Swarm Like Locusts

Early in our Torah reading for this week, a prophet stands before an evil king. The prophet, Moses, has been sent by God to deliver a ferocious message to Pharoah, a threat of divine retribution. His mission is righteous and his message is clear. But while in previous instances God has filled Moses in on the specific threat he’s meant to convey, this time the deity has neglected to mention the details. And so, as I imagine the scene, Moses marches up to Pharaoh and his entire retinue, opens his mouth, and—draws a blank. At the worst possible moment, the prophet realizes that he does not know what to say. He’s at a loss: Without knowing what plague God plans to send, how can he convey the stakes? How can he possibly make the king change course?

The scene has the feeling of a familiar nightmare. In my particular version, I’m standing on my high school auditorium stage, preparing to give a recital of Bach sonatas, until I realize I’m holding a musical instrument I’ve never seen and have no idea how to play. Of course, Moses’s situation—standing before Pharaoh, who commands a cruel and mighty empire—is orders of magnitudes more stressful. Confronting the king, the scrawny old shepherd is surely daunted by the immense power differential. Later in the Torah, we find language for this brand of fear. After Israelite spies encounter what they believe are giants in Canaan, they tell their community that next to these great warriors, “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.” I imagine Moses, anticipating this language, looking up at Pharaoh and thinking to himself: I’m just a grasshopper before a very large fly swatter.

Over the past weeks, I’ve come to know exactly how he feels. On the streets of my neighborhood, I have seen scores of ICE agents, with all the backing of the most powerful government in the world, terrorizing my neighbors. I’ve washed tear gas out of the eyes of protesters right outside my home, as canisters continue to rain down across the city. I’ve struggled to verify the safety of friends swept up in the federal government’s indiscriminate sweeps. I’ve run toward the wail of whistles only to arrive at a scene after neighbors have already been abducted. Again and again, I too have felt like a grasshopper, lacking the words, the tools, or the strategies to adequately face down the giants in front of us.

But before Moses can let his fear consume him, before he can slink away from the palace in defeat, a thought occurs to him. According to the Mei Hasheloach, a 19th-century Hasidic commentator, at this moment Moses, shaking like a little grasshopper, begins to think like one. Perhaps he remembers those times during his life as a shepherd when grasshoppers got mobilized—when they joined together with their brethren and swarmed as locusts. The Mei Hasheloach imagines Moses thinking to himself: “Locusts have within them unity and love for each other, they have no hate amongst them. Therefore, they don’t need a king.” In this moment, the interdependence of locusts emerges as a model of effective non-hierarchical action. After all, there’s no queen locust, no alpha grasshopper. And yet the insects are able to move communally, to sustain and protect one another. In this way, perhaps Moses realizes, locusts are precisely the opposite of Egypt. Where Egypt is governed by a king who controls his people through fear, locusts exemplify the power of the collective to work together in love.

And so, after a beat of anxiety, of feeling small and uncertain, Moses comes up with the right words. He looks up at Pharaoh and says: “Behold, tomorrow I will bring locusts.” Or, if we were to stretch this translation slightly: “Tomorrow, I’m gonna bring it as a swarm of locusts.”

Here in occupied Minneapolis, as in Egypt, there is no outside force that will give us the step-by-step plan to achieve liberation. But we can learn from Moses that we already have what we need. The giants in front of us aren’t as big as they may appear; their hate and their need for kings make them weak. Meanwhile, we tiny insects share a unity of purpose—embodied by a hundred people showing up at a street corner to defend a neighbor, by tens of thousands marching downtown in subzero temperatures, by an entire region of scrappy volunteers inventing and re-inventing an infrastructure of mutual protection. We share a love, lived out through innumerable grocery runs for neighbors scared to leave their homes, through minivans full of immigrant kids afraid of waiting at bus stops, through theaters and restaurants and churches transforming into sanctuaries. In the streets, in the schools, in the Signal threads, in all our places of healing and justice, we are as locusts. Let us swarm.