Freedom from Corruption of Power ›

Washington DC – MLK at Night, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Washington’s newest memorial. This sculpture is about 30 feet tall. For me, the monuments are most beautiful at night – all lit up, far fewer crowds and still perfectly safe. Washington, DC. | By ChellieL. cc: flickr

This week’s Torah narrative completes the story of the ten plagues. It describes the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart as the story proceeds. It then introduces the first mitzvot given to the Jewish people as a nation – the twenty mitzvot which create the holiday observances of Pesach, the festival of Freedom. To this day this educational construct serves to create and recreate the Jewish people and is a cornerstone of our collective identity. 

A short memory and a short fuse

We have in this story as it unfolds an insightful description of the stupidity of an evil regime unable to see beyond the short-term, this-worldly perspective of power and control. It is this description which has served as a basis for subsequent teachers and preachers, such as the late and great American religious leader Martin Luther King (whose yohrzeit was last week!) as a metaphor for the blindness of tyranny. We see the same phenomenon again, tragically, in one of our neighboring northern Arab regimes. A similar, though less bloody, “hardening of the heart” is also unfortunately not unknown in our own regime in its attitudes to the weak and needy in our  society, and in the treatment of and widespread lack of interest in the daily lives of our  immediate neighbors in area “C” of  the occupied territories for whom we are still, despite all our public promises and international subterfuges, responsible.

On the other hand we have in this week’s text, starting with the words “Hahodesh hazeh Lechem…” the outlines of an educational enterprise of universal significance and Divine wisdom. The most profound counter to  tyranny and the evil stupidity of power is to be found in the “telling of the story” of freedom on Seder night, a telling so powerful in its family-based dynamic that no regime, however evil, was able to overcome it.

Model figures: Rabbi Heschel and Martin Luther King

Decent families in this country will “tell the story” as it should be told. They will not just say “They wanted to kill us, we won, lets eat” as in the well-known Jewish joke, but rather will tell the Exodus story of liberation in both of  its dimensions – the particular and the universal. These are, as both Martin Luther King and his friend, and  our beloved teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel (whose yohrtzeit was also this week), understood and taught, deeply intertwined in this week’s Torah narrative.

As Heschel said: “A person cannot be religious and indifferent to other human beings’ plight and suffering…There is no other people in the world which is {shoud be – Y.G}  so absolutely committed to the sanctity of human rights and equality of all men as our people. Our history is the most emphatic testimony that injustice to some men spells the doom of all men…Judaism is the art of the impossible…what we can do first of all…is not to sink forever in the mire of indifference…What is called for is not a silent sigh but…the inspired screaming of a prophet uttered by a whole community.” ( from “The Plight of Russian Jews”, pages. 214-215 in the book, “Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity”, ed, Susannah Heschel, N.Y. 1996).

As a metaphor for human liberation from injustice and slavery, the Exodus story is profoundly inspiring. Those of us who hear G-d’s voice in it, the voice of the Blessed Holy One who heard the cries of the oppressed and enslaved will surely not despair but continue to strive until we overcome the stupidity of  tyranny and worldly power, even our own people’s.

Shabbat Shalom.