Solomon Northup was born a free black man in New York at the turn of the 19th Century. He was kidnapped, brought down South, and enslaved for twelve years until he escaped. He wrote an account of this ordeal entitled Twelve Years as a Slave in which he describes a moment when his master is so enraged that he raises a hatchet into the air in an attempt to kill Solomon. He writes, “It was a moment of life or death. The sharp, bright blade of the hatchet glittered in the sun. In another instant it would be buried in my brain…there was but one course to take. Springing towards him with all my power…with one hand I caught his uplifted arm, with the other seized him by the throat. We stood looking each other in the eyes. In his I could see murder. I felt as if I had a serpent by the neck, watching [for] the slightest relaxation of my grip, to coil itself round my body, crushing and stinging it to death…” When I think of slavery, I think in images. They are dark, sinister flashes of heavy chains, bloodied fingers from picking cotton, and instances of spontaneous violence like the one I just recounted. These images account for the brutal physicality of slavery, but they don’t capture the vicious and corrosive psychological impact of slavery. It is hard to depict the utter brokenness of a man’s soul through any image, but this element of slavery is equally barbaric. Judaism has always been very careful to acknowledge that slavery casts its cruel tentacles on both the physical body and the human spirit.
The images of our enslavement are physical- the brutal beatings by Egyptians taskmasters; newborn Israelite baby boys being thrown into the Nile; and so on. The question that lingers beneath Parashat Bo and the remainder of the Torah is whether or not the Exodus from Egypt was a deliverance of the soul along with these broken bodies. The Torah hints at an answer in its description of the redemption. The ritual of the Passover sacrifice that we were to perform the night of our redemption must be eaten in a specific way. The Torah states, “
And you shall eat it hurriedly.
The Passover sacrifice that symbolizes our new found freedom is to be eaten hurriedly with our sandals on our feet and our walking sticks in hand. This makes total sense. Outside The Angel of Death is passing over their homes and attacking Egyptians. The cries were certainly horrible, yet the elation at a long over-due apportioning of justice must have felt satisfying. The fervor that accompanies the prospect of their freedom probably caused their hearts to race. This Passover meal was eaten quickly, with one foot in the doors of enslavement and one dangling into the horizon of their liberation. As the sun rose, these shattered bodies marched toward freedom.
There was one problem: in the words of Rabbi Bradley Artson, “…a rushed liberation is bound to be incomplete. To be free physically does not necessarily mean one’s spirit is free…While the slaves’ bodies were taken away from their servitude, such a hasty freedom left both their souls and the larger society unaltered. The liberation from Mitzrayim was unfinished” (The Bedside Torah, p. 109). The Israelite journey to the Promised Land is riddled with the consequences of this half liberation. Golden Calves, insurrections, and romantic revisions of the good life in Egypt characterize the desert journey home. The bodies were present, but the souls remained deeply enslaved. Contrast our immediate construction post-redemption of the Golden Calf to the moment of Solomon Northup’s escape from the hatchet poised to kill him. About his fist moment after his escape he wrote, “Life is dear to every living thing; the worm that crawls upon the ground will struggle for it. At that moment it was dear to me, enslaved and treated as I was…I was desolate, but thankful. Thankful that my life was spared, - desolate and discouraged with the prospect before me. What would become of me? Who would befriend me? Whither should I fly? Oh, God! Thou who gavest me life, and implanted in my bosom the love of life who filled it with emotions such as other men, thy creatures, have, do not forsake me. Have pity on the poor slave-let me not perish. If thou cost not protect me, I am lost-lost! Such supplications, silently and unuttered, ascended from my inmost heart to Heaven.” Despite the degradation he suffered, Northup’s soul remained nurtured and connected, even if he was unsatisfied with God’s response. It is possible for a man’s body to be battered and abused while his spirit retains an inner grace and dignity. This is nothing short of miraculous. In the case of the Israelites, the degradation of the body was mirrored in the decay of the soul. Their liberation was rushed; their souls needed time to be nurtured again. As Artson says, “true liberation never follows an external schedule, [it] unfolds at its own pace” (p. 109).
I often feel that we have not slowed down since that night 3,000 years ago that with sandals on our feet and staffs in our hands, we rushed through that meal and out of Egypt. Our bodies are still running and running while our souls remain enslaved in a new form of Egypt, begging for some attention. When I speak to people in our community about feeding their souls and intellects, more than anything else, they tell me that they so wish they could but they are simply too busy. They can’t find the time to attend a class or program because they are running ragged from work and family obligations. Believe me, I get it. I often feel that I am too busy to find the time to actually prepare the class! But we must slow down; we must stop running. We have to liberate our souls that are still stuck in those slave huts of Egypt. At this time of the year we make lots of resolutions- we will care for our health better; we will be better children to our parents or parents to our children; we will be more romantic. How about a new resolution: to take better care of our souls and intellects, to liberate our souls that remained chained and enslaved. To do this, the spirit that we bring to our loves but be manifest in the exact opposite manner from our ancestors: we need to take our sandals off, put down our walking sticks, sit down, and feed our souls.
There is a story entitled “Brevity” written by J Robert Lennon that I will summarize for you. A local novelist spent ten years writing a book about his region and its inhabitants which, when completed, added up to more than a thousand pages. Exhausted by her effort, she at last sent it off to a publisher, only to be told that it would have to be cut by nearly half. Though daunted by the work ahead of her, the novelist was encouraged by the publisher’s interest, and spent more than a year excising material. But by the time she reached the requested length, the novelist found it difficult to stop. In the early days of her editing, she would struggle for hours to remove words from a sentence, only to discover that its paragraph was better off without it. Soon she discovered that removing sentences from a paragraph was rarely as effective as cutting entire paragraphs, nor was selectively erasing paragraphs from a chapter as satisfying as eliminating chapters entirely. After another year, she had whittled the book down into a short story, which she sent to magazines. Multiple rejections, however, drove her back to the chopping block, where she reduced her story to a vignette, the vignette to an anecdote, the anecdote to an aphorism, and the aphorism, at last, to this haiku:
Tiny Upstate town
Undergoes many changes
Nonetheless endures
I love this story. How many of us could trim the fat out of our lives and whittle our essence down to a core sense of who we are and what we stand for? How many of us are still running and running, partly because we feel that life in a suburb of New York City can be no other way, and partly because we are a bit scared at what we may find if we trim 1,000 pages down to a haiku?
As we start 2011, think about ways that you can stop running and slow down a bit. Make your soul a priority. You will not be a good parent or spouse or child or friend if you do not take care of yourself, and I am speaking about your intellect and soul as much as your physical health. Resolve to take advantage of your shul membership as much as you do your gym membership. Enroll in a class; join our bikkur cholim committee and visit a home-bound senior; cook for someone who is down on his luck in the soup kitchen; attend a lecture, share a communal Shabbat dinner; make time for reflection and prayer; support folks who are in mourning. Do something, one thing that you know would enrich your life for which you have not made the time. We are only as free as our souls, and if yours remains chained down in Egypt, resolve to unlock these chains today. When you nurture your soul, like Solomon Northup, you will see that nothing, not even a glittering hatchet raised above your head, will be able to destroy your gratitude for being alive. And your supplications, silent and unuttered, will ascend from your inmost heart to heaven.
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