When I teach the Exodus story to AJU’s Miller Introduction to Judaism students, I share that it is one of the greatest gifts that the Jewish people has given to the world. This story, which we will begin reading this shabbat, is the moment where we stake claim to a God who sides with justice over power, where lowly slaves are seen as God’s beloved children, where tyrants and dictators are brought crashing down, and where we’re taught that those who are brought down by degradation will be carried on eagles’ wings to a place of dignity. Read more...

It is well known that on the night before he was assassinated, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. seemed to prophecy his own death. “I might not get there with you,”  he said to the crowd of striking sanitation workers, and supporters, and ministers that came to see him. He was talking about the Promised Land. He was talking about freedom and equality. King was talking about justice. He did not get there with them, with us. Read more...

Leaving Egypt is a recurring event.  Beyond the individual, who is obligated on Passover to reenact the journey from bondage to liberation, the exodus story became a narrative within which political events have been located and understood.  For numerous and varied movements throughout history, leaving Egypt is the “story [that] made it possible to tell other stories.”[1]  Egypt is removed from the coordinates of space and recast as a system of oppression, all too capable of mutating to meet its unjust asp Read more...

V’ani tefilati l’cha Adonai eit ratzon “And I stand before you, O Lord, at this chosen moment.” - Psalms 69:14 Read more...