To Feel Liberation
Friday January 14, 2022 – י״ב שְׁבָט תשפ״ב
By Dr. Adar Cohen
How should one feel after being liberated from tyranny and oppression? How should a nation feel in that situation?
Throughout human history, we know of quite a few cases of peoples who endured many years of tyranny, terror, oppression, humiliation, and fear, and waited for years for the moment to come when they could feel the taste of liberation, redemption, or in the words of the Torah “from slavery to freedom”, יציאה מעבדות לחירות, – יציאת מצרים the exodus from Egypt. Does the transition from a stage of bondage, a true feeling of freedom, happen immediately? How do those people who suffered, and carry the collective memories of suffering passed down through the generations, feel at the point of redemption? How can one recognize redemption?
Our weekly portion, בשלח, gives us the cultural prototype of such a dramatic event in the lifetime of people – both as individuals and as a collective. The Torah tells us about that tremendous moment when our ancestors crossed the Red Sea:
“Thus there was the cloud with the darkness, and it cast a spell upon the night… Then Moses held out his arm over the sea and Adonai drove back the sea with a strong east wind all that night and turned the sea into dry ground. The waters were split, and the Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left…At the morning watch, Adonai looked down upon the Egyptian army from a pillar of fire and cloud, and threw the Egyptian army into panic.” [Exodus, 14: 19-24]
It was not only a physical transition from night to dawn, a change in the clock and in nature. Even more, it was a mighty transition in the life of each one of those frightened and oppressed slaves and a historical transition in the life of a nation.
I keep trying to imagine how it would feel to be part of such an extraordinary and heroic occurrence, the moments of excitement from being oppressed to becoming a free person. As a free person myself, who grew up in a Jewish state and in a democratic society, I realize that, fortunately, I could never fully understand that.
Thousands of years have passed since the enslavement in Egypt and the emancipation from it, times in which the Israelites and their descendants experienced political independence as well as oppression at the hands of foreign rulers. But we have never lost our faith in the importance of liberation and our belief in freedom. As Rabbi Gregory Kotler mentioned, during the Crusades and in the cellars of the Inquisition, in the Soviet labor camps and in the Nazi extermination camps, our people continued to say: “השתא עבדי – לשנה הבאה בני חורין”- “Now we are slaves – for next year free people.”
As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, Jews throughout history have recognized tyranny for what it is. They refused to be intimidated by power, threat, terror, and fear. That is why they were attacked and conquered by the empires of the ancient world – Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and Rome; the Christian and Muslim theocratic empires of the Middle Ages; and the two greatest tyrannies of the modern world, Nazi Germany, and Stalinist Russia. The result was that Jews found themselves, time and again, on the front line of the defense of humanity. This moral attitude, embodied in the story of Exodus, became an inspiration to others.
In the 1970s our penchant for liberation was linked to the struggle to free the Jews from the USSR. Both American Jews and Israelis worked to liberate their Russian brethren under the slogan – “Let my people go!”
Natan Sharansky, a prisoner of Zion in the Soviet Union, who later became a minister in the Israeli government and Chairman of the Jewish Agency, writes how the Jewish collective memory accompanied him in the Soviet prison:
“During the night of the Pesach seder, I told two of my fellow prisoners the story of the Exodus through a small ditch in the wall. This isolated group of dissidents had already tasted the ability of freedom to reshape the individual and understood the power that lies within it to change an entire society. The idea that a nation of slaves could win freedom and defeat the most powerful tyranny in the world, was for us, not an ancient legend but an eternal truth.”
In February 1986 Sharansky was eventually released. I wondered if – as he was marching over the Glinika bridge from the East side of Berlin to the West side of the city – did he feel in those moments that he was metaphorically walking on the “dry ground” in the middle of the Red Sea?
This Shabbat it is important to recall the universal lesson of the Exodus, the ultimate symbol of liberation from slavery, through the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself. The Bible tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh’s court centuries ago and cried, “Let my people go.” This is a kind of opening chapter in a continuing story. The present struggle in the United States is a later chapter in the same unfolding story.” [–Martin Luther King, “Nobel Lecture” (1964)]
Dr. King saw his struggle as a continuation of the struggle of Moses, and through that, the same struggle as that of all oppressed people. Nowadays, we acknowledge that liberating the slaves in the 1860s and fighting and marching for human rights in the 1960s were important steps in the trajectory towards freedom, but the path to equality is yet long and tortuous. The Exodus from Egypt didn’t end when we left the sea for dry land. We then embarked on a 40-year journey through the desert to reach the promised land – and once there, much work was left to be done.
The full integration of Russian Jews in Israeli society didn’t happen in that one event of liberation from the Soviet regime. Likewise, to ensure equality, and to erase decades of systemic racism against black and brown people in the United States cannot happen through a one-shot transformative event – it takes a long journey through the Sinai desert. We must all be proactive to bring about the moral struggle for freedom and liberation. This is part of our Jewish heritage – the fight against injustice anywhere and in support of humanistic values for everyone. We cannot forget this mission of universal social justice as we cannot forget the ongoing Jewish Exodus.
Moreover, the State of Israel, my beloved homeland, is not just an ongoing project to ensure the freedom and liberation of the Jewish people. It ought to be an ongoing project to ensure a just society for all. The combination of these values is the common “(dry) ground” that unites us all as liberal Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora. Like in the crossing of the Red Sea, we need this “Pillar of cloud” (עמוד ענן) that will lead us as the essence of the Torah that we teach generations to come. May we all remember with joy and gratitude our ancestors’ moments of Exodus and may they be a constant reminder for us all to keep on struggling for justice and liberty from tyranny existing in the world around us.
שבת שלום
Dr. Adar Cohen-Kedem is serving this year as the Senior Israel Educational Consultant for ARZA and the URJ. He serves as the Faculty & Academic Director, Department of Teacher Education, Seymour Fox School of Education, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and is the author of Both Jewish and Democratic: A Handbook for Israeli Teachers, from the Israel Democracy Institute. Dr. Cohen can be reached at acohen-kedem@urj.org.
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