The people and the Book: In search of the Promised Land

We study the Exodus narrative at the very same time we commemorate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Is this a mere coincidence?

By RABBI RICHARD JACOBS
king (do not publish again) (photo credit: avi katz)
king (do not publish again)
(photo credit: avi katz)
ON APRIL 7, 1957, AT THE DEXTER AVENUE BAPTIST Church in Montgomery, Alabama, a 28-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. began his sermon with these words: “...I would like to use as a basis for our thinking together a story that has long since been stenciled on the mental sheets of succeeding generations. It is the story of the Exodus, the story of the flight of the Hebrew people from the bondage of Egypt, through the wilderness, and finally to the Promised Land. It’s a beautiful story... This is something of the story of every people struggling for freedom.”
Throughout his life, when Dr. King preached sermons he often turned to the Book of Exodus to build his homilies. And each year during January, for thousands of years, we Jews have told this story of the Exodus from Egyptian bondage. It is the story of our struggle for freedom. In Exodus, we read of Moses, a great leader who spoke truth to power, a man who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a man who stood his ground against the cruelty of the ancient Pharaoh.
Dr. King was a lot like Moses.
Each year since 1986, on the third Monday in January, the United States observes a national holiday to honor the teachings of one of America’s greatest leaders, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The plagues of discrimination, poverty, violence and injustice still afflict America, and the struggle for economic and racial justice has changed strategies several times since Dr. King’s death in 1968.
We still have not reached the Promised Land.
In Parashat Bo, we read about the last three plagues that God brought upon the Egyptians in an attempt to convince them to let the Israelites go free. The penultimate plague, darkness, was one of the worst.
“And God said to Moses, ‘Hold out your arm toward the sky that there may be darkness upon the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be touched.’ Moses held out his arm toward the sky and thick darkness [hoshech afeila] descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days. People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was; but all the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings” (Exodus 10:21-23).
Living during the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Rabbi Ovadia Sforno (1470-1550) understood what it meant to live in darkness. He comments that the darkness was thick; beyond the mere absence of light, it was a tangible darkness. The Gerer Rebbe understood that the darkness was so debilitating because people could not see one another, they could not see their neighbor’s pain.
The ancient Egyptians were afflicted with this plague from the moment they enslaved the Israelites. The Egyptians did not feel their neighbor’s pain; they were engulfed in the darkness of prejudice, hatred and indifference.
This same plague afflicts our world as well. So much of contemporary Jewish life is devoted to eradicating this plague.
We Jews like to tell how Rabbi Stephen S. Wise helped found the NAACP, or how Jack Greenberg succeeded Thurgood Marshall as head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or how between one-third and one-half of whites participating in the freedom rides and, later, the massive voting registration drive among blacks in Mississippi, in 1964, were Jews. In short, we like to tell what we have done for the African-American community.
But there is something patronizing about past Black-Jewish relations. It was not always a relationship of equal partners. It was our common vision and moral courage that brought our peoples together in the 60s, but we made far too many assumptions about each other. Jews and Blacks invoked the common experience of bondage. Both peoples have known Egypt. Both peoples have suffered continually from discrimination. But we have failed to understand the uniqueness of the other’s experience.
Each year in January, we study the Exodus narrative at the very same time we commemorate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Is this a mere coincidence or a profound opportunity to rid our world of the plagues that still threaten it?
Dr. King articulated a crucial antidote to the hoshech afeila: “All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Dr. King’s life was a torch of light amid the darkness, as was Moses’s. Let us renew our commitment to follow them from the darkness toward the light.
Rabbi Richard Jacobs is the spiritual leader of Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, New York.


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