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.”