These Are the Names - Sh'mot 5775

(To watch this sermon as it was delivered at Temple Shaaray Tefila of Manhattan, please click here and find the service for Kabbalat Shabbat 1/9. Sermon begins just after the 1:03:00 mark.)

Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah; Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin; Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. “These are the names of the children of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each coming with his household.”

Thus begins the second book of Torah, the book we call in English “Exodus,” the book we call in Hebrew Sh’mot. But Sh’mot doesn’t mean Exodus. It doesn’t mean “going out” or “going down” or “leaving.” Sh’mot means “names.”

Amelia Boynton, Andrew Young, James Bevel, and John Lewis; Bayard Rustin, Annie Lee Cooper, and James Orange; Reverends Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, and Frederick Reese; and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.

These are the names of the children of Israel who marched through their own Mitzrayim, their own Egypt, risking their lives and the lives of their families, to fight for their very freedom, to demand their rights as citizens of this country of ours, rights famously deemed “inalienable” by the framers of our Constitution. Nothing more, nothing less.

And on that fateful day, 50 years ago this March, a little girl, just 11 years old, found her place in the lines in Selma, on the north side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, and in doing so, took her place in American history. Her name is Joanne Bland. Some of you here tonight have had the extraordinary pleasure of meeting Ms. Bland, on one of our Civil Rights Trips to Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham. I had long known of Joanne—how inspirational she is, of her tireless work in educating a new generation on the Civil Rights Movement, of her dedication to the work we still need to do together. This past Monday evening, thanks to Hope Chernak, our Director of Informal Education, Shaaray Tefila had the privilege of a private screening of the powerful new film, Selma, and Joanne was our special guest.

Though she had had the opportunity to see the movie earlier, she had chosen to experience it for the first time with us, with a community that she has fallen in love with, and who most certainly has fallen in love with her. And though she and I were only meeting for the first time on Monday night, our connection was instant, deep, and so wonderfully familiar, as though we had known each other our entire lives. We both just knew that this was only the beginning of a meaningful and spiritual connection, one that transcends whatever differences she and I may have on the surface. And when the images and sounds of Bloody Sunday filled our eyes and ears, it was still so real, so vivid, so raw for Joanne 50 years later that she was sobbing and shaking uncontrollably, even having to step out of the theater for a few minutes to let it out and try to regain some semblance of composure.

As she returned to her seat in front of Hope and me, I took her hand and held it strong, saying everything I needed to say without saying a word, and knowing just by feeling it that she understood every sentiment. I have to tell you: seeing this film through my own eyes and almost literally through Joanne’s as well was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. And when the lights came up, fresh tears still flowing down so many of our cheeks, I knew that it was going to be just too hard in that moment for Joanne to stand in front of the nearly 200 people there and answer questions. She and I came together in a moment of embrace that I know I will feel and carry with me for the rest of my life. As the credits rolled, and John Legend’s beautiful voice sang the words, “One day when the glory comes, it will be ours, it will be ours,” I was overcome with emotion that coursed through me and pouring from me like a divine spring, touched as I was by the myriad ways our faith, our heritage call upon us today to continue that same march begun by so many brave souls 50 years ago.

Our tradition is clear: in Genesis, in the creation of humanity, we are told unequivocally, even twice in the same verse vayivra Elohim et ha-adam b’tzalmo, “And God created the human in God’s image,” b’tzelem Elohim bara oto, “in the image of God were they created.” Certainly we are proud of what we as Jews are uniquely able to offer the world that no other people can, but we are missing the point entirely when our only focus is on ourselves. And in Leviticus we read, “Lo ta’amod al dam rei’echa,” commonly translated, “You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” If every single person is created in the image of God, and every single person has a spark of the divine within him or her, then the dam rei’echa, the blood of our neighbors being spilled, figuratively or literally, as we saw in the film and have seen in recent months in our country, that is a cry that cannot fall on deaf ears, certainly not in the Jewish community. This is not an African-American issue; this is not a white issue; it’s not a Jewish, Christian, or Muslim issue; it is a human issue, because civil rights are human rights, and that concerns all of us. And if it doesn’t, then it should. At least 36 times the Torah warns us, commands us not to oppress the stranger, and why? Because you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt. You – yes YOU – know what it’s like to be a stranger, an outcast, the other, treated as less than, and you are forbidden from doing that to any other person on God’s earth. In another rare instance of repeated words, Deuteronomy tells us, Tzedek tzedek tirdof, “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” that injustice anywhere, against anyone, is an injustice right here, right in front of our faces, against all of us; that wherever there is a man or woman being judged by the color of their skin, the God to whom they pray, the culture with which they identify, rather than by the content of their character, that which God endowed them with, that is a crime against every single one of us.

My friends, we have come so far since those volatile days five decades ago. And yet, well we know, as we look around us in America, when we watch the nightly news, we know there is still so much work to be done. Though the courageous marchers from Selma to Birmingham busted down barriers to make the path more accessible, how well we are aware that we have miles and miles to go before we sleep. Mi Chamocha, the prayer we traditionally recite every day, is not just a song of praise, words of thanks to God for freeing our people from the slavery, the indignity we endured for hundreds of years. They are undoubtedly that, and yet they are so much more. Mi Chamocha is a reminder, a wake-up call confronting us head-on with the fact we so often choose to ignore: that there is still racism, injustice, hatred that plagues our world. And we cannot, we must not, abide that. We cannot stand on the sidelines and allow these things to happen to our brothers and our sisters, wherever they may be. And though the pursuit of justice and dignity towards all humankind may not be complete in our own day, though we may not get to see such true equality with our own eyes, Pirke Avot says it doesn’t matter. Lo alecha ham’la’cha ligmor, the famous text tells us, it’s not necessarily upon you to finish the work, v’lo atah ben-chorin l’hibateil mimenah, but you are never, and will never be, free to desist from it, to throw in the towel and say, “It’s too much. I give up.”

As we enter a new book of Torah, the book of Sh’mot, of names; as we stand at the dawn of a new secular year, and as we are just one week from honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, a legacy so bound up with all that we cherish as Jews and as Americans, let us be inspired by him, by Joanne Bland, by the men and women of all ages and races and faiths who put their lives on the line so that no one will be treated as the stranger, as the other, and oppressed as such. Let us re-commit ourselves to tikkun olam, to repairing a still-broken world, by honoring the tzelem Elohim, the image of God in every single human being on earth. And let us do so today. Not “one day.” Not someday soon. Today.

“The arc of the universe is long,” Dr. King said, “but it bends towards justice.”

Let us bend that arc, again and again, until there is truly liberty and justice for all.

AMEN.