| Dear CBO Friends,
It is difficult to grasp freedom in an age and a country that is so focused on convenience. Every morning, I call out to Alexa, my artificially intelligent assistant, to shut off my alarm, predict the weather, and play a happy tune to get my blood pumping. I get frustrated when she can't turn on my TV and I have to reach ALL THE WAY for the remote control. Every year, our old conveniences seem dull and onerous. How then can we truly grasp the struggle for freedom of the Israelites?
There are multiple ways to approach this quandary. There are plenty within our own community who do not currently have freedom. They struggle with the oppression of illness, addiction, financial insecurity, poverty, and depression. We can look outside of our community to human trafficking, the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, the Nuer in South Sudan, and the Christians and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria. We also have our own founded fear about our present and future in Israel, Europe and even America. Slavery is still very relevant. We are commanded as former slaves to be attuned with our empathy to enslavement of all those who are other.
These verses in the Torah are endless:
Exodus 22:21 "Do not mistreat a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in Egypt.
Exodus 23:9 "You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of an alien, seeing you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
Leviticus 19:33-34 "'When a stranger lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The stranger who lives as a foreigner with you shall be to you as the native-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you lived as foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am Adonai your God.
Where we have influence over the treatment of people, we must call on our collective past to tap into compassion and action. We should not wait for our own inconvenience and suffering to wake up to the plight of those who are enslaved. That understanding of text is too literal. Mark Twain is reported to have said: “History never repeats itself but it rhymes.”
We are the people of the book, the ones so steeped in the language of slavery and redemption that we should be able to detect that language and those rhymes today. We tell our story every year because we know that people often put their own convenience over the safety of others. May we always do justice to the memory of our ancestors by exercising our power to speak out to rescue and redeem.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Bernstein
|
Affiliated with United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism