Exodus 12:29 - 13:16 (or, Moses version of "I Have a Dream" sp

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Martin Luther King's birth is being celebrated this Monday. He was a well-known civil rights leader who non-violently helped revolutionize the United States, much the way Moses revolutionized the Hebrews.

This week’s Torah Portion, from Exodus 12:29 - 13:16, read this week in synagogues across the land, goes from high point to high point, and is very topical in this weekend of commemoration of the birth of Martin Luther King. Moses beseeched Pharaoh before the ultimate plague to “Let My People Go” and each time Pharaoh “hardened his heart” as we discussed last week. As we will learn next week his relenting was limited in time since Pharaoh chased after the departing Hebrews. Only G-d or swimming lessons could have saved him at this point.

Miriam Anderson sang beautifully of this:

Thus spoke the Lord, bold Moses said:

-Let My People Go!

'If not I'll smite, your firstborn's dead'

-Let My People Go!

God-The Lord said 'Go down, Moses

Way down in Egypt land

Tell all Pharaoes to

Let My People Go!'

MLK’s civil rights movement was heavily steeped in religion and religious tradition. The “I Have a Dream” speech was largely written by Stanley Levison (though as delivered Martin Luther King significantly varied the “script” and made the speech his own). At that stage of the civil rights movement Jews were an essential ally of the movement. Unfortunately this alliance did not survive King’s death.

Martin Luther King's actions in completing the very incomplete liberation of the emancipation is eerily parallel to Moses’ completion of the escape from Egypt. A short side note; Egypt was not only a place of slavery for the Jews but a place of ultimate rescue as well. If the Israelites had died in the drought that forced Jacob and his remaining sons to move to Egypt, there wouldn’t be a Jewish people to talk about. To some extent even that rescue “would have been sufficient”.

This Torah Portion brings together the final, ultimate horror of the last plague; the killing of the first born, with the escape from Egypt, the renewal of the promise of the promised land, and finally the establishment of the Pesach rituals.

The freedom that the Israelites get is unique. As the Orthodox site ohr.edu, dedicated to the Rabbi Chona Menachem Mendel (Mendel) Weinbach (24 September 1933 – 11 December 2012) of blessed memory said:

“Hence, we see that the first step of the Exodus was to make the Israelites realize that they were not "Egyptians of the Abrahamitic Persuasion," but rather that they were a special nation with a unique role to play in history.

Freedom isn't a goal unto itself, but a means to an end. For while freedom enables one to carry out very important and worthwhile responsibilities, it can also be misused for destructive purposes, such as harming other individuals and society as a whole. When freedom is viewed as an end in itself and dispensed indiscriminately, it can bring about the demise of civilized society.”

Similarly, part of America the Beautiful recites:

America! America! God mend thine ev'ry flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law!

The Israelite “freedom” is similar to the freedom Martin Luther King advocated; not anarchy but an ordered, non-violent, responsible freedom. And that is what we in the U.S.are celebrating this weekend in the birth of Martin Luther King, and in today's Torah portion.