Bondage to Redemption (Part Two)

The Exodus story is the most important story in our peoples past and present. The story is much more than the recollections we share sitting at our homes while munching on matzah. The story of Moses and the Israelites and the burning bush, must have impacted Tennyson for the bush in our story is forged in the fires of faith and watered with the tears of our people who sought refuge from the pain and struggle of their lives.

To take us back in time, Abraham that towering figure of Genesis who left all behind in search of a new home and a new connection to God, is pulled stage by stage from the wealth and security of his father’s home in Ur and then Haran, to the far desert reaches of the Fertile Crescent. He travels beyond the pale of settlement and finds himself caught in the “liminal”. That was the space between two worlds, the world of his father and the safety and security of family and the world of Egypt, where food was once again abundant. Keeping with the theme of you can never go back, Abraham presses forward towards Egypt, forever changing the course of human history and especially the history of his family and people.

Abraham enters Egypt with a reputation. Pharaoh encounters him and Sarai and through a series of unfortunate occurrences, ends up rewarding Abraham with great riches. What is most important here is that Abraham’s journey south begins the greatest story ever told and opens up the theme of from Bondage to Redemption.

So here we are in the moment. Abraham opened the door to Egypt and, like the proverbial Pandora’s Box, opened the gates of Egyptian Bondage. For the next 430 years or so, Egypt and Israelite hegemony become the buzz words through which generations of Talmudic and Biblical scholars would funnel the longings of our people. First for food, then for freedom, our people sought the guidance and direction of a higher power. Their hope found in the voice from a bush, solitary and lonely, burned but not consumed, hardened by nature, much like the tree of Tennyson’s youth and the staff, forged from its branches and watered with the cries of a people in search and in need.