Bo -- 5773

It’s the longest night in history:  the tenth plague, death of the first born.  “Thus says God:  ‘Toward midnight I will go forth among the Egyptians, and every male first-born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstones’ and all the first-born of the cattle.’ (Exodus 11:4-5)”

The anguish is palpable, and the questions demand to be answered:  Why did they have to die?  Why the innocent along with the guilty, the high born and the low?  Surely the children and the cattle had done no wrong.

All those who benefit from injustice are implicated in the system.  The little children, though blameless, nursed on slave women’s bodies—usurping the place of those nurses’ drowned babies.  The slave girls, though blameless, labored on millstones quarried and carried by strong Hebrew backs.  The cattle, though blameless, grazed in pens fenced by slave labor.  Although they did not create the system, those blameless Egyptians benefited from it.

Could they have pushed back against the paradigm of oppression?  The Torah recounts the civil disobedience of some—the midwives who refused Pharaoh’s order and who were rewarded.  In the face of brutality, inaction is collusion.  Silence is complicity.

This weekend, Americans celebrate the birth of a great champion of justice and equality.  Martin Luther King dedicated his life to overthrowing multiple systems of oppression.  Let us remember the words of one who walked arm in arm with him, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Few are guity.  All are responsible.”

Vaeira 5773

God charges Moses with an historic task—liberating his people and changing history.  Moses demurs.

“’Go and tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the Israelites depart from his land.’  But Moses appeared to God, saying ‘The Israelites would not listen to me; how then should Pharaoh heed me, me—who gets tongue-tied!’”  (Exodus 6:10-12).

Moses does what so many of us do:  he assumes his own incapacity.

We tell ourselves stories of our own incompetence:

o   An earlier failure was my fault.
o   My earlier failure is bound to happen again.
o   I’m not capable.

Somehow recordings tell us we’re not good enough, that we’re not smart or likeable enough get placed in our heads.  We psych ourselves out of doing great things by thinking that failure stems from our own inabilities, rather than from the wider environment.  We see failures as proof of our incapacity rather than as opportunities to learn, and weave these into the stories of our lives.

But in fact we have extraordinary capacity.  Each one of us is capable of doing miracles in our own lives and in the wider world.  Each one of us is so special, so miraculous that the Universe summoned us into existence at this very moment, just as we are.  We are needed.  Our sacred task, both simple and profound, is to accept that truth.

When we know we can, all things are possible.

Watch this:  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=535184355831

Shemot 5773

It must be the most agonizing scene of the entire Torah: 

A baby is born in a time of genocide.  His kind is to be killed; he is marked from the moment of his birth.  But when his mother “saw how beautiful he was, she hid him for three months,” until she could hide him no longer (Exodus 2:2).  Then, for a second time in three verses, the woman conceives – this time a plan to prolong her son’s life.  She will waterproof a basket and place him in the river.

Can you imagine her, standing on the riverbank, readying and steadying the small life raft?  What does she put in it along with him?  A child so young can’t feed himself, so nutrition would be pointless.  A child so young can’t hold anything, so toys would be pointless.  Perhaps some reminder of her, some clue to his origins?  Or perhaps she didn’t expect him to survive—she just didn’t want to watch him killed.

She holds her boy close, thinking “no no no.”  Then, subject to a silent sign, she kisses him on the forehead, tugs his big toe, and places him into the basket and the water.  With a wrenching but imperceptible push, she lets him go.  All alone, he ventures into a place no child ought to go, a place with crocodiles and hippopotami and rapids and heat, into a place for which he is completely unprepared, into a fate entirely uncertain.

This is what it means to be a parent, isn’t it?  We protect and guard, and prepare them as best as we can.  Then, with the knowledge that whatever time we’ve shared hasn’t been nearly enough, we release that baby to an unknown fate.  With a prayer and a push, we send them into the wide and wild world, to become the people they will become.