‘Freedom
from slavery’ is a phrase that rolls off the tongue at Pesach (Passover) time. It’s central to the foundational myth of
Jewish life. As the Haggadah we
recite annually at seder night puts
it : Avadim Hayinu… “we were slaves in Egypt and the Eternal, our God,
delivered us from there…”.
We tell it
again and again. We celebrate it over and over - not only at Pesach but in our daily and Shabbat
liturgy: Mi’mitzrayim ga’altanu, Adonai
Elohaynu, u’mi’bayt avadim p’ditanu “From Egypt You delivered us, Eternal God, and
redeemed us from the camp of slavery”. It opens the Ten Commandments: “I am the
Eternal Your God Who Brought You out of the land of Egypt, out of the camp of
slavery” (Exodus 20:1). There is no escaping it.
The reminder
is insistent, relentless: ‘Be thankful you are no longer slaves…’
But why this
repetition? Why is it so relentless? is this repetition only about collective
memory, to keep alive our story, our
cultural heritage? And to keep us
grateful for the freedoms we have? I don’t think so.
I think the
urgency of the repetition has another, more hidden, aim: it is not only to
remind us to be grateful, but to sensitise us as a people to a moral
responsibility. And what is that moral/ethical responsibility? It must be to remind
us to be as dedicated to the liberation of those
who are slaves today as we are dedicated to remembering our own origins as
slaves.
For slavery
still exists. Not the slavery of shackles and transatlantic ships, but the
modern slavery of 40.3 million victims of forced labour, forced marriages, sex
exploitation and human trafficking (figures from UN’s International Labour
Organization). Vulnerable, exploitable, exploited people – 71% are women and
girls; 25% are children – form a global supply chain in the agriculture,
construction, fashion, beauty and sex industries. Slavery is big business.
Pharaohs large and small are raking in profits of around 150 billion dollars a
year.
You might
wonder what we, as Jews aware of the unethical dimensions of these practices, can
actually do? What does our historical memory commit us to do, today? As well as
supporting campaign groups like Anti-Slavery International (https://www.antislavery.org/), you could be alert to where such
practices might be happening a heartbeat away from ourselves - there are an
estimated 13,000 people enslaved in the UK today. The Modern Slavery Helpline
can be contacted on 0800 0121 700.
We should
never forget that one of the purposes of our Pesach celebrations is to keep us alert to the reality that slavery
is not only a historic crime from the past. It is an ongoing experience - but
with no intervention from a liberating God. If God is to work in the world
today God has to work though us. The task of freeing others from slavery is in
our own divine hands.
In the past
I often used to speak about the heart of Pesach
as being about inner liberation: freeing ourselves from our own ‘narrowness’ (that’s
what the word Mitzrayim / Egypt means): our narrowness of thinking and feeling,
our narrowness of beliefs and opinions. It was important, I thought, to find ways
of using the themes of the festival to look inwards – as the Hasidim of old
did.
The Hasidic
movement was always seeking to make the rituals and liturgy and texts of
Judaism personal and existential – about our own life as a human being. This approach
- and I have over the years borrowed freely from it, built upon it, developing
a neo-Hasidic ethos and theology – this whole approach stresses the
psychological and the spiritual dimensions of a festival like Pesach: the
opportunities for personal change and development.
I still think
it’s important to be reminded of this stance, this approach, to our Jewishness
– the personal, psychological, the spiritual work that is integral to being a
Jew – but I also think, more and more, that in a darkening world, being Jewish is also a political act: we need to keep
alive the vision – in cynical and daunting times - of a certain moral and ethical vision of collective
life: how we live together in communities, in societies, in nations, on the
planet.
So of course
we can ask: ‘what are we enslaved to in our lives?’ I would never deny the
centrality of this kind of question, it’s vital. But just as vital - if we are
going to have a space in the future, in the generations to come, to ask this
kind of personal question – just as vital is the external question (what I am
calling the political question): how do we act in the world to reduce the real
slavery that still exists?
It isn’t
straightforward for Jews living in leafy bourgeois suburbs to know how to
address the reality of this. It might be easier to think of freedom from
slavery as inner work. But it isn’t enough. I don’t have answers to this
question about how to act in the world in relation to these crimes – but I do
know that I want to talk about these matters; and encourage you to talk about
them, to think about them, to help move mountains about them: move mountains of
disinterest and mountains of inertia and mountains of disdain.
The Jewish
people is a visionary people or it is nothing. It has no purpose if it doesn’t
stay focused on its vision that societies can be transformed and that the
balance of creativity and destructiveness in the world, of love and hate, can be shifted in favour of life, fuller
life, liberated life, and away from narrowness and death.
Abandon this
vision and we might as well all pack up and go home - for without this vision,
personal Jewish life is just narcissistic self-indulgence, and collective
Jewish life, community life, just becomes a feel-good social club, or part of
the entertainment industry. And we’ve got Netflix for that.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 6th, 2019)
