Small Steps to Redemption

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on April 5th. Rabbi Steven drashed on the power of the seder to both ground us in history, reminding us that our people have survived tyranny before, and to uplift our spirits, eating and drinking and remembering the joyful dance of Miriam.

If you are looking for a seder, you’re in luck. We are so excited to announce that thanks to the generosity of Builder volunteers and our partners at OneTable, Mishkan is able to offer Community Hosted Seders this year. If you want to spend an inspired, down-to-earth evening with fellow Mishkanites, we would love to have you. These seders will be hosted in the homes of Builders all over the city (and one virtually). Deadlines to RSVP are fast approaching and tables are filling up, so register now! 

https://dinners.onetable.org/partners/mishkan-chicago-seders-2025

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

I don’t know if you have seen the photos (or maybe you were there), but last weekend nearly a thousand people gathered together downtown for Trans Day of Visibility. And today there is another protest happening in Federal Plaza, as part of “Hands Off!” — a nationwide demonstration against the president’s attacks on the welfare system, the federal workforce, immigrants, and other vulnerable — but vital — elements of American society. The back-to-back protests of this weekend and the last reminded me of early 2017, during the first Trump Administration. At the time, I was in rabbinical school in New York City. Starting with the Women’s March on January 21, my classmates and I developed a weekly tradition of brunch and protest (or protest and brunch, depending on what time we were marching). We rallied for LGBTQ+ rights. We stood for women and freedom of choice. We demonstrated against anti-immigrant policies, like the “Muslim Ban.” The marches did not always achieve their aims. But they created a temporary reality, a place where the values of freedom and dignity and equality were alive. We helped each other remember what we were fighting for, with chants and signs and placards and banners. One of the favorite signs that I made was from the Women’s March, drawn on a piece of cardboard. It read, “Jews: Opposing Tyrants Since 2000 BCE.”

I’ll admit that 2000 BCE is a generous approximation of when the Israelites were liberated from slavery and left Egypt. If the Exodus was a historic event (and that is a heavily debated “if”), most scholars place it between the 15th and 13th centuries BCE. Questions about the historicity of the exodus narrative are fascinating. People make entire careers out of finding answers for them. But when looking at the stories we tell about ourselves, the ones that help us understand who we are and how we move through the world, I am less interested in what is factual than what is true. And what I mean by that, is that when we move from the annals of history to the realm of myth there is something to be learned — less the who, what, when, and where, and more the how and the why.

The primary purpose of Passover (the why) is to retell the story of the Exodus. That’s what the seder is all about. The haggadah, the songs, the rituals, the charoset, the horseradish, the matzah — they are all tools (the how) to help us lean in (at times, quite literally) to the story, to tell it as if we are retelling it from our own lived experience. Ba’avur zeh asah Adonai li b’tzeiti mi-Mitzrayim. “For this purpose,” we read, “God labored on my behalf, by taking me out of Egypt.” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote that for the Jew, when we say “I believe” what we actually mean is “I remember.” Yet while the story remains the same, we do not; each Passover, we recall the Exodus with hearts that have been transformed — in ways joyful, in ways tragic — by the intervening year. And so the truth we uncover in its retelling will change every time we sit at the seder table. Earlier this week, Rabbi Lizzi asked folks at morning minyan what questions we should ask this Passover. One person wrote, “What does freedom look like?” Another person wrote, “What does oppression look like?” Depending on the year we had, the questions we ask and the answers we look for will be different. As I watch people take to the streets again, signs in hand, I find myself wondering how we will make it through the reign of another pharaoh — one that threatens to undo the very systems that have kept tyrants in check in this country for centuries.

A funny thing about Passover is that we tell the story in one sitting, moving us from slavery to freedom to “next year in Jerusalem” in the span of a single meal — when even according to the biblical narrative, this process took years. It seems like if we were really going to embody the Exodus, we should go about it slowly. There is an anecdote in the haggadah about five rabbis who gathered for a seder in Bnei Brak. They became so engrossed in recounting the Exodus that they stayed up all night. The rabbis only realized how long they had been at it when someone came to remind them that it was time for shacharit, the morning prayer. So the haggadah explains: V’chol ha-marbeh l’sapeir bitziat mitzrayim harei zeh m’shubach, anyone who adds to their telling of the exodus from Egypt is praiseworthy. I think this is less a prescription of piety, and more a reminder that the journey from slavery to freedom took time. The story of Passover is one of cumulative change, small acts of defiance and disobedience that brought us step by step closer to freedom.

First there are the midwives, Shifra and Puah. When Pharaoh decrees that all male Israelite babies should be killed, they lie to protect them — they would have done his bidding, the midwives tell Pharaoh, but were unable to reach the Israelite women until well after they had given birth. (The writer and activist Francine Klagsbrun notes that this may be the first recorded instance of civil disobedience). And then there is Yocheved, an Israelite woman who hides her son Moses from the soldiers who have been dispatched to slaughter him and the other newborns. She secrets him away, placing him in a basket on the Nile rather than handing him over to authorities. And then we have Moses’ sister, Miriam, who follows the basket to see that it reaches safety; when it finds safe harbor, she suggests that Yocheved serve as his wetnurse, ensuring that Moses is raised with knowledge of and a connection to his people. And then of course Bat-Paro — that is, Pharaoh’s daughter — the one who pulls the basket from the river and takes Moses as her own, saving him from her father’s murderous decree.

Each of these actions occur within the very first breath of the exodus’ retelling. They are a preamble to the primary storyline: Moses confronting Pharaoh, Pharaoh refusing to listen, and the divine “signs and wonders” that will undo the shackles of slavery and wrest the Israelites from the house of bondage. They are easy to miss. None of these small acts of protest were sufficient, in and of themselves, to dismantle a society built on the oppression of an entire people. Yet all of them were necessary: incremental, at times imperceptible, steps on the road to redemption. Shifra and Puah did not save every life. But they saved some. And to those parents, that life was a reason to persevere. Yocheved did not end her people’s enslavement, but she ensured that her son grew up free — a necessary precondition to Moses’ ability to imagine a better future, to see the gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be. Bat-Paro did not rewrite the laws of Egypt, but her act of disobedience, done at the epicenter of power, would ripple forward and outward to transform her entire country. These are women (a fact that I don’t think we should overlook), many of them slaves, working within the constraints of an unequal society, doing what is possible in that moment, while aspiring for a world where those barriers no longer exist.

This is an important point. Their actions were not only done in defiance of the world they lived in. They were also a manifestation of the world they hoped for, a brief moment of leaving mitzrayim, the narrowness that surrounded them, to live expansively — as if that narrowness no longer existed. The Exodus ends with the Israelites gathered on the shore of the Reed Sea, the parted waters closing behind them — and with it, the end of centuries of oppression. Moses begins to offer words of praise: ashira l’Adonai. One day, I will sing to God. Of course, the rabbis are puzzled: why is he speaking in the future tense? Rabbi Jericho Vincent (who has a great podcast on how we might survive this moment in history, check it out) offers that this is a way of Moses saying, “one day in the future, when I’m really and truly safe, when I’ve processed this whole experience, when I feel secure, then I’ll really celebrate that I was saved from death by the splitting of the sea.” This is a totally understandable response. They just saw one of the greatest nations on the planet brought to its knees by terrible plagues, they fled with what they could carry on their backs, they found themselves trapped between a vengeful army and an impassable sea — and now, miraculously safe on the other shore, they face an uncharted and unknown wilderness. Moses is optimistic, but cautiously so.

But then Moses looks back, and his sister Miriam and all the women have taken out their timbrels. They begin to dance and sing in response to his prayer. Yet her song is not ashira l’Adonai, but shiru l’Adonai — which R’Jericho translates as “sing right the f*ck now.” Miriam is aware of the difficult road that has led to this moment. And she understands that there is a difficult road ahead of them. But for the time being, they are here. So she sings: an act of defiance against all that has been, a reminder of all that might be. Her song is a lodestar, pointing the way toward a better future — knowing that they can get there because of everything it took to reach this moment. To quote Miriam, as depicted in what is objectively the greatest animated feature of all time, the Prince of Egypt (and because how could I give a sermon about Passover without mentioning it once): “We are not afraid, although we know there is much to fear… for we were moving mountains long before we knew we could.”

The very fact that the women packed their timbrels is an act of hopeful defiance, a commitment to preserving the tools that would be needed for the world that the Isrealites dreamed of building — even if they didn’t seem so helpful at the time. It’s a small action, seemingly insignificant. But imagine if the women didn’t pack their instruments. Thinking about the journey that lay ahead, no one would have blamed them for picking up a blanket or a bowl in lieu of a tambourine. Yet, lacking instruments, no one would have sung on that distant shore. Lacking instruments, we would not be singing those same songs today. And who knows what would have happened, if the Israelites had wandered into that wilderness without recognition of and gratitude for what they had overcome or the vision and hope for where their journey would end. The theologian Arthur Cohen once wrote that Jews live in the tension between recollection of the past and anticipation of the future. This dual lens is what allows us to find our way in the present. Especially when facing the wilderness, we must remember where we have come from and know where we are going — and understand that the space in between is connected by a thousand small steps. It is not just a long view of history, but the longest view: from creation to redemption to revelation to the messianic promise of what could be.

The writer Rebecca Solnit once described herself as a tortoise at a mayfly party. Tortoises can live for over a century. Mayflies live for a few days. Most of the time, we act like mayflies: focused on the here and now. But if we are to survive this moment, she explains that we must take an expansive view of history (she writes, “I’m advocating for all those mayflies to work at becoming tortoises”) — to understand the consequences of small actions, which may seem insignificant in the short term but are necessary steps on the way to substantive change. For me, this is the how and the why of the seder this year. How do we make it through the reign of another pharaoh? Just like our ancestors, step by step. And why? Because this is how we have outlasted every single tyrant who has wished us harm, since 2000 BCE (or so).

The seder is a series of small acts. Here we break the matzah. Here we lean to our left. Here we spill some wine. Here we sing hallel. They are small actions, not sufficient in themselves for bringing about the world we want to live in — but by doing them, we open a pathway within ourselves for the future we envision, the future we are fighting for. The seder plate, the haggadah, the conversation over dinner becomes a window, allowing us a glimpse (however brief) of that better world now. We break the matzah and imagine a world where all who are hungry have a table to sit at, enough food to eat. We lean to our left and imagine a world where everyone is free. We take our wine, spilling a drop for each of the ten plagues, and imagine a world where our hearts are large enough to hold all people, even the people we think of as our enemies, with compassion. We sing hallel, songs of praise, and for just a few minutes create space for joy — an act of defiance against those in power who would demand our silence, a reminder that where we find ourselves now is not where we must always be. The journey is ours to take. Like bringing instruments into the wilderness, each action is a reminder that what we do matters — even if we cannot see it now. By doing what we can, where we can, however we can; by retelling the story of our people, which is our story; by remembering where we have been and where we are going: step by step, we walk just a bit closer to a redeemed world.

I hope you have a chag kasher v’sameach — a meaningful, healthy, and happy Passover. And shabbat shalom.