Stop Creating Monsters
A Jewish Antidote to Populism
Shabbat Vayishlach - Rabbi Adrian M. Schell – 6-12-2025
May I once again use this opportunity to welcome our esteemed guest, the Secretary of State, Steve Reed. It is a privilege to have you with us in Wimbledon this Shabbat.
In preparing my sermon for today, many might have thought, or indeed suggested, that I should address some of the pressing logistical issues of our time. I considered speaking to you about housing, about the vital need for security for religious institutions, about strengthening the CST, or about the rising tide of hate crime.
These are all critical topics, matters of life and safety, and I have indeed thought about all of them and have produced a mental stack of unfinished sermons on each.
But in my research, I found a quote attributed to you that mirrors so profoundly a key moment of the Torah reading we just listened to that I could not resist expanding on it, for it speaks directly from my heart. I quote you now:
“People power is the antidote to populism.”
It is a striking phrase. In the political sphere, it suggests that democracy is reclaimed when ordinary citizens engage, organise, and take ownership of their future. But seen through the lens of our tradition, and specifically through the lens of this week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach, it takes on a deeply spiritual dimension.
Our portion describes a looming confrontation. Jacob is returning home after twenty years of exile. He is travelling back to the land of his birth, but to get there, he must face Esau, the brother he deceived and betrayed two decades earlier.
Jacob is terrified. The text tells us he was “greatly afraid and distressed”. He sends spies ahead, and they return with the news that Esau is coming to meet him with four hundred men. In Jacob’s mind, this is an army. He assumes the worst. He assumes war.
And so, the night before the brothers are due to meet, Jacob finds himself alone on the banks of the Jabbok river. There, in the darkness, a strange event occurs. “And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day”.
Who is this man, this ish? The text is famously ambiguous. Our sages have debated it for centuries. Rashi suggests it was the guardian angel of Esau. Others suggest it was an angel of God. But the Chasidic masters and modern psychologists offer a different, perhaps more challenging interpretation:
In the dark Jacob wrestles with his his own fear, and with the image of Esau that he has constructed in his mind. For twenty years, silence has stood between the brothers. In that silence, fear has done its work. Distance had sculpted a monster out of a brother.
This is the mechanism of populism to which your quote alludes. Populism thrives on the abstract “other.” It requires distance. It requires us to construct a caricature of our opponents, stripping them of nuance and humanity until they are no longer people with whom we disagree, but monsters whom we must defeat. When we do not wrestle with these projections, when we do not engage, the other becomes distorted. We fight the ghosts of our own making.
But then the dawn breaks. The wrestling ends. The sun rises. Jacob looks up and sees Esau in the flesh.
And in the light of day, the monster vanishes. It was never there. Esau does not attack; he runs to Jacob, he embraces him, he falls on his neck, and they weep together. The monster dissolves in the face of the human reality.
And this very moment Jacob says something that should be pinned on the wall of every government office in Whitehall and not only there. He looks at this man he has spent twenty years demonising and says:
כִּ֣י עַל־כֵּ֞ן רָאִ֣יתִי פָנֶ֗יךָ כִּרְאֹ֛ת פְּנֵ֥י אֱלֹהִ֖ים
“For therefore I have seen your face, like seeing the face of God.” (Gen 33:10)
This is the Torah’s antidote to the divisive politics of our age. To see the face of the opponent, the stranger, the one we fear, and to recognise in that face the presence of the Divine.
It is easy to see God in the face of a friend, or a child, or someone who votes the way we do. It is a supreme spiritual challenge to see God in the face of Esau. But Jacob teaches us that we cannot be whole until we can look into the eyes of the other and see their humanity.
Secretary of State, Steven, this is the challenge for you and your government, too. It is incredibly tempting, when the political winds are blowing a certain way, to let the populists set the agenda. It is politically expedient to adopt the language of the monster-makers, to treat the refugee or the asylum seeker not as a human face, but as a problem to be managed, a statistic to be reduced, or a threat to be repelled.
But, if “people power is the antidote to populism,” then the government must lead by empowering us to see people, not categories.
We need you to resist the urge to demonise the vulnerable to satisfy the angry. We need you to dismantle the fear, not manage it.
The Torah demands we look at the source of real pain, the lack of a home, the lack of safety, the lack of dignity, and treat that, rather than attacking the people suffering from it.
And for sure not - we do not need to be a community of victims to understand this; we just need to be a community with memory. We know that when a society loses the ability to see the face of God in the stranger, the results are catastrophic. We know that when the agenda is shaped by those who prey on our vulnerabilities, the “other” is erased long before they are physically removed.
Jacob’s victory was not that he won the fight in the night. It was that he survived the darkness long enough to see his brother’s face in the daylight.
That is the task before us all.
To reject the distorted images we are fed. To refuse to let fear design our neighbours. To cross the river, as Jacob did, and look the other in the eye, whether that other is perhaps identifying themselves in a way we haven’t seen them, a neighbour we do not understand, or a refugee seeking safety. And to find the courage to say: I see you. You are not a crisis, you are not a threat to me and our society. You are a human being, created in the image of the Divine.
It is a decision we make every time we speak, every time we vote, and every time we legislate. We either build monsters, or we recognise the face of God.
Shabbat Shalom.