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"TOO JEWISH" RADIO SHOW

Bo

by Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

This week our people gets out of Egypt—or, to be more accurate, we chant the Torah portion of Bo which includes the description of the actual Exodus from Egyptian slavery and the establishment of the rites and rituals of the observance of the Passover. 

The build up to this week’s parshah has been steady and dramatic.  Plague has followed plague—ten of them, of course—rising in severity as the One God overcomes the long roster of Egyptian gods and idols and frees the people of Israel from their long night of oppression and slavery.  Finally in Bo our ancestors become a free people.

Since we are now free, you might expect us to immediately cast off the memory of oppression and enslavement and move on to new and better things, to reject our history of degradation.  But oddly, God through Moses commands us to do quite the opposite—to remember the slavery, and how we were freed only by God’s great acts.  And from this point on we are reminded repeatedly in the Torah to remember those in our own society who are oppressed, and to help them, because after all we ourselves were slaves in the land of Egypt; “You were strangers in a strange land” we tell ourselves; help the strangers in your land.

The message is powerful, in its own way: we are to recall the fact of our own oppression, so that we will identify with those in our own world who need our help.  The sedrah of Bo teaches us that we must seek always to redeem the world through our own actions.  Our connection is with the lowly, and our efforts to heal the world come from the knowledge that we ourselves have come up from exactly that background.

It’s a powerful lesson in humility that leads directly to charity, tzedakah, and the promulgation of righteousness in the world.  May we all remember that lesson this week—and every week.

But there is also a further lesson in Bo, for remembering the Exodus is not simply a call to social action.  After the final plague is inflicted on Pharaoh and the Egyptians and the Israelites are freed from slavery, they escape towards the shore of the sea of Reeds .  As their great ancestor Joseph asked, they carry with them on their journey an ark containing his bones.  It is symbolic of the new life in liberation our people are seeking—and emblematic, as well, of the fact that we always carry our past with us, our history, for better or worse, throughout our lives. 

When we are able to transform that personal history, as our ancestors did collectively, from slavery to freedom, from the bondage of the snares of the past to the freedom to create a new, better, holier reality, we can achieve the promise of a future of goodness, blessing, and life.

Isn’t there someone in your own family you’d like to see again, even an old friend from whom you’ve become estranged? Joseph teaches all of us that we can go home again, that we can find our way back to peace and wholeness and love.