Bondage to Redemption (Conclusion)

As Moses was drawn out of the water, so we are drawn out of our bondage. The story of the Exodus has particular poignance here in this time and place as we gather in the days before Pesach. From the Biblical view, bondage was a mainly physical struggle against oppression. But all of us can now see there was a spiritual component to that same bondage. For us, living three plus millennia since that moment on the mountain, we are far beyond the physical servitude of Egyptian slavery. Living in the first decade of the 21st century, we know well the pain of history and the struggles through time of our people in lands near and far. We have journeyed through oppression and exile, time and again overcoming the forces that would have destroyed us.

In the 60’s, our bondage was linked to the civil rights era and the struggle to free ourselves from its hold. In the 70’s we turned to Soviet Jewry and implored the USSR to let our people go. In the 80’s we turned our eyes towards the struggles of the Falasha in Elthiopia. Falasha no more we cried as we shed the tears once again of slavery. In the 90’s it was Kosovo, Chechnya, Bosnia and Rwanda. Our struggle has become the universal struggle. At the turn of the century we focused on the plight of the people in Darfur and those enslaved in Pakistan and Afghanistan, each needing a path to freedom and peace. Each decade marked by a new struggle, a new and more difficult bondage and a hopeful communal path to liberation and redemption. And what of this time? What is our struggle today?

I fear that we face a more difficult bondage today than ever before. We have bound ourselves to a tyrant more unrelenting than ever before. Our bondage is no longer physical, it is emotional and spiritual. It threatens to destroy everything we have built, all the monuments to our success in this world. It threatens our ability to respond to our own needs and to respond to so many need ones all over this broken planet earth. This latest threat to our freedom is of our own creation, much like the Golem that threatened Rabbi Yizchak in Poland.

We have bound ourselves to models of success and acquisition that have eroded our moral base and have given host to a myriad of social diseases. Many of us have watched over the past few years as all we had worked for and saved and invested was erased from the ledgers as the market fell further and further in on itself.

The Egypt in our lives is our own creating. The Haggadah cries that “In every generation, we are obligated to see ourselves as slaves on the path to redemption”. We see the slavery, what is the path to our redemption?

I am a relationship person. I avoid emails and phone calls for the face to face encounter with each other. Martin Buber sought to teach a philosophy of life built around the concept of covenantal dialogue. His view was that we have levels of relationships in our lives, casual and intimate. It is in the most intimate of relationships that we gain the deepest insight into our partners and ourselves. He called that an “I/Thou” moment. It is when we see our partner in relationship as something more than a distraction or a necessary tool in our own long march forward. An “I/Thou” moment happens when we can sense ourselves hanging on each others words and completing each others thoughts and sensing each others needs. Buber used the imagery of love in his language of relationship and he sought to teach us that if we can establish that kind of moment with another human being, we can surly mirror that relationship with our Divine partner, God.

Buber felt that we must, in order to thrive in the world of faith, focus our efforts on creating an intimacy with God. That it was through our relationship with God, in the most personal and profound way, that we could find the path to true living and sacred redemption. Redemption is found not by fleeing from ones bondage but by facing it with a partner for in that sacred partnership is found the strength to survive all bondage.

And so we are brought to the penultimate conclusion. Redemption is a Divine gift brought about only when the cries of our bondage can reach the highest heavens and the depths of our soul cry out for help. Redemption is possible only when the Divine relationship is in play, not when we have turned our back to our faith or relegated God to some casual position in our lives.

In the Exodus story, God finds the Israelites in their suffering because they never broke the covenant or gave up their faith. God was present in their lives and they turned daily for God to help. This active engagement in the Divine covenantal relationship added presence to their cries and passion to their voice and God’s answer was the greatest redemption ever experienced.

For us today, the question about our own deliverance from our own bondage moments hangs on the relationship we have built with God in our own lives. The market may rise and fall, oppression may once again rear its ugly head, bondages may come but our tradition teaches that there is always a sun rise after darkness. The key to seeing that sunrise is our faith in that Divine relationship that guides and sustains us in both good times and bad.

So like Lord Tennyson’s tree alone and exposed on a rocky crag, we stand most days battered by forces all around us. Resolute we stand because the roots of our “Aytz Hayim” – tree of life reach deep into the soil and create for us a stable and firm foundation of faith. Storms will come and go, life will deal us inequities, we may stumble and fall, but with our faith in God and our belief in the renewing relationship with God, we shall stand tall and grow.