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Read this as a Union for Reform Judaism Ten Minutes of Torah (January 28, 2005)

(for best results, read aloud)


Sing, Muse, of slaves who dream of Promised Lands,
And Pharaohs – great and small – with callous hands
Who lash with whip or word, who lynch with rope,
But fail to desiccate the well of hope
That springs eternal in the human soul
And yearns to be set free and be made whole.

Our trek began way down in Egypt land
When Moses, backed by God’s almighty hand,
Entreated Pharaoh: “Let my people go!
And plagues be on your head if you say no.”
God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, so he denied
Their pleas to leave, until his first-born died.
The Israelites, with no time to prepare,
Packed up their lives and set out unaware
What they would witness and endure ahead:
The parting sea, and their pursuers dead;
Two pillars, night and day, of fire and cloud
To guard and guide them as the Lord had vowed;
At Sinai God’s own presence did descend
To give the blessed Law and start to mend
The still unfinished, broken world we share
Which our Creator placed into our care.
And once the covenant was set in stone,
And blessed seeds of promise fin’lly sown,
The Israelites, their wand’ring in the past,
Were spiritually home and free at last.

In our own land a tale runs parallel:
A race enslaved endured a living hell.
Emancipation came through Abraham,
But hatred wed with legislation damned
Five generations more to crippled rights
And persecution at the hands of Whites
Until a Modern Moses rose to lead,
To help this country realize its creed
And rend discrimination at the seam:
This was the hope, the vision, and the dream.
They mobilized for justice, equal rights –
But not with darkness, boils, blood, or blights –
Their “plague” was love unyielding.  Vi'lence spurned,
They promised that their freedom would be earned
Through boycott, march, abuse, arrest, and jail,
And legal battles destined to prevail,
And sacrifices made for freedom’s sake.
An epic movement’s roots began to take;
The Presidential hand was moved to act
And with its potent pen produced a pact
To end discrimination based on race
And let all men assume their rightful place
According to their character, not skin,
So Pharaoh never has his way again.

Great victories for Freedom…. What comes next?
A lesson we can learn from sacred text:
Upon deliverance from Pharaoh’s yoke,
The Israelites’ complaint seems like a joke –
“So Moses, did you bring us here to die?
We hunger, tire, and thirst,” they whined and sighed.
“We had it great in Egypt,” others said;
“Though slaves there, we had shelter and were fed.”
And in our time some voiced the same concern:
“Don’t rock the boat – it makes the crosses burn.”
But certain dreams are fiercely urgent now,
Demanding that we take a solemn vow
To raise our banner, open wide our eyes,
And never rest, for justice is our prize.
A threat to justice anywhere’s a threat
To justice everywhere, lest we forget.

But what about the thirsting Israelites?
Or Blacks who changed the law and won their rights
But still wer’n’t satisfied without good schools,
Fair housing, good employment, all the tools
That make equality a waking dream,
And ar’n’t as unpoetic as they seem?
As Heschel teaches, nothing is too small
Or trite for God’s attentiveness at all.
For God’s concern is man and common deeds,
And how we manage daily human needs.

So where are we in history’s long arc?
Again to ancient wisdom let us hark:
A well-worn phrase – “I am the Lord your God,
Who led you from that land to be your God.”
A God of Freedom, then, who set us free
So we may work for those who long to be.

It’s not our task to finish, but to start,
In partnership with God to do our part.
The water from the rock will only flow
If we each lift our staff and strike a blow
For justice, so it wells up like a stream
And bursts the floodgates damming up the dream.

© 2005 David Segal

 
Epilogue (as delivered live)

Thank you for participating, though perhaps unwittingly, in this sermonic experiment.  What you just heard, in case you’re curious, was in heroic couplets – i.e. iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of AABBCC and so on. 

I chose this epic form to fit our epic subject matter – for what more epic, foundational narrative than this do we have, as a religious community?  The clash of nations, Moses vs. Pharaoh, God vs. Pharaoh, the plagues, the Red Sea, the desert wandering, the revelation at Sinai…. We know it well.  I wanted to try to deal with the disparity between the often analytic prose of sermons and the powerfully poetic narrative of the text; to take on the Torah portions and our history in a more dramatic and viscerally engaging way; and to say something new and in a new way about the common juxtaposition of the Exodus and Civil Rights.

If the Bible is epic, it is surely a neurotic, ironic, often apparently trivial one, obsessed with even the minutest of details: it is an epic of everydayness.  And this is precisely what I want to highlight – that in Judaism, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and healing the sick are heroic deeds of epic proportion, as are efforts to ensure affordable housing, quality education, and employment opportunities.

If we have trouble understanding them as such, then we need to retrain our ears, and our hearts, to hear the resoundingly grand reverberations of heroism in even the smallest righteous deed.


*Many thanks to Tim Gerheim, Mike Steffen, and Erin Scharff for their indispensable editorial aid and lexical acumen.