Let our people go!
This week’s Torah portion, Va’era, shows Moses returning to Pharaoh again and again asking for freedom for the Israelite slaves. Pharaoh refused, and, as we recount each year on Passover, allowed the Egyptians to endure plague after plague, rather than seeing the humanity of the Israelites and grant them their freedom.
As we were all glued to the news this week, watching the first three Israeli hostages be released from Gaza as part of the ceasefire agreement, I reflected on the similarity. Like Moses, we have been repeating the call “Let our people go!” demanding freedom for the hostages. And, like Pharaoh, Hamas refused to heed the call, and allowed not only the hostages to suffer, but also the people of Gaza and Israel to suffer. Whatever you may think of the latest ceasefire agreement, we must acknowledge that Israel did not stand alone, and it took many world leaders to help make this latest agreement happen.
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This past Monday was Martin Luther King Day in our country. While Martin Luther King was fighting for Civil Rights, he did not stand alone either. One of his famous allies was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish American immigrant hero for many of us. The Jewish people should be proud of this partnership, which included King letting Israel know quite emphatically that he stood by them as well. In his speech to the Rabbinical Assembly in 1968, King famously declared: “Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.”
This past weekend, our Jewish community braved sub-freezing morning temperatures and, in the legacy of Rabbi Heschel’s example, marched in unity alongside more than 200,000 San Antonians in what is billed as the largest MLK Day March in the nation. Just as MLK and Heschel joined hands in interfaith solidarity, we unified with other faiths at the MLK Interfaith Service, and at the Temple Beth-El/Antioch Missionary Baptist Church exchange.
In reading Heschel’s sermon this week, I found this quote that seemed incredibly prescient: “How many disasters do we have to go through in order to realize that all of humanity has a stake in the liberty of one person” (Religion and Race, 1963). Let us not forget, we are, Stronger Together
Lisa Epstein, PhD
Director, Jewish Community Relations Council