This posting is a version of the sermon I gave last Friday, for MLK Weekend
It is
appropriate that tonight is a Torah Shabbat where we find ourselves in the
early chapters of Sh’mot – the 2nd book of the Torah – Exodus. We find our ancestors have become
slaves in Egypt, and we begin the narrative that will lead to our redemption.
And this is Martin Luther King Jr Weekend. Martin Luther King Jr – an inspiring leader and orator who
drew heavily on the freedom narrative in the Torah to point the way forward for
this country.
And while we
remember and celebrate his legacy, and can clearly look back and see the
progress that has been made since he led the fight for civil rights for African
Americans, recent events continue to remind us that their freedom story is
incomplete. Just this week, major
highways around Boston were shut down during the morning commute by those
protesting to keep reminding us that Black Lives Matter and there is a systemic
set of problems that have not been satisfactorily addressed in our country
where our African American brother and sisters are concerned. The picture is
more complicated and nuanced than in MLK’s time. ‘How can it be’, we ask, ‘that
we can live in an era where a person of color is President of the USA, and yet
such inculcated and systemic racism continues to be present in our society?’
Let’s take a
look at this week’s parsha, and the midrashim that our Rabbis spun from this
text to reflect on what freedom and redemption truly look like, as these
insights can inform our understanding of why there is more work to be done in
our society today.
Let’s begin
with a core text that becomes the basis for the 4 cups of wine at a Passover
Seder:
Exodus
6:6-7:
6 “Say,
therefore, to the Children of Israel, ‘I am the Eternal, and I will bring you
out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their
bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great
judgments.
7 ‘Then I
will take you for My people, and I will be your God; and you shall know that I
am the Eternal your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the
Egyptians.
The Midrash
on these two verses gives us the historical background:
“There are
four expressions of redemption: I will bring you out—I will deliver you—I
will redeem you and I will take you. These correspond to the four
decrees which Pharaoh issued regarding them. The Sages accordingly ordained
four cups to be drunk on the eve of Passover to correspond with these four
expressions, in order to fulfill the verse: I will lift up the cup of
salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord (Psalm 116:13).”
The
Jerusalem Talmud expands on this:
“Why do we
have four cups of wine? R. Yochanan said in the name of Rabbi Benayah, this
refers to four stages in the redemption. . . “I will bring you out from under
the burdens of Egypt.” Even if God had left us in Egypt to be slaves, God would
have ceased the burdensome yoke. For this alone we would have been grateful to
Him and therefore we drink the first cup. “I will deliver you from their
slavery.” We drink the cup of salvation for God delivered us completely from
serving them. “I will redeem you with an outstretched arm . . . .” Because God
confused them and crushed them on our behalf so that they could no longer
afflict us, we drink the third cup. “I will take you . . . .” The greatest
aspect of the redemption is that God brought us near and granted us also
spiritual redemption. For this we raise the fourth cup.
What these Rabbis are teaching us is
that true freedom does not happen in a single act. True freedom is never simply
the removal of one kind of enslavement or limitation. We can look back at the
Torah narrative and see that our ultimate state of freedom was represented by
first escaping from slavery in Egypt. But then we began a period of wandering.
We received Revelation and we are presented with a whole system of laws,
practices and ethical principles that provide the scaffolding for a society
that can better ensure the redemptive possibilities for all, albeit through the
limited lens of society at that time (where slaves were still permitted, and
women were not equal to men).
Finally, we are able to enter the
Promised Land. This is the place where we have the ability for true
self-realization, where no other group determine what is possible for us.
We can highlight a similar set of
steps when we pull back the lens of history and look at the longer perspective.
Jews took a giant leap in the redemptive journey when the era of Enlightenment
in Europe brought us the status of full citizens. However, as our history
cruelly demonstrated to us, this alone could not secure our sense of freedom
while a society continued to view us as ‘other’. Theodore Herzl understood
this, and the world via the United Nations was finally willing to accept this
after the Holocaust. And so the State of Israel came into being. Whether we
choose to make it our home or not, its existence – even the troubled existence
that it continues to have with its neighbors – provides a place of ultimate
self-realization for us as a people.
And what of the African-American
experience in the US? We see that significant stages of redemption have come
into being. Freed from slavery. But then subject to Jim Crow laws. Civil rights
granted, but other socio-economic and cultural factors continuing to make a
less systematic but still present kind of segregation a reality in the lives of
many. Why is this still so?
There is one step in that ancient
midrash that I skipped over – the step where God confuses and crushes Pharaoh
and his army so that they can no longer oppress us. Hitler was defeated. The
Jewish people won the war of Independence that had to be fought right after the
modern State of Israel was declared. Is this step inevitable? Is the only way
to truly arrive at redemption to overthrow those who were once the oppressors? No-one
wants to see any kind of literal war in this country again. Having just
returned from a vacation in Charleston and Savannah, I have a new awareness of
the devastation wrought by America’s civil war. I hear fear expressed in voices
that wonder whether peaceful protest might inflame some to literally fight back
against our police forces; fears that might not be entirely unfounded given what has already
transpired in recent weeks, even if only by the hand of one or two unstable and
violent individuals. But I reject the inevitability or even the necessity as loudly
as MLK Jr himself rejected violence as a means to accomplishing his ends.
Nevertheless, we have a real challenge that we,
as a society, must be willing to confront. I look at the realities for many
members of our African American communities and I recognize that those
realities have been created by a complex set of systemic issues and remnants of
a history of oppression that continues to leave its mark. Attempts that were
made to rebalance society by providing additional points of entry into schools,
colleges, the workplace, and the voting booth have actually been undone in
recent years by many local and state legislative bodies. The Supreme Court
itself has contributed to the undoing of some of these systems, however blunt
and clumsy they might have been, that helped to level the playing field just a
bit. This is not right. We must not, through our actions or through our
silence, be contributors to the hand of Pharaoh that continues to shape the
lives of African Americans in our country.
How can we do our part? There are
many civil rights organizations who are leading the way at this time that we
can work with and support. But there is no better place for us to start than
our Reform movement’s very own Religious Action Center. Get on their mailing
list. Respond to their calls for advocacy and action. They work with broad
coalitions of organizations to help get legislation passed in Washington that
can provide the system-wide structures through which change for the better can
come. For example, right now you can sign up to support their call for the ‘End
Racial Profiling Act’. The End Racial Profiling Act would legally prohibit
racial profiling, ensure specialized instruction in federal law enforcement
training, condition state and local governments’ receipt of federal funds on
the successful adoption of anti-racial profiling policies, award Justice
Department grants to state and local governments that best implement practices
that defeat racial profiling, and position the U.S. Attorney General as
watchdog to assess such practices.
At the end of February we will be
taking our 10th grade Confirmation Class on our annual trip to learn
with the Religious Action Center in Washington D.C. They will learn how their
own powers of advocacy and action can be informed by Jewish values, and how to
assess whether legislation being voted on by our politicians brings us closer
to a vision of the kind of society we want to live in, or further from it. They
end their trip with a visit to the offices of our Congressional and State
legislators, to lobby on those issues that they most care about, on behalf of
the membership of the approximately 900 Reform congregations in North America.
Don’t just leave this work to our
teens. The journey to freedom is not complete until we can say of others, as we
can say of ourselves that we have been brought out, delivered, redeemed and
taken to a place where we have the potential for full self-realization within
the society in which we live. In 1958
as he stood before the American Jewish Congress, MLK said these words:
My people were
brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains
fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born out of our common struggle for
centuries, not only to rid us of bondage, but to make oppression of any people
by others an impossibility.
