Torah portion

SPIRIT TORAH PORTION

Lessons of the Past

This week’s parshah, Bo, encourage our children to ask contains what I believe is questions and why in answering one of the Torah’s most them we point to the text from important mitzvot: It is a dedi- which we seek our answers. cation to education, to knowing When we look at this week’s our past and ensuring that our portion, we read v’gam erev rav history informs our future. alah itam (a mixed multitude

Having just won their free- went up with them.) While dom from Egyptian these five words don’t bondage, the Israelites change the essence of our are instructed by story of liberation, they do Moses on the laws of expand it. In the erev rav Passover, which they (mixed multitude) we find are to observe for all not only ourselves and the time. As they prepare Rabbi Ari people who look like us, but for their sojourn in Witkin a people inherently comthe desert, Moses says, posed of multiplicity. “And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this Parshat Bo: Exodus 10:1-13:16; Jeremiah In the midst of a struggle for liberation, it can be easy to narrow our conception rite?’ you shall say ‘It is 46:13-28. of who is “with us.” Each the Passover sacrifice year, when we return to to the Lord because He passed parshat Bo, we have the opporover the house of the Israelites tunity to expand it again and …” (Exodus 12:26-27). Here, at remember that not only are we the most climatic moment in more diverse than we may have the people’s history, standing on the edge of freedom, Moses

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More than 2,000 years later, the Passover seder is the most observed ritual in Jewish life. According to the Pew Research

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In the midst of a year when the forces of oppression are more apparent than ever, we can all be buoyed by another five-word phrase. Not from the text of the Torah but painted on the windows of our houses and signs in our front yards —“We are in this together.”

As we move into a new year in the shadow of a rhetoric of hatred and division, let us not forget that sacred commandment to teach our children the history of our liberation — that we walked to freedom hand in hand as an erev rav, a mixed multitude. Ever knowing that just as it was in the past, so, too, will it be in the future.

Rabbi Ari Witkin is the director of leadership development at the Jewish Federation of Metro Detroit.