Shabbat Bo
Written by Debbie Young-Somers Friday, 30 January 2009
It was hard not to feel moved by the inauguration of the first black President of the United States of America last week. For a country that has experienced segregation within living memory, and which still feels the ripples of slavery, this was a huge moment. It does not mean that all prejudice has been wiped out, or that all opportunities are now equal between black and white in America (or, indeed, in the UK), but it is a hugely important step towards this long hoped for dream. This symbolic and very real movement from slavery to freedom resonates deeply with our portion this week, as the rabble of Hebrew slaves takes their first tentative steps towards freedom.
We throw this term ‘freedom’ around quite glibly when we refer to the Exodus and the seder, the roots of which appear in our parashah, Bo, this week. But is it true freedom that the ex-slaves are edging towards? It is not an easy life that they are embarking upon. True, they are rather whingey, and don’t ever seem to look on the bright side: that they have gained freedom from the hard labour and slavery they have known under Pharaoh and the Egyptians. Yet this is not some libertarian life they are being offered in exchange, but a life of service to a higher power. They leave Egypt in order to be able to worship their God, and as they make their way towards Sinai, they progress towards the covenant that is to be made between God and the people, a relationship defined at least in part by their responsibilities, rather than their freedoms.
Rabbi David Rosen (1), former Chief Rabbi of Ireland and long-time leader in the interfaith world has written of an inaccurate tendency to overemphasise Judaism’s preference for human responsibility rather than human rights (or freedoms). He sees both as essential elements at the core of Judaism. Nonetheless, while Torah and Halakhah can be understood to promote human rights and individual freedoms, it does not seem to be the rights of the individual that dominate the experience of our freed slaves, who—while each made be-tzelem Elohim, in the image of God—must build a community together, and enter into a covenant with God collectively.
Thinking on this kind of communal level, while Barack Obama is one black man who has beaten the odds individually, collectively there are still many problems for minority communities in the USA, as there are on this side of the Atlantic. Some brief illustrations from the US Bureau of Statistics: Unemployment is nearly double within the black community relative to the population as a whole, and the number of blacks who live below the poverty threshold is 150 per cent more than whites. Meanwhile in the UK the exclusion rate for black pupils is around twice the rate it is for white pupils (2) . Social inequality, as much as racial inequality, continues to be an issue we struggle with here in the UK. In 2007 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation carried out a huge consultation to try and establish what social evils plague us today; one interviewee commented that:
“if you’re poor, you’re struggling all the time—you have no choices in life. That’s what poverty does to you, it gives you no choice”.Freedom, it seems, in western democracies at least, is a relative thing, which to some extent depends on your level of wealth. Of course, talking about western freedom is in and of itself a relative thing, when seen in the context of worldwide oppression, poverty and slavery.
But if freedom is relative, and in need of temperance with responsibility, how do we, as progressive Jews, retain personal freedom as a compelling part of our Judaism. Informed decision making and personal Jewish journeys have long been our catch-phrases. But what of our overarching values, our communal responsibility, our ethical imperatives outside of our own needs? There must be something more binding us together than personal choice, there must be areas in which we meet each other and connect. Indeed the seder provides one such opportunity, where Jews have for millennia gathered to remember the Exodus, and our freedom from oppression and tyranny. Many Progressive sedarim these days ask us to consider not only our own story of freedom and slavery, but those of others as well. Some twenty-seven million people remain enslaved today (3), including bonded labourers and trafficked people. All this despite having just marked the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which demands: "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms."
The UN Declaration of Human Rights emerged as a response to the experiences of the Second World War, and this week we marked National Holocaust Memorial Day, the theme of which was ‘Stand Up to Hatred’. This national, rather than Jewish, memorial is a crucial part of learning from the events of the Holocaust. Dr. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a great Israeli philosopher, (and one thinker whom Rabbi David Rosen criticized for over-emphasizing commandments and obligations over human rights within Judaism), believed that the Holocaust was not a Jewish issue. Of course we should memorialise the Shoah, but it is not a problem for Jews, per se, but a problem that Europe and its perpetrators must deal with (4) . So National Holocaust Memorial day provides an important forum for this processing and thinking, about the events of the Holocaust, but also about ongoing genocide today and since 1945, when so many declared ‘Never Again’.
Genocide and slavery are of course different, but both come out of our ability to see the other as somehow inhuman, unimportant, and lacking in an individual identity. Both destroy the other and often reduce them to some kind of sub-human. They also damage the perpetrator, and they damage us all by their presence in society. Nehama Leibowitz, (whose brother was Yeshayahu), in her exploration of last weeks’ portion Va’era, argued along with Tractate Rosh Hashanah in the Palestinian Talmud that on leaving Egypt, Israel themselves had been keeping slaves. She writes:
“Israel is not worthy of freedom from bondage until they first liberate themselves from the disgrace of subjecting others. They are not worthy of being considered servants of God, who alone is the rightful Master of all, so long as they themselves lord it over their brethren” (5).It seems that the slaves who left Egypt were not as blameless and good as we might be tempted to think, and while we do not keep slaves ourselves, or commit genocide, we all (and I am not exempt) allow slavery to continue, through our shopping habits, our silence, and our ignorance.
Martin Luther King had a dream, and it has certainly come closer to being a reality in the last few months. But while Europe celebrates the end of the Bush era, and remembers its own shame from the last century, and as Americans hold their heads up high at the sea change they made happen, let us not forget the long way we have to travel before we find real freedom. And let us not forget that freedom must walk hand in hand with responsibility, the responsibility our leaders must take, and the responsibility each of us must take, to continue the change that so many have worked so hard for, not only because we were slaves in Egypt, but because we also have the ability to enslave.
May we all be blessed with true freedoms, and the ability and strength to fulfil our responsibilities, and may we all play a part in the creation of a future where all will be judged on the content of their characters, not the colour of their skin, or the religion they profess.
May this be God’s will.
Debbie Young-Somers
1 http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/Default.aspx
2 Interviewed in the film ‘Izkor’’
3 http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/Default.aspx
4 Interviewed in the film ‘Izkor’’
5 New Studies in Shemot
