Two months ago we celebrated Pesach and retold the story of our collective oppression and the divine miracle of liberation. After escaping Egypt, we embarked on a literal and spiritual journey through the desert, until we were ready to receive our Torah at Mount Sinai.

There we became a people with ethical obligations to our fellow humans, with a moral mandate to seek mishpat (justice) tempered with chesed (love).

The Exodus story has been used throughout this country’s history as a symbol and rallying cry to denounce slavery and oppression. The spiritual “Go Down, Moses” was sung by slaves and used to point the way to freedom on the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, the Exodus narrative was used to frame the civil rights movement.

Today we are in the midst of another civil rights crisis. The criminal justice system has been correctly compared to both Jim Crow and slavery, and it is time for the Jewish community, steeped in the Exodus story, to make reforming this system an ethical, moral, and religious priority.

One of the cornerstones of this egregious, racist and unjust system is money bail.

In our current system, most people arrested — whether justly or not — are required to pay bail in order to be released before trial. In practice, this means that wealthy people charged with even the most violent crimes can buy their freedom while those with fewer resources have two choices. They can either sit in jail (sometimes for weeks, months or even years) or pay a bail bondsman 10 percent of the bail amount — often thousands of dollars. The money paid to a bondsman is never returned, even if the charges are dropped or they are found innocent!

This system was ostensibly put in place to keep the public safe and to ensure that people return to court for trial. In reality, it has become a tool to incarcerate more people, mostly black, brown and poor, more easily, without actually increasing public safety. In fact, states that have abolished or minimized money bail have not just equal, but better, court-show rates than states that utilize bondsmen.

This single fact awakened in me a passion for bail reform: almost 70 percent of people in local jails throughout the United States have not been convicted of a crime. As of 2016, there were 451,000 people, supposedly “innocent until proven guilty,” locked up awaiting trial. This number is astounding. Compare this to 1974, three years after the inception of the “War on Drugs” and the beginning of modern mass incarceration, when there were only 200,000 incarcerated people in the entire country.

The money bail system is fundamentally unjust. Those who are detained pretrial are three times more likely to be sentenced to prison and receive longer prison sentences than those who are released, and few ever see a “fair trial by their peers.” Many district attorneys can and do abuse their prosecutorial discretion by overcharging those arrested and asking for high bail. They can then exploit the accused’s fear and desperation to coerce a plea bargain, regardless of guilt or innocence. In fact, 97 percent of federal convictions and 94 percent of state convictions are achieved by plea bargains.

What may be the most damning aspect of money bail is its racist application, which sets the stage for the vast racial disparities in mass incarceration. Bail for African Americans is, on average, set 35 percent higher than that of white people accused of the same crime. Blacks and Latinos represent 50 percent of all pretrial detainees despite only representing 30 percent of the general population.

In San Francisco, where African Americans make up 6 percent of the population and whites are 48 percent, black people are nine times more likely to be jailed. If things don’t change, one in every three black boys born in the United States will end up incarcerated at some point in their lives. One in three.

Many advocacy groups and officials have come out against money bail and are in favor of reform.

In California, our governor, chief justice and attorney general all have advocated for change while the major opponents — bail bondsmen, giant insurers and district attorneys — are those who benefit directly from the $13 billion industry.

Senate Bill 10 (bail reform legislation) will likely be voted on within the next month. You can do something tangible that can help hundreds of thousands of people, their families and communities: call your state assembly member now and urge them to support comprehensive bail reform.

We have an opportunity for real change in California with a bill that protects our Jewish values of equality, safety and respect for human dignity.

Jewish organizations such as Bend the Arc: Jewish Action and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, in solidarity with directly impacted communities, are advocating for comprehensive bail reform.

I’d like to challenge us all, in this time after Pesach and Shavuot, to bolster our spiritual readiness to live our Torah, to truly see each and every human being as a holy mirror of the divine, and to promote mishpat v’chesed — justice and love.