D’var Torah: Parashah Bo
This week’s Torah portion is Parashah Bo. While all of our Torah portions are holy, this week’s parashah surely ranks among the most well-known, for it tells the story of the Jews’ liberation from slavery and exodus from Egypt.
I would like to focus on the words in Exodus 12:37–39:
“37] The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand fighting men on foot, aside from noncombatants. 38] Moreover, a mixed multitude went up with them, and very much livestock, both flocks and herds. 39] And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had taken out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, since they had been driven out of Egypt and could not delay; nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves.”
So we have this vision of hundreds of thousands of people, men, women, children, and animals, setting off into the wilderness in great haste, with scant provisions, and feeling what? Perhaps hope, but also no small amount of fear and trepidation, and despair at leaving the only home they knew. And yet off they went on their journey, for the alternative of staying, was unthinkable.
The Black American author Zora Neale Hurston captures this complex sentiment in a quote from her book Moses, Man of the Mountain, as quoted by Rabbi Hilly Haber:
“The people cried when Moses told them [they were free to leave]. He had expected wild clamor: the sound of cymbals and exultant singing and dancing. But the people wept out of their eyes. Goshen was very still. No songs and shouts…They just sat with centuries in their eyes and cried.”
- Zora Neale Hurston (Moses, Man of the Mountain)
February 3 is Refugee Shabbat, an event organized by HIAS, the organization that resettled my own refugee cousins as they fled from anti-Semitism behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s.
Parashah Bo and the approach of HIAS’s Refugee Shabbat make this an appropriate moment to focus on the forced migrations in our National backyard, and our response to them.
To our south a terrible crisis is playing out. Last year over 200,000 people, mostly Venezuelan but also from a host of other countries, made an extraordinarily perilous trek through one of the most inhospitable stretches of jungle in the Americas: the 66 mile wide Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama. They included women and many, many children.
Last week I learned of the story of a mother, named Darys Alexandra Cuaro, and her daughter Sarah, aged 6, who recently made the journey through the Darien Gap. They became separated for days and Ms. Cuaro barely survived the trek. It was the subject of a recent episode of the NYT podcast The Daily. Quoting from the original print story:
Sarah and her mother exited the Darién on Oct. 10. Two days later, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Venezuelans who arrived at the U.S. southern border would no longer be allowed to enter the United States.
Instead, citing a Trump-era pandemic health order, officials said they would be sent back to Mexico. At the same time, a small number of Venezuelans — 24,000 people — would be given legal entry if they applied from abroad, and if they had a U.S. sponsor…
Ms. Cuauro was devastated. She had no sponsor. By this point she and Sarah had taken a series of buses to Honduras. They had used all their money.
Now in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, she considered her options, weighing in her mind the trauma of trying to get to a country where they would almost surely be rejected. “I write this to you with tears in my eyes,” she said in a text message.
She was going to a migration office to beg for a flight home. “It pains me to abandon the dream of living in a safe place,” she wrote. “But the situation has forced my hand.”
I understand that from where we sit in the suburbs of our nation’s capital, there is a cold political logic to our border policies. But I wonder if our Jewish value of hachnasat orchim- welcoming the stranger- and the example in this week’s parashah enjoin us to consider a different, more humane approach.
Let us remember our ancestors’ journey through the wilderness as we think of those migrants still on their own journeys. Let us remember their hope, and their fear. Let us imagine ourselves in the Israelites’ quaking sandals, and in Darys Alexandra’s mud-soaked boots, and her daughter Sara’s tiny shoes. And let us be guided by our Jewish values as we urge our government to pursue a more humane and just immigration policy.
