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“Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this.”

Religious studies scholar Huston Smith, in his book The World’s Religions, in his chapter on Judaism, has a section with the subtitle “Meaning in History.”

Smith writes, “For the Bible, history is neither maya (illusion) nor a circular process of nature; it is the arena of God’s purposive activity…. To the Jews history was of towering significance. It was important, first, because they were convinced that the context in which life is lived affects that life in every way, setting up its problems, delineating its opportunities, conditioning its outcomes…. Second, if contexts are crucial for life, so is collective action; social action as we call it. There are times when the only way to change things is by working together—planning, organizing and then acting in concert…. Third, history was important for the Jews because they saw it as a field of opportunity… nothing in history happens accidently. (The Lord’s) hand was at work in every event…. Finally, history was important because life’s opportunities are not monotonously alike. Events, all of them important, are not equally important…. Each opportunity is unique, but some are decisive…. This uniqueness of events is epitomized in the Hebrew notion (a) of God’s direct intervention in history at certain critical points (like leaving slavery) and (b) of a chosen people as recipients of God’s unique challenges.”

I find it interesting that Smith says recipients not of God’s unique blessings, but of God’s unique challenges.

In one edition of UU minister Richard Gilbert’s adult religious education curriculum “Building Your Own Theology” was this story:

“The Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams told of an evening spent with the great psychologist Erich Fromm, when he asked him, ‘Erich, you are a humanist. But tell me—what really makes you tick?’ Fromm thought for a moment and then replied, ‘It’s the spirit of the Hebrew prophets in me that gives me a sense of direction—their cry of justice, their abhorrence of idols, their fidelity to a God who is beyond all image, yet, who calls us in human history to real equality, community, and personhood. That’s what really makes me tick!’”

Huston Smith writes, “In Judaism… history is in tension between its divine possibilities and its manifest frustrations. A sharp tension exists between the ought and the is. Consequently, Judaism laid the groundwork for social protest…. It is in the lands that have been affected by the Jewish historical perspective, one that influenced Christianity and to some extent Islam, that the chief thrusts for human betterment have occurred. The prophets set the pattern.”

Or as Fromm said for himself, “It’s the spirit of the Hebrew prophets in me that gives me a sense of direction—their cry of justice, their abhorrence of idols, their fidelity to a God who is beyond all image, yet, who calls us in human history to real equality, community, and personhood. That’s what really makes me tick!’”

Fromm was a humanist. We do not have to literally believe in the parting of the Red Sea or in manna delivered daily from heaven to find meaning in history. Even the rabbis tell the stories differently in different generations, finding within the stories not a literal history, but a Jewish sacred history, lessons for the current generation.

“Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this.”

“Each opportunity is unique, but some are decisive….This uniqueness of events is epitomized in the Hebrew notion (a) of God’s direct intervention in history at certain critical points and (b) of a chosen people as recipients of God’s unique challenges.”

In my email inbox I regularly receive Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s blog posts. Her blog is called “Life is a Sacred Text,” a good Jewish title. There is meaning in history. She has been going through the Torah portion of scripture and is now getting to the Prophets. She began her March 16 blog post like this: “When I knew that we were going to be starting with Prophets—and thus entering the Book of Joshua—I knew that we needed to go deeper into the Conquest Narrative.

“That is: The fact that after the Israelites are liberated from Egypt and wander in the desert, they enter the Promised Land, and well, slaughter the people already living there in order to take their land. It’s commanded in Deuteronomy, and much of the Book of Joshua is about these massacres….

“Whatever happened or didn’t, this is still the story that we have, and read. And the fact of it is, this biblical narrative has been used to justify untold, immeasurable harm over the centuries, across lands, up through today.

“How we talk about these stories matters. How we read them matters. Pretending that they’re just not there is not an option.”

She then turned over the blog post to a friend, Daniel Delgado, a rabbinical student who is both Quechua and Ashkenazi. The Quechua are indigenous people of Peru. Delgado would know how the Doctrine of Discovery created by a series of Papal bulls gave license to European Christians to take the land and subjugate the people. The first of those bulls was issued in 1452.

“Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Dum Diversas, which authorized King Afonso V of Portugal to ‘subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ’, and ‘reduce their persons to perpetual servitude,’ to take their belongings, including land, ‘to convert them to you, and your use, and your successors the Kings of Portugal,’” (from Discovery doctrine – Wikipedia).

The Discovery doctrine would eventually be used by the European nations and our own United States of America to justify the enslavement and slaughter of the peoples of the Americas, Africa, and other lands.

Ashkenazi is a Jewish ethnicity. Wikipedia states that the Ashkenazi “form a distinct ethnicity of the Jewish diaspora, emerging from the Jewish communities that consolidated during the 10th century in the Rhineland (western Germany) and in Northern France…. After the Crusades (11th–13th centuries), they began a gradual eastward migration due to mounting restrictions within the Holy Roman Empire… This migration ramped up after the persecution during the Black Death (14th century), such that by the 16th century, the bulk of the Ashkenazi Jews had migrated to the Kingdom of Poland, which includes present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Russia. This area became the main center of Ashkenazi Jewry until the Holocaust,” (from Ashkenazi Jews – Wikipedia).

We know the story of the Holocaust and we know that many who survived that genocide found refuge in a Jewish nation state, Israel.

I will share a portion of what Delgado writes. He begins, “The Book of Joshua can be a tough read for many reasons. Not least of these is its very premise: G-d has commanded the Israelites (our ancestors!) to conquer the land of Canaan, exterminate the original inhabitants, and establish complete demographic and political domination. The text glorifies this sacred mission, at times seeming to revel in xenophobic brutality.

“Even before the 20th century, there was already a long history of European colonizers using this story as justification for genocide against Indigenous peoples…. But here we are, with the text in our canon. And although there is historical consensus that neither the Israelite conquest nor the extermination of the Canaanites ever actually happened, the story of that conquest is still part of our sacred text.

“How do we make sense of this? For myself, I find satisfaction neither in ignoring it, nor in dismissing it as ahistorical (and then ignoring it), nor in simply rejecting it as abhorrent (and then ignoring it).

“Sacred words demand attention. They are given to us—whether by the mouth of Divinity or the hands and voices of our ancestors—with something to teach….

“The Book of Joshua and the rest of the Tanach [Hebrew Bible] were never meant to be read as ‘historical’ in this modern sense. Instead, these texts are what I call ancestor stories and religion scholars call myth—not in the sense of ‘falsehood,’ but rather in the sense of ‘sacred stories that tell us who we are, where we came from, and our place in the world.’…

“If the Conquest Narrative is part of our Origin Myth, what does it tell us about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going?

“To start, it establishes that the Israelites (and we, their Jewish descendants) are fundamentally outsiders to the Land. In a Biblical text that repeatedly emphasizes the eternal connection between this particular people and this particular land, the emphasis on foreignness is notable.

“It’s also consistent with the Biblical view that all humans are essentially exiles from Eden, our universal Origin Place. In this cosmovision, the connection between peoples and lands is not intrinsic, but rather relational and covenantal—based upon right living toward one another, the land, and the Creator. So from Sinai onward, the Israelites are repeatedly warned that they will merit to continue dwelling in the Land only if they live in a good way.*

“’If you do not follow me, and do not observe all these commandments…’ (Leviticus 26:14) concludes the lengthy, sprawling legislative text commonly called the Holiness Code,** then proceeds to detail the horrific realities of what being exiled from the Land will entail….

“So now we understand why, in this Origin Myth, the Israelites could not simply enter an empty land, but rather needed to conquer it from someone else. The Canaanites show us what happens to those who fail to live in good relation:

“’You shall not learn to do like the abhorrent things [of the Canaanites]… Because of these abhorrent things (the Lord) your God is about to dispossess them before you!’ (Deuteronomy 18:9-11.)…

“The text tells us that the Canaanites have violated their covenant with land and Creator. They haven’t lived in good relation, and they are being cut off as a result.

“Now, that’s incredibly disturbing if we read this as a theology of geopolitics and a prescription for how to behave toward other nations: ‘Any conquest is just God’s will!’ (Unfortunately, that is the way it too often has been read.)

“But if this is an Origin Myth, with its historical meaning restricted to Myth-Time, then it tells us something really important: if the Israelites don’t watch themselves, the same will happen to them.

“’Like the nations that (the Lord) causes to perish before you, so shall you perish, inasmuch as you would not heed the voice of (the Lord) your God.’ (Deuteronomy 8:20)

“Of course, there is no early and late in the Torah. We have received a complete Tanach text, so we—like the omniscient Creator—already know how this story will end. The Israelites will screw up, massively. The prophets will warn us, again and again, that we are violating our covenant with Land and Creator by mistreating the poor, by waging pointless wars, and by elevating material power over the path of the spirit.

“We will be exiled.”

We know even more. We know that in 1948 the nation of Israel was created as a Jewish state. Many survivors of pogroms and the Holocaust made their way there. We also know that in 1948, “about half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population—around 750,000 people—were expelled from their homes or made to flee.”

The Palestinians call this the Nakba, the catastrophe (from Nakba – Wikipedia). I am not willing to buy into a theology that says a Holocaust or a Nakba were divine punishment. I am willing to buy into a theology that says to remember one’s own blessings and so treat others with kindness and justice.

Passover begins this Wednesday at sunset. We celebrate the escape of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery. But we know so much more of the story. What meaning can we find in it all today?

Delgado wrote, “The prophets will warn us, again and again, that we are violating our covenant with Land and Creator by mistreating the poor, by waging pointless wars, and by elevating material power over the path of the spirit.” It does not have to be a commandment of God for us to remember the history of our own and our peoples’ struggles and to resolve because of that memory to treat all people kindly and justly. We do not have to be Jewish to know that about whatever people we claim.

I end with a reading from the Jewish Funds for Justice, which was an American charity based in New York. In 2011, Progressive Jewish Alliance merged with Jewish Funds for Justice and became a new organization, Bend the Arc. Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice is a progressive Jewish American political organization. The organization supports social justice and focuses strictly on domestic issues.

Here is the reading with some small adaptations.

“In each generation, each person has the obligation to look at (themselves) as if personally brought out of Egypt.

“We have discussed liberation and sung its praises.

“We have recounted oppression and remembered its tears.

“We have counted our blessings and offered our gratitude….

“Still, others cannot celebrate liberation.

“Others yet shed tears….

“Others yet hunger for redemption.

“Each one of us has the power to act as an agent of redemption, if only we can see ourselves as God’s partners in pursuing justice.

“I can stay the tears of others, if I can see myself as diminished by their sorrows.

“I can hasten the time when everyone will be able to rejoice in freedom, if I can see myself as the companion of those fighting against oppression.

“I can honor the history and struggles of people everywhere to gain dignity and deliverance from bondage.

“When I look at myself in the mirror after this celebration, who will I see?”

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