Shabbat Replay: The Long Way To Freedom

Just as Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for voting rights didn't end with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Moshe's fight for liberation didn't end when the Israelites packed their bags full of Egyptian gold and hit the road. It's a long way to freedom, and boy are Moshe's arms tired!

This episode is Rabbi Deena's sermon from Mishkan's Friday night service on January 14th, 2022. For full recordings of Friday services, click here. For upcoming Shabbat services and programs, check our event calendar.

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

Transcript

Transcript

Producer:
Welcome to Shabbat Replay on Contact Chai. You’re listening to the expert fiddling of Kalman Strauss during our Friday night service on January 14th. Kalman also composed, produced, and performed the theme music for Contact Chai. Last Friday, Rabbi Deena gave a rousing sermon in anticipation of MLK day. Of course, it didn’t turn out to be the relaxing weekend we were all hoping for. All of us at Mishkan stand in love and solidarity with the Beth Israel community and are keeping them in our prayers. But now, sit back, relax, and enjoy these words from Rabbi Deena on the Long Way To Freedom.


(01:05) Rabbi Deena Cowans:
As many of you know, I am obsessed with Trader Joe’s. I insist on shopping there even though there’s several perfectly good grocery stores closer to me, but there is one thing I don’t like… the parking lot. It’s ALWAYS full, the spots are so narrow, and people are FEARLESS in the way they move through it. I’m a pretty stress-prone driver under the best of circumstances, so this parking lot fully ignites my “omg I’m going to be trapped and unable to safely maneuver my way out” fears in a big way. 

The other day, I went to TJs, and when I got back to my car, two other cars had parked on either side of me with what I would call “minimal respect for the yellow lines”. The prospect of pulling out of the spot incited near panic in me. So much so that I stood next to my car, in the freezing cold, and contemplated calling my partner Zack to ask him to drive to Trader Joes and back my car out of the spot for me. 

And just before I called him, one of the cars next to me pulled out, giving me a chance to get out myself. 

[singing] “There can be miracles, when you believe…”

This instinct, to call outwards for help when we feel stuck, or panicked, or afraid, is so natural. If we knew we could get out of tight spots, they wouldn’t feel so tight. And we can learn to get out of them, but that process of learning is, frankly, scary and hard.

This week, we go on that learning journey with the Israelites. After a series of miracles, the Israelites are given the green light to get out of Egypt, and God leads them go the long way, to avoid armed confrontation with any of Egypt’s neighbors. They make it to an encampment next to the red sea when Pharaoh decides, “Wait, why did I let them go? Let’s go get them!” So the Egyptians mount up their horses and chariots and charge in pursuit. 

At which point, the Israelites realize they’re trapped between a sea and a rampaging army. 

So they cry out to Moses, their guide and miracle worker, saying “What the heck? Were there not enough graves in Egypt that you had to bring us here to die?”

“Don’t worry!” Moses says, “God is going to save us, have faith!” The next line in the text is God saying to Moshe, “Why are you bothering me about this?! Do something about it!”

Which is, I think, the God equivalent of saying “You can back out your own car, thank you very much.” 

So Moses stretches out his hand, using the staff he used to bring the plagues and miracles in Egypt, and a wind blows all night, clearing a path through the sea. 

The Israelites are saved because of one, influential, external actor, who swoops in to save the day. The Israelites make it to freedom on someone else’s terms, because of someone else’s actions.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks points out that this behavior, this instinct to claim helplessness in the face of a crisis and cry out to someone else, had fundamentally changed for the Israelites by the end of the parsha. Though we begin this week with a story of the people taking the long way to freedom to avoid military conflict, and then freezing with fear as a rival army rushes towards them, the parsha ends with the story of the Israelites’ first major military victory. Once they’re out in the desert, the Israelites are attacked from behind by the Amalakites. But when this happens, Moses immediately says to Joshua, “Take up a group of fighters and go into battle; I’m going to climb a mountain with my magical staff to support you.” So Joshua does, and the Israelites prevail in battle. 

What happened here, Rabbi Sacks asks, that the Israelites could go in the space of one parsha from avoiding battle and needing a savior to being able to fend for themselves?

He answers that crossing the Red Sea was like the Israelite version of crossing the Rubicon: an action that, once taken, can’t be taken back. Yes, the Israelites needed some help to get out of Egypt, but once they’re in the desert, there’s no going back (not that this will stop them from occasionally grumbling about it). They themselves are responsible for making the changes they need, which is what the whole period of wandering in the desert is about: moving out of a slave mentality and into freedom, not only accepting responsibility and freedom but embracing it. 

This agency and self-sufficiency is innate, it had just been beaten out of them through so many generations of oppression. Entering the desert is the chance for them to reclaim their communal power. It will be hard, it will take time for them to feel change, but it will happen.

On Monday, we will observe MLK day, a chance for us to honor his legacy and feel reinvigorated to continue his fights for civil rights and justice. MLK day is the only federal holiday designated as a “national day of service”, in which we are all supposed to go out and make a difference in the world. 

As it happens, one of King’s biggest civil rights battles is back in the spotlight this week: the fight to ensure voting rights and access for all people, but especially Black and Brown folks who have been systematically disenfranchised for decades. Many of us have been following, with much concern, the moves many states have made to restrict voting access such as reducing hours that polls are open, closing polling places in predominantly black and brown communities, making it harder to register to vote, gerrymandering district lines to concentrate or disperse certain voters’ power. Grassroots organizers have been working for years, often with significant pushback, to combat this infringement of civil rights. This week, President Biden gave a speech in Georgia calling for a change to the filibuster rules in the Senate, which would make space for passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to restore and strengthen key provisions of the original, 1965 Voting Rights Act that had been dismantled. Without a change to the filibuster rules, this act is otherwise would be unlikely to clear the Senate. 

If this feels convoluted to you, well, it does to me too. Which is exactly why voting rights are so important: they help return agency to people whose lives are most affected by public policy: us. They allow people to make their will known, and remind their elected officials of their wants and needs. Voting access will not solve inequality or oppression and it will not eradicate white supremacy. But it does begin to shift the power balance away from the few and towards the many, and that is a fundamentally Jewish idea. 

Next week, we are going to read about two moments in which the will of the people is brought to the forefront: first, Moshe will heed the council of his father in law, and set up a system of judges and magistrates to help him govern. Later in the parsha, when God is gearing up for revelation, Moshe will go to the people and say, “Do you want this?” and the people will answer, “Naaseh v’nishma”- WE will do and WE will listen. God and Moshe, powerful leaders though they were, needed the agreement and buy in of every Israelite. We see this theme repeated throughout the Torah, Talmud and later Jewish history: a system where a small number attempt to govern or set policy without the buy-in and agreement of the community will fail. 

Where we might feel overwhelmed by the inertia of government, or the obstinacy of white supremacy, we do actually have mechanisms of change available to us, if only we had the capacity to use and believe in them. Dr. King said it best, so I want to read you a selection from his 1957 speech, “Give us the Ballot” delivered three years after the passing of Brown vs Board of Education:

“Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights. Give us the ballot, and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence. Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.

Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill and send to the sacred halls of Congress men who will not sign a “Southern Manifesto” because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice. Give us the ballot, and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justly and love mercy, and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who will, who have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the Divine. Give us the ballot, and we will quietly and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement the Supreme Court’s decision of May 17th, 1954.” That was the day of the Brown vs Board of Education decision.

What I find so striking about this passage is that King does not claim that voting rights will make problems disappear- he still expected to live in a world of racism and violence. What he wanted, what he was advocating for, was a way to fight those things, and especially a way to fight them according to the will of people most affected by them. 

We will see, over the next many parshiyot, that the Israelites need to learn again and again how to have faith, in themselves and in their leaders. They were disenfranchised for more than 400 years as slaves. So it makes sense that the process of stepping into their power, of believing that things can change and they can change them, will take a generation or so to take hold. 

So too with our country: we have failed black and brown people for so long, we have watched civil rights wither and democracy weaken, so much that we might not believe it’s possible to fix. We need laws that protect everyone’s access to vote, and so many other things, and we might not get them this time around. 

Like the Israelites going to battle against the Amalakites, we cannot turn back and avoid this fight, even though we don’t know it’s outcome. But we can, and we must, make even incremental changes- first of all, by making sure we vote in every election, and then by donating time or money or both to help others vote. 

I know that continuing to fight a battle that it feels like we’ve been losing for years is so hard, and that continuing to believe change is possible requires a tremendous amount of faith. 

Which is why I want to close by going back to Dr. King’s words, as he closed his speech 65 years ago. King knew, perhaps better than anyone, the faith necessary to stay in a fight after it has knocked you down, and he closed his “Give us the Ballot” speech by exhorting those gathered: 

“Go out with that faith today. Go back to your homes in the Southland to that faith, with that faith today. Go back to Philadelphia, to New York, to 1957 Detroit and Chicago with that faith today, that the universe is on our side in the struggle. Stand up for justice. Sometimes it gets hard, but it is always difficult to get out of Egypt, for the Red Sea always stands before you with discouraging dimensions. And even after you’ve crossed the Red Sea, you have to move through a wilderness with prodigious hilltops of evil and gigantic mountains of opposition. But I say to you this afternoon: Keep moving. Let nothing slow you up. Move on with dignity and honor and respectability.”