Shemot: The Call of the Erev Rav

With the Book of Genesis behind us, we turn our attention this week to the Book of Exodus, and essentially the first stories of our ancestors as a people, as a nation. This book

is OUR story; it tells all about the Israelite experience in slavery, and how our God swooped in to rescue us from the bad guys, and gave us our Torah, and led us to our Promised Land. Genesis was everyone's story - detailing the creation of the world, the common ancestors of ALL people, and how monotheism was formed - but Exodus belongs entirely to the Jewish people. So how come the book is filled with so many non-Jews???

Right away, in this first Torah portion in Exodus, we learn about the midwives who saved Jewish children from Pharaoh's monstrous plan. In fact, this story shows up already in the very first chapter! Pharaoh
tells these two women, Shifrah and Puah, to kill all male babies born to the Israelite women (v. 16), but they refuse to do so out of fear of God (v. 17). They defiantly, and remarkably, lie to Pharaoh's face (v. 19), and are ultimately rewarded by God (v. 21). But that's not the only example. Pharaoh's own daughter scoops Moses out of the Nile and raises him as her son. After fleeing from Pharaoh, Moses finds shelter with a Midianite priest, Yitro, and soon marries his daughter. If you fast-forward a bit, when the Israelites eventually DO leave Egypt (sorry if I spoiled the surprise ending for you...), we are told that they leave with an "Erev Rav," a "mixed multitude" of other slaves and servants who seized the opportunity when mighty Egypt was vulnerable and snuck out too! For a story that's meant to be all about the Jews, there sure are a lot of non-Jewish players involved...

And that, I suppose, is my whole point. Our story is never just about us. Our successes and failures never occur in a vacuum, with no input from anyone else. The story of the Israelite

Exodus from Egypt serves as a vital reminder of our interdependence with all those who lived - and still live - around us in our community, our country, and indeed our shared world. I am especially aware of this right now. Just this past week, I had the incredible honor of delivering the keynote address at a Martin Luther King Day event at Calvary Baptist Church in Chester. Dr. King himself actually served as an associate pastor at Calvary Baptist in the late 1940s, under the tutelage of the Rev. J. Pius Barbour. It is hard for me to describe to you the feeling of awe, humility, and holiness that I felt standing at the same lectern as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was unbelievable. There is actually an audio recording of the service available online, with some photos (though no video), which you can find here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRnm1NQJU4g

The speech I delivered was very similar to one I had given a year earlier at Crozer-Chester Hospital, and which you can read on the blog here. In it, I specifically mentioned this concept of the Erev Rav, the mixed multitude that left Egypt together, and which took responsibility for one another's fate. And several people who attended either last year or this year came up to me afterwards and said they had never heard about the

non-Israelites who also escaped from slavery. Indeed, even in our Jewish community, a lot of people don't know about this, and they also don't spend too much time thinking about the midwives, Pharaoh's daugther, or Yitro; we forget that OUR story is also THEIR story. But we shouldn't forget it, and we can't. Caring about other oppressed minorities, and worrying about the struggle for freedom, equality, acceptance, or citizenship of all people, these ARE Jewish issues! Too often we care only about what happens to other Jews - in the US, or Russia, Ethiopia, Syria, or France - and we demand that others be vigilant about anti-Semitism. But it's a two-way street. Our fates are intertwined, and together we are ALL the Erev Rav. As we continue to read the story of the Exodus, let us remember all of Martin Luther King's incredible teachings, and let us see everyone's struggle as our own struggle. The battle against oppression is NEVER a zero-sum game, where my success is your failure or vice versa. We all have to work together, and we have to fight the Pharaoh's of every generation together as one.

Photos in this blog post:

1. CC image courtesy of Jim Padgett on Wikimedia Commons
2.CC image courtesy of Jim Padgett on Wikimedia Commons
3. Image from CCityBlogger's video on YouTube
4. CC image of refugees (in this case, Jewish, but they could be from anywhere, no?) courtesy of German Federal Archives on Wikimedia Commons