Bo
Exodus 10:1-13:16
Jeremiah 46:13-28
I recently had the privilege of attending a most extraordinary conference. It was a gathering of people involved with Synagogue 2000, a transdenominational project seeking to restore the American synagogue to a place of spiritual centrality in this age of spiritual searching.
During a week of learning and discussion, prayer and visioning, we asked ourselves what the synagogue will need to be in order to fully serve the needs of American Jews as we move into the 21st century.
The majestic parashah that we read this week, Parashat Bo, can be read, among other things, as a blueprint for what Jewish community needs to be. The parashah brings us through the latter part of the narrative of the plagues to the climactic moment of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. In this paradigmatic tale, our people is birthed, and we learn of the mission the Jewish people is to play in the world.
How does this parashah define the nature of the new Jewish people? Among other requirements of Jewish community that one might identify in this narrative, I find four particularly salient descriptions: the Jewish people must be inclusive, caring, endowed with spirit and impassioned.
*Inclusivity. Before the plague of locusts, when Pharaoh considers granting Moses’ request to let the people go to worship God, he asks Moses who exactly must attend the supposed celebration.
“Bine’areinu uviz’keineinu neileich,” replies Moses majestically: “Young and old, we will all go. We will go with our sons and daughters, our flocks and herds; for we must observe the Lord’s festival” (Exodus 10:9).
When it comes to worship of God, when it comes to defining ourselves as a people, when it is time to march forward to claim our people’s destiny, we are an inclusive community. All of us must go together.
*Caring. We read a fascinating description of the ninth plague, the plague of darkness. “Moses held out his arm toward the sky and thick darkness descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days. People could not see one another…but all the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings” (10:22-3).
Some commentators find profound meaning in the text’s emphasis on the fact that people could not see one another. In this terrible darkness, people could not see one another’s pain, could not see one another’s personhood, could not understand those with whom they were sharing their lives.
A community without empathy, without kindness, without the deep desire to know the other, is a community that lives in darkness. The Egyptians lived in this plague for three days. Jews must never live in this kind of darkness.
*Spirit. The same description we just considered contrasts the darkness that afflicted the Egyptian community with the light that the Israelites continued to experience in their own homes. For at least one commentator, this feature of the text hints at a mystical truth that every Jew (we might say, every person), has within the self a special spark of light, a divine light, which came from God before the world was created (Itturei Torah, vol. 3, p. 84).
Jews must be able to recognize in themselves and in others the spark of the divine, which can illuminate dark times, and bring clarity and direction. From our very beginnings, this quality was at our essence as a people. Without this quality, our identity as a people would be greatly impoverished.
*Passion for justice. The Exodus story in its entirety becomes the basis for our people’s self-understanding. Over and over again, throughout this parashah, and throughout the Torah, we are taught to remember the story of our slavery and our redemption from Egypt, and to teach our children always to remember our own divinely led struggle for liberation.
More frequently than any other mitzvah, we are taught to be vigilant in advocating for the rights and needs of the oppressed, of the orphan, the widow, the outsider, the marginal. The Torah conveys this message to us with thunderous force: To be Jewish is to remember our history, in order to use it as an eternal foundation of our passion for social justice.
As we read once again the story of our people’s birth, let us ask ourselves whether we are doing our part to make our community more inclusive, more caring, more spiritual, more just. Our history demands it, and so does our future.