The Jewish Mission - Mishpatim 5775

When I was young, I did not think too heavily about personal meaning in my Jewish involvement. We were a family of shul-goers and Torah readers, and our Jewish experience was defined by driving the 20 miles back and forth to our synagogue in Pittsfield, MA several times a week for Hebrew school, for Shabbat morning services, and for other types of Jewish involvement. Being Jewish meant showing up; that was the essential means through which we identified.

For many of us who came of age in the 20th century, being Jewish was about joining a synagogue, spending holidays with family, marrying a member of the community, and trying to make it in the New World despite prevalent anti-Semitism. The desire to be connected to a community, to identify with a people and a faith, was what built great synagogues like this one. Identity was defined by membership, and institutions like this were as much about social life and status as about Judaism.

And, as has often been observed, the Jews are just like everybody else, only more so. Robert Putnam, the professor of public policy at Harvard, demonstrates over and over in his book, “Bowling Alone,” that the concept of membership and group participation as an essential part of our identity peaked in the middle of the 20th century and has been on the decline since.

Today, membership is not enough to sustain identity for most people. As I have said here before, the data show that the fastest-growing religion in America is “None.” (Note: not “nun.”) Americans are far more isolated from one another, and often alienated from faith and ethnic groups. We are, as Putnam suggests, bowling alone. The “social capital” that Putnam describes as the glue that held our society together has largely eroded.

The greatest philosophical challenge of our time, and indeed the challenge facing most faith communities, is meaning. Our sense of how we derive meaning from our lives has changed tremendously.

Today, everything is individualized. It’s not about “us.” It’s all about “I” and my iPhone. (This is somewhat i-ronic, since most of us are today carrying devices that connect us into one central data location, where we are little more than bits of information.) The task, therefore, of the American synagogue is to create meaning on a personal basis for all who enter, to attempt to reach the individual heart and soul of everyone in its orbit.

So how exactly do we do this? The Torah gives us a few hints. Today in Parashat Mishpatim, we read the following (Ex. 22:20-21):

וְגֵר לֹא-תוֹנֶה, וְלֹא תִלְחָצֶנּוּ:  כִּי-גֵרִים הֱיִיתֶם, בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם.  כָּל-אַלְמָנָה וְיָתוֹם, לֹא תְעַנּוּן.  

You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan.

And there are many other such formulations. Over and over, the Torah exhorts us to pursue acts of hesed, of lovingkindness - for the sojourner among you, the widow, the orphan, the poor, the worker who depends on his daily wages, and so forth.

(BTW, the word “ger,” which in modern Hebrew means a convert to Judaism, is better understood traditionally not as a convert, but as a non-Israelite who lives among Israelites. That is, a ger is a stranger, one without family connections or property, and therefore presence in the margins of society.)

We understand and appreciate the plight of those in need, in all their forms of need, because we came from a needy place. We were subjected to the very worst treatment that humans can concoct. We were slaves, and we emerged from slavery as a nation.

The verse is crying out to us: slavery symbolizes what it means to be oppressed, disenfranchised, downtrodden. We understand this. And the Torah reminds us of this many times; I have not actually counted the number of times that this occurs, but an anecdote floating around out there says that it’s somewhere in thirties. Regardless, it’s far more than the number of times that we are commanded to keep Shabbat or kashrut. (And as you may know, there is no explicit Torah commandment to pray three times daily, or to read the Torah, to recite Qiddush on Friday night, etc. That is another indicator of how important hesed is, relative to those things that we consider essential parts of Jewish life.)

And it is this mitzvah, the mitzvah of recalling slavery for the purposes of doing good works for others in need, more than any other mitzvah, which has the potential to infuse our lives with meaning.

Our holy mission as Jews is to work to improve the welfare of others:  to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to house the homeless, to uplift those whom society has neglected. Our mission is to ensure that all people are treated justly, and to fill our lives with acts of righteousness. That is why we are “Or LaGoyim,” a light unto the nations of the world.

The Viennese psychiatrist and survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, Victor Frankl, published an extraordinarily influential book a year after the end of World War II: Man’s Search for Meaning. What Frankl learned in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz was that in an environment designed to break the human spirit, those who had the best chances of survival were the people who had a sense of purpose. And, Frankl confesses, the ones who survived were not the brightest, the cleverest, or even the strongest physically. “The best of us did not return,” he says.

“There is nothing in the world… that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: ‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.’ I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive.”

Frankl goes on to speak of a uniquely modern problem that he calls the “existential vacuum,” the sense felt by many of his patients that life is meaningless. And if, as Frankl notes, as many as 60% of Americans found life somewhat meaningless in 1946, all the more so today: as we are continually distracted by our devices, as we work longer hours for less money and watch helplessly as our children run from activity to activity solely for the purpose of impressing an Ivy League admissions committee, as we recede into the ever-more solitary environment of our comfortable living rooms and digital nests, the existential vacuum has grown.

But there is a way out of the vacuum. What gives our lives meaning? It is doing for others. It is extending our hands to those in need, in all the ways that we can. That is the holy purpose to which we are called: Gemilut hasadim - acts of lovingkindness.

The mitzvot of Jewish life, including the Top Ten that we read last week and the many more that we read today in Parashat Mishpatim, give our lives a framework for holy living. But following Jewish law - observing Shabbat, kashrut, tefillah, holidays, etc. - is not enough for most of us. Whether we pursue the 613 mitzvot with zeal or not, we must add to that the layers of activities that make Judaism a fully meaningful pursuit: reaching out to others for the purposes of hesed.

Almost every synagogue that I have ever visited contains a sculpture or other artwork displaying the tablets that Moshe brought down from Mt. Sinai, and we must always remain close to our textual tradition. But the real, essential role that synagogues must play in the future is to provide structure for going beyond these basic rules, beyond those tablets, to build communities that provide meaning for individuals. We have to create meaning. We have to be platforms that give our members, and the wider community, the chance to fulfill their holy purpose: to reach out to those in need through works of lovingkindness.

Shabbat shalom.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson

The True Meaning of Matzah - Seventh Day Pesah, 5774

I suspect that some of you must have a running bet over whether I’m going to begin a sermon with, “I recently heard on NPR…” I’m not sure what the current odds are, but it may be that money is about to be owed:

I recently heard on NPR a fascinating story about a church in North Carolina that really struck me. At St. Albans Episcopal Church in Davidson, a well-appointed outer suburb of Charlotte, there is a new bronze statue on the church grounds, depicting a figure lying, huddled on a bench, wrapped in a blanket. The only body parts of the figure visible are its feet, which display the wounds that, according to Christian tradition, were caused by the crucifixion of Jesus at the hands of the Romans. The statue is titled Jesus the Homeless, and, as you may imagine, has caused no shortage of uproar within the congregation. Some love it, including the church’s pastor, and some hate it. (BTW, the sculptor has a wonderful name that may resonate for some in this holiday season: Timothy Schmalz.)

What caught my attention when listening to this story is the power of this message. One goal of art, as with religion, is to take us outside of ourselves, to raise our awareness about things that we cannot otherwise see. The message that this statue projects is not the typical theology common to images found in churches - Jesus’s birth or death scenes, or decked out with glorious threads and haloes and rays of light.

Rather, the message here is, remember the needy! You who come to this well-kept suburban church, which could afford to spend $22,000 to purchase the art installation in memory of a deceased member, should remember that there are plenty of people in the world, good, deserving people, who cannot afford a home, much less one in a neighborhood like this. And this is a message that all of us who live in more comfortable environments would do well to remember.

And while some believe that this is an affront to the central character in Christianity, others see this as religious consciousness-raising par excellence. As the church’s spiritual leader Rev. David Buck puts it, "We believe that that's the kind of life Jesus had. He was, in essence, a homeless person."

Now of course, I am not here today to talk about Jesus, even though yesterday was Easter Sunday. Rather, I am going to talk about Pesah, which of course plays a role as the backdrop in the Christian bible for the events surrounding Jesus’ death.

However, I think that the symbolic intent conveyed by the statue is as valent here as it is in North Carolina, and in fact, one of the central mitzvot / commandments of Pesah, the consumption of matzah, is its spiritual analog.

Occasionally, I will admit that we have a problem in Judaism. We try to hit too many buttons at once. When you consider Pesah, for example, you can see how the central message of this holiday might be obscured amidst all the other noise. What are the themes of Pesah? There are several - this is a holiday with at least four names: Hag ha-Aviv (the festival of spring), Hag ha-Herut (the festival of freedom), and Hag ha-Matzot (the festival of flat, tasteless, cracker-like bread), and of course, Pesah, referring to the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb. But the central message of Pesah is even more specific than that. It is reflected in the following statement, which we say during the seder, right before we ask the Four Questions that get the conversation about slavery and freedom started:

הַא לַחְמָא עַנְיָא, דִּאֲכַלוּ אֲבָהָתַנָא בְּאַרְעָא דְּמִצְרַיִם.  כָּל דִּכְפִין, יֵיתֵי וְיֵיכוּל; כָּל דִּצְרִיךְ יֵיתֵי וִיפַסַּח.

Ha lahma anya di-akhalu avahatana be-ar’a demitzrayim.

Kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul; kol ditzrikh yeitei veyifsah.

This is the bread of poverty that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.

Let all who are hungry, come and eat.

Let all who are in need come and celebrate Passover.

Most of us probably rush by this statement on the way to more interesting territory in the Haggadah, or perhaps on the way to dinner, without thinking about it too deeply. It’s in Aramaic, and we all know that when we find ritual passages in Aramaic, it’s because the liturgical framers wanted us to understand. The passage refers to the Talmud, Tractate Ta’anit 20b. In enumerating the noble deeds performed by the great sage Rav Huna, the Gemara reports the following:

When Rav Huna was in possession of some medicament, he would take a pitcherful thereof, hang it on the door-post and say: “Whoever wishes to have some, let him come and take it.” … When he was about to sit down to a meal, he would open the doors, saying: “Anyone who desires to eat, let him come in and eat.”

What made Rav Huna a great sage (and not a merely good one) was his willingness to share with those in need. We echo those words when we open our seder, even before telling the Pesah story, by saying, in a language that (at least historically) the Jews understood better than Hebrew, “Kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul,” let all who are hungry, come and eat.

We borrowed this text directly into the Haggadah because it speaks to the values that we highlight on this holiday. We should be more like Rav Huna. When we sit and discuss our departure from Egypt, an abundant meal awaiting us in the kitchen, we should not forget that we are a people whose nationhood was forged in slavery and oppression, and that we should remember (א) there are plenty of others out there who are still suffering, and (ב) that we might just as easily end up in Mitzrayim, the narrow place of Egypt, once again. It is our duty not just to recite this line, but to really mean it. If we do not open up our doors to those who lack food and shelter and clothing, then we must, in subsequent days and months, open up our hearts and our wallets.

And thus, reciting this line at the seder is far from the end of fulfilling our Passover obligation. Think about it for a moment: the first seder was nearly a week ago, and we’re still eating matzah, and (at least for the Ashkenazim) a range of meager foods.

Eating is so central to our lives - those of us who can afford to, do it almost all day long. It’s such a huge part of our personal and macro-economies that we often do not realize how omnipresent it is - how much time and energy we spend eating, or preparing, or shopping for, or growing and harvesting and transporting and all the other tasks associated with food.

So it is remarkable indeed that we eat this lehem oni, this bread of poverty, for eight whole days. Not just one or two evenings, but for about 2% of your calendar year.

Matzah is, or at least should be, something akin to the Jewish version of the homeless Jesus: a reminder: a symbol of what we have vs. what we might not have; a beacon calling us to be at once grateful for our freedom and our ability to dine like free people as well as mindful of those who have no freedom and cannot dine like we do.

Kol dikhfin yeitei veyeikhul. This potent message of the seder continues to resonate, even as this festival winds to a close.

My sister, who is living in Budapest, Hungary this year, put together a seder for some family and friends last week. She told me that the matzah that she procured in Budapest was somehow much worse than the matzah that she has been accustomed to in the States.

Now, I’m not sure how that can be - matzah, lehem oni, the bread of poverty, is not something to be enjoyed. But whether you like eating matzah or not, and regardless of its quality and relative tastiness, the meaning of the matzah is consistent: we emerged from oppression so that we can extend a hand to others.

We do not often step over homeless people here in Great Neck, nor are we frequently approached by people asking for money on Middle Neck Road. But there are needy among us here, as there are everywhere. The matzah should remind us of that, as well as our obligation to be like Rav Huna, and figuratively, if not literally, open the doors to those in need.

 

And so, to conclude, we should use these last two days of Pesah (and for many of us the last days of consuming matzah until the next 14th of Nisan) to consider how we might emulate Rav Huna, how we might fulfill our obligation to care for those who have less than we do. How can we carry the message and symbolism of matzah into the other 98% of the year? Can we commit to the following?

• Bringing food to Temple Israel when our Chesed Connection collects, or directly to the food pantry at St. Aloysius church here in town
• Participating in Midnight Run, which we host here at Temple Israel, and helping with Hatzilu, which distributes food to those in need locally
• Donating to charitable organizations that feed the hungry (e.g. Mazon here in America, Meir Panim in Israel)
• Helping our children and grandchildren to understand the importance of giving by demonstrating our willingness to do so. Get them involved!
• Educate yourself on what the issues are surrounding hungry and homeless people. Find your own way to help out. Seek out other initiatives and promote them to your family and friends. Raise the bar of dialogue.

Don’t let the message of the matzah get lost in all the other messages of this season. Let all who are hungry, come and eat.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Monday, April 21, 2014.)

Let My People Pray - Va-era 5773

When Israel was in Egypt’s land / Let my people go

These are the words of the old spiritual, originally composed and sung by black slaves in America about their plight, their desire to be set free from bondage. Slaves who were brought here from Africa were stripped of their original tribal cultures and made to worship as their white Christian masters did, and they found strength and solace in the messages of the Bible. The thematic line of this spiritual, “Let my people go,” comes from Parashat Va-era, which we chanted this morning. God instructs Moses to go to Pharaoh and say:

ה' א-ֱלֹהֵי הָעִבְרִים שְׁלָחַנִי אֵלֶיךָ לֵאמֹר, שַׁלַּח אֶת-עַמִּי, וְיַעַבְדֻנִי בַּמִּדְבָּר

The Lord, God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, “Let My people go that they may worship Me in the wilderness.”

What the spiritual leaves out is the second part of that verse, about worshipping God in the desert. What is God’s justification for requesting freedom for the Israelites? It is not necessarily that they deserve freedom because slavery is wrong. Rather, they should be released so that they could receive the Torah and thereby worship God freely. The command given to Pharaoh from God is as much about religious freedom as it is about physical freedom. Moshe delivers this request to Pharaoh multiple times in this parashah and next week’s, as the plagues are unfurled on Egypt, and it is always couched in the language of spiritual purpose. As our Etz Hayim commentary points out (p. 359), “It was not only freedom from something, it was freedom for something.”

The Kotel in 1910, with men and women praying in close proximity, without a mehitzah. Many such images exist.

The religion that God bestows upon the Israelites in the latter parts of the book of Shemot / Exodus is, of course, that of the priestly sacrificial worship, practiced first in the desert using the portable tabernacle, the mishkan, and in later centuries in Jerusalem at the First and Second Temples. Fast forward more than a millennium, to the year 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, and the Jews needed to find a way to reach God through a means other than sacrifice. And that route was prayer, which we continue to do today. Rather than animal sacrifice, we offer today avodah shebalev, the service of the heart, as Maimonides puts it.

Here at Temple Israel, as is the custom in virtually all Conservative synagogues, we pray in a style that reflects the openness of our society to full participation of men and women. This is, of course, a break with historical Jewish practice that only came about within the last half-century or so. We are egalitarian; we count women and men equally under halakhah / Jewish law. And this is as it should be, because the world has changed in the last 2,000 years.

In our society, women can be doctors, lawyers, CEOs, judges, politicians, or even the leader of the most powerful country on Earth. So why, when it comes to Jewish ritual, should they be confined to the “back of the bus”, that is, the other side of the mehitzah (the wall separating the sexes in Orthodox synagogues)? Why should women be prevented from leading the community in tefillah / prayer, reading from the Torah, becoming rabbis or mohalot (those who perform ritual circumcisions) or soferot (scribes that write holy documents like the Torah)? The very idea of keeping women from participating in all aspects of Jewish life is not just absurd, but deeply offensive.

Times have changed. We have changed. And mainstream Judaism has always accommodated change.

I was recently asked by a member of this community if I would work as a rabbi in an Orthodox synagogue. My answer was, as you may not be too surprised to hear, no. Not because I do not respect Orthodoxy and those who choose to pursue Judaism according to its principles - I do very much so, as an advocate of religious freedom and pluralism. Not because Orthodoxy is inauthentic - it is of course as authentic an expression of Judaism and at the same time in many respects just as modern as we are. And not because much of Orthodoxy does not accept me as a rabbi.  I could never be an Orthodox rabbi because this, the Conservative movement, is my spiritual home.

There are three principles of Conservative Judaism that are to me non-negotiable:

1. That we accept that Judaism has developed and changed historically, and what we today call Judaism was not handed to Moses on Mt. Sinai, but is a product of two millennia of natural growth. Judaism as we know it, including Orthodoxy (a modern concept in itself), has never been fixed.

2. That we accept modern understandings of God and the Torah, according to the tools of academic inquiry and contemporary philosophy, and allow them to stand alongside and interact with the traditional views;

3. (and this is the most important item) That we accept men and women as being equal before God - the principle of egalitarianism.

Today is not only Shabbat, the second-holiest day of the Jewish calendar, but also Rosh Hodesh Shevat, the first day of the eleventh month of the Jewish year. Rosh Hodesh is not really a holiday; it is a day that is slightly elevated above the rest of the month because it marks the renewal of the lunar cycle that was so important to our ancestors. Today is the day of the new moon.

Unlike other, more significant holidays, Rosh Hodesh has no special practices other than a few liturgical changes. There are no special foods, no particular ritual items like ram’s horns or palm fronds or a candelabrum. To my knowledge, there are no Rosh Hodesh songs or stories.

In his comments to the story of the Molten Calf (Parashat Ki Tissa), Rashi cites a midrash that the women are given Rosh Hodesh as a day of rest because the female Israelites refused to surrender their jewelry to Aaron to build the calf. So there is at least a midrashic basis for making Rosh Hodesh a special day for women.

As such, there are two things that have developed for Rosh Hodesh in the last two or three decades. One is the widespread establishment of women’s Rosh Hodesh groups, which can take a variety of forms because there is nothing in classical Jewish literature or practice that indicates how to do this. Rosh Hodesh groups often feature discussion, recitation of tehillim / psalms, some group activities, and of course food, and all for women. I have, in fact, never been invited to participate in a Rosh Hodesh group! (But hey, I’m not bitter.)

The second is the Women of the Wall. I have mentioned them here before - this is the Rosh Hodesh group writ large, consisting of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform women, that has been meeting in Jerusalem at the Kotel, the Western Wall plaza, every Rosh Hodesh since 1988. They feature a shaharit / morning service conducted entirely by and for women. They did not meet today, because it is Shabbat, but will reconvene again for Rosh Hodesh Adar in a month.

Here is the troubling part: since 2002, when the Israeli Supreme Court allocated the Robinson’s Arch area of the Western Wall for non-Orthodox, egalitarian groups who wanted to conduct mixed-gender services at the Kotel, it has been illegal for any group to conduct a service on the women’s side of the mehitzah at the traditional Kotel, and illegal to conduct egalitarian services anywhere in the Kotel plaza. Furthermore, any woman wearing the traditionally male tefillah accessories, tallit or tefillin, can be arrested, and some of the Women of the Wall have indeed been taken to jail and subjected to harsh treatment.

The Kotel, the exterior western retaining wall of the Second Temple complex, rebuilt by King Herod in the 1st century BCE, has long been considered the holiest site in Judaism. Every tourist group goes there; I remember my first visit as an eager 17-year-old, when the tears welled up from deep within me as I extended a hand to touch the ancient Herodian stones.

The area that is traditionally thought of as “The Kotel” is actually a very small fraction of the total surface area of that western retaining wall; it became elevated because for many centuries, it was the only part of the wall that was accessible to visitors.

Today, the entire Kotel plaza is effectively an Orthodox synagogue. It has its own rabbi, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovich, of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) extraction, appointed by the Chief Rabbi of Israel. Recently, Rabbi Rabinovich wrote an opinion piece in Israel’s Yedi’ot Aharanot newpaper explaining how he is a moderate fighting off the intrusions of “extremists” like Women of the Wall, in which he said the following:

This is how fanaticism operates. It asks for protection in the name of tolerance, then thrives and flourishes until it becomes too late to stop the devastation it brings on us all.
I'll say it loud and clear: As long as I am the Western Wall's rabbi, fanaticism will not establish a foothold at the site. The Kotel's stones can teach us about the price of zealotry.

Women who want to hold a prayer service, who want to participate in the mitzvot of Jewish life, and men and women who want to pray together near the traditional Kotel are “fanatics” who will bring “devastation” on all of us. Thus saith Rabbi Rabinovich.

The worst possible kind of fanatacism is that which has the gall to declare itself mainstream. Non-Orthodox Jews represent more than 80% of American Jewry. What we do is not extreme. We are the mainstream.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Kotel is not a synagogue. It is a very old wall. And it belongs to all of us: Haredi, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, secular, humanist, Zionist, non-Zionist, etc.

Some of you might be thinking right now, “Why does this matter? Why should I care if the Kotel functions like a Haredi synagogue?”

Let me tell you why this matters. We live in an age in which our children’s commitment to Israel, something which the American Jewish community has long taken for granted, is undeniably on the wane. So when they go to Israel with their synagogue or youth group or Birthright or whatever, and they see that the State of Israel, aided and abetted by the intolerance of the Israeli Rabbinate, dismisses the mode of Judaism in which they were raised, this only creates doubt about their connection to the Jewish State. For most of us, ladies and gentlemen, our connection to Judaism is deeply associated with what we do in synagogue. Rejection of our mainstream practices by the increasingly right-wing religious authorities, in league with the Israeli government - THAT is what will bring devastation on us all.

Let My people go, that they might worship Me. Indeed.

There is here a slight glimmer of hope: Natan Sharansky, the former Russian refusenik who is now the head of the Jewish Agency, has been assigned by PM Netanyahu to study the matter and come up with a plan. I am cautionsly optimistic, but let’s see how this plays out.

Meanwhile, let us hope and pray that we are soon set free to worship as we please, as our ancestors once were.

Shabbat shalom.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, January 12, 2013.)

Slavery, Then and Now: How Matzah Can Change the World

“Ha lahma anya,” we chant in Aramaic as we open the Maggid / storytelling section of the Passover seder.  “This is the bread of poverty that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.  Let all who are hungry come and eat.”  

I must confess that I truly loathe matzah, and love good quality, fresh bread.  I dread this time of year with the same passion that drives men to produce great sandwiches - the TLT, for example: baked tofu, lettuce and tomato, ideally with red onion and wasabi mayonnaise on a hallah roll.  Matzah is not merely unsatisfying; it’s downright painful, and somewhat unsettling.

But that, of course, is exactly the point.  For eight days out of the year, we forgo not only the sourdough, whole wheat, rye, pumpernickel, pita, tortillas, and of course pasta, decent breakfast cereals, soy sauce, and a whole range of other hametz-laden edibles.  This is supposed to be a challenge, one that brings us down a few notches from our usual comfort range; although we are free, we should continue to look back over our shoulders to those whom we left behind in Egypt, those who even in this day are oppressed and suffering, like modern-day slaves.

There are an estimated 12 million to 27 million slaves on the planet today: 80% are female, 50% are minors.  Some 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, and more within their own countries.  Contemporary slaves falls into two major categories: those that are forced into prostitution, and those in forced-labor arrangements.  Both of these types exist within our borders, but our lifestyles support slavery all over the world.  If you want to see how your choices keep slaves and their taskmasters in business all over the world, go to the website slaveryfootprint.org.

Why is it that Jews have often been at the forefront of humanitarian causes?  Why is it that we have such a long track record of remembering the poor and disenfranchised, of taking steps to repair this fractured world?  Perhaps it is because the Torah exhorts us no less than 36 times to protect the stranger that dwells among us, far more than keeping the Shabbat or avoiding pork.  Or maybe it is the matzah.  The bread of poverty reminds us that slavery is still a part of us, and that redemption comes when all of humanity comes forth from Egypt.  So please, don’t enjoy your food during the week of Pesah; allow the hard, unpalatable staple to bring to mind the suffering of others, the oppression of those who are figuratively as well as literally enslaved.

Let all who are hungry come and eat.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally published in the Temple Israel Voice, 4/7/2012.)