their views differ from our own. A bill of obligations, concurrent with – and inseparable from – our Bill of Rights.
And while figures on the world stage, leaders like Carney, or on the religious stage, rabbis like me, have a vocational obligation to take public stands, the responsibility does not stop with us. It rests equally on parents and neighbors, employers and employees, teachers and students. This is a moment that calls for profiles in courage of the common kind. The courage to protect independence of thought, to defend freedom of conscience, to err on the side of agency, and to recognize that the decision not to act is itself a consequential choice. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. We need to be informed. We need to get involved. In a time when truth itself is under attack, we need to double down on our generational obligation to educate others. We need to remind others – and ourselves – that democracy is not a spectator sport.
To borrow the image of the Torah reading, we must imagine that future day when our children and our children’s children will ask us about this moment: what we saw, what we knew, and what we did. I, for one, do not want to look back with regret or shame, wishing I had done something when it was still within my power to do so.
For me, the enduring image of these chapters of Exodus is not any single plague, not Pharaoh’s hardened heart, and not even the splitting of the sea. It is that earlier, quieter moment – when Moses, called by God at the burning bush, hesitates. Filled with self-doubt, He hems and haws, asking: Who am I that I should stand before Pharaoh?
God responds not with reassurance or flattery, but with a question: Mah zeh b’yadekha? What is in your hand? At the most basic level, Moses is holding a staff – a staff which we will learn is anything but just a staff. But on a deeper level, God’s question is not about an object; it is about agency. About stepping up and stepping forward. About protecting one’s people. About leveraging position and privilege on behalf of the vulnerable. About speaking out against power and protecting those who do the same.
Mah zeh b’yadekha? What is in your hand? That question is asked not only of Moses and his generation. It is asked of every generation, and it is being asked of us right now. None of us is powerless and we dare not rely on miracles. We hold far more power in our hands than we realize. All of us have agency. The only question is whether we will choose to exercise it. May our answer to that question – in words and in deeds – be worthy of the calling of this dark hour.