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This week’s Torah portion, Va’era (Ex. 6:2 – 9:9) has threats, plagues, suffering and a repetition of names for God that seem to represent different aspects of the Divine. God hardens Pharoah’s heart so that when Moses and Aaron ask that the Israelites be allowed to go to the wilderness to worship their God for three days he refuses. The first distinctive word of the first verse gives us the portion’s name, which translates as “I appeared”. God is reassuring Moses that just as God was with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, so too God will be the power behind the staff Moses will wield. There is lots of pressure on Moses to take on the thankless job of asking for slaves to be freed, even temporarily. God does not relent and so it goes: Moses asks, Pharoah refuses, God brings a plague, Pharoah relents and over and over. Next week we’ll have more.

Basically this is a “mine is bigger than yours” situation. God wants to intimidate Pharoah by showing control of supernatural forces and Pharoah wants not to lose face before his people. Lose-Lose is how the text sets it all up, and yet, there is a promise that even though it looks like things couldn’t get any worse, there will be freedom. No surprise then that this exact situation is what inspired so many of the songs slaves sang in this country as they toiled under a less harsh sun. How appropriate that on the anniversary of the march in Selma Alabama that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel strode in by the side of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dr. Ralph Bunche we read this Torah portion. Not the story when the slaves won their freedom, but when they, well we, were suffering even more than before we had raised our voices and cried out. We had to make bricks without any straw, almost an impossible task.

Our experience as slaves should have raised our awareness to suffering everywhere. We, as Reform Jews, are called to respond to the prophetic message: to demand justice for those who are denied it. We are no longer slaves in Egypt, thank God, but we seem to carry a little Pharoah around inside us. We want to have our cake and eat it too, to enjoy our life and not notice the suffering of others. As we read this story again, how all of Egypt was made to suffer in order for us to be free, can we imagine “what if”? What if Pharoah had recanted and we were allowed to go out even before the first plague? Would we still feel our liberation was miraculous enough to retell every year? What if there had been negotiations made in good faith between God and Pharoah with Moses as interpreter? Would that different story of being redeemed have shaped our values differently? Would we not have seen our natural place as Jews to be marching besides black citizens denied equal rights under the law?

I can’t answer what might have been if our story had been different. I can encourage all of us to bring to mind how precious our freedom was and how much blood was shed in order that it be given to us millennia ago. We don’t want to go back. Let’s be vigilant and make sure we don’t bring Egypt with us wherever we go.

Shabbat Shalom                                              Rabbi Leah Benamy