Parashat Bo-D'var Torah

As I said when I called up people for the first aliyah, "BO," the name of my parasha, most often is translated as "go." The Torah says that God told Moses, "BO EL PHAR-OH." But "BO" really means come. What does it mean to "come" to Pharaoh? Does it mean to come to our oppressor? God's way of "coming" to Pharaoh was by giving him signs, which took the form of terrible plagues.

One of God's signs or plagues was darkness. During the plague of darkness the Egyptians were so immobilized that they couldn't get out of bed. To me, this darkness means depression. The Egyptians became so engulfed in depression that they couldn't even notice other people, even their own brothers, let alone have compassion for their fellow human beings, the Israelites.

Again and again, we read that Pharaoh's heart was hardened. This was because he refused to notice the signs around him.

I heard a story from Reb Goldie Milgram that illustrates this point very well. There was once a very holy man who lived in his house all by himself. One day someone came up to his door in a jeep and said, "Better get in, there's going to be a flood, and you don't want to drown." The holy man replied, "No thanks. God will provide for me." Later it started to rain heavily and the water came up to the man's first floor window. Then someone in a boat came floating by and said, "Hurry up you better get in, you don't want to drown.” Once again the holy man said, "No thanks. God will provide for me." Finally, the water got so high that the man had to climb up on the roof of his house. Someone in a helicopter then flew by and called down to him and said, "come up here, otherwise you’ll drown." The holy man said a third time, "No thanks. God will provide for me." The man drowned. So, when he got up to heaven the holy man asked God, "God, why didn't you save me?" God replied, "I tried . . .three times!"

The holy man in this story refused to notice the signs because he stubbornly believed that God alone would save him. You could say, in a way, that his heart was hardened and he was unable to recognize the opportunities that came his way. Plagues present choices for change. What signs today must we become aware of in order to set us free?

For my Tikkun Olam project I am working with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, or KWRU for short. This is a group of mostly poor people that live in Philadelphia and fight for economic human rights. These rights include housing, food, healthcare, education and living wage jobs. KWRU brings the signs to the Pharaoh of our times. They bring up facts about poverty and injustice by getting right up in Pharaoh’s face. You can't ignore what's right in front of you. When we ignore the signs of injustice in the world, our hearts become hardened. The more we ignore, the more stubborn or stuck we become.

Is America the modern Egypt? If so, what will it take to free us from our oppressive system? For example, how can we sit still when some people don't know when their next meal will be? How can we ignore the fact that in 1995 five million Americans went hungry when the state of California has enough food to feed our entire country? What will be our 10th plague, the one, that as in Parashat Bo will cause Pharaoh to let us go free?

Obviously it wasn't September 11th because our system hasn't changed. I think it's gotten more oppressive, with racial profiling and, now we're on the brink of war. Rabbi Yael told us on Rosh Hashanah that President Bush did not use all of the Americans' caring and compassionate energy to help rebuild America but instead used this event as an excuse for a war over oil. We're still in the darkness.
Maybe those of us in the middle-class are the modern Egyptians. In Parashat BO the innocent Egyptians were harmed by something that their leader was doing. Pharaoh's advisors actually begged him to let the Israelites go. Pharaoh's actions hurt himself as well as innocent people. From this we learn that what you do can harm you and the others around you. In the same way, helping the poor will not only improve the lives of the poor but it will also improve our lives too. Just like when we left Egypt, didn't the lives of the Egyptians improve because we left? (No more plagues.)

Right before the Israelites left Egypt, God commanded them to take the wealth from their Egyptian neighbors. This could be viewed as reparations for all their years of slavery. KWRU wrote a song that says poor people must take back from the rich what was stolen from them. It goes,

"Well I went down to the rich man's (president's/governors/etc.) house and I took back what he stole from me / Took back my dignity / Took back my humanity/ And now he's under my feet / Under my feet / Under my feet / Under my feet / Ain't no system gonna walk all over me."

Rabbi Brian has some concerns about the last part of this song where it says, "And now he's under my feet." He feels that this implies that all revolutions or changes have to include violence. But Ghandi said, "the deadliest form of violence is poverty". So if we oppose violence, why then do we tolerate poverty in this country and in the world?

Through my own photography, I am helping to document poverty and the fight against it, just as KWRU does. Like my parasha, I hope my pictures will help bring light to the darkness. But is this enough? Will the system change just by exposing the problems?

The last lines of my parasha require that the future generations of Israel tell their children about what God did when we were freed from slavery. It also says in order to remember this better "it shall be a sign upon your hand and as a symbol on your forehead that with a mighty hand God freed us from Egypt." Traditionally, Jews have carried out this teaching by putting on tefillin during morning weekday prayers. Tefillin are leather straps with small boxes on them that contain scrolls inside them with the words of the Sh'ma. You put one around your head and the other on your weaker arm with the straps wrapped around your arm. This past Thursday I fulfilled the mitzvah of tefillin for the first time at a morning service here at Mishkan.

I think in the Sh'ma we have the answer of what we must do. First, we must listen. KWRU does this by listening and writing down the stories of poor people. Recently they traveled for a month on a Freedom Bus all around the country to document poverty. (My mom and I were lucky enough to go with them for the first two days of this tour.) At the end of the month they presented these stories on International Human Rights Day to a Truth Commission right across the street from the United Nations. When KWRU listens, they break the isolation poor people feel. They bring light to the darkness.

The Sh'ma also tells us that everything is one. This means that everything is linked together. It means that if some injustice is being committed anywhere it affects us all because everything is one. The Sh'ma tells us to hold these words close to our heart at all times. It means that like the name of my parasha, BO, we are required by God to come and confront our oppressor and fight against the injustice that is still all around us.