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‘Hope is mandatory’: Beginning Exodus
Like much of the Jewish world, my emotions are in turmoil. Will 33 beloved hostages really come home? Our anticipation is fraught with fear: the risk of retreating from Northern Gaza, the release of terrorists with blood-stained hands, and the devastating suffering of those hostages left in captivity.
Even imagining our hostages’ release feels precarious. To hope is to risk the heartbreak of despair.
Hope and despair, however, are not opposites but twins, born from the same belief: that change is possible.
Daring to imagine change is neither easy nor without cost — but it is essential. This week’s Torah portion reminds us that freedom begins when we question the status quo and dare envision a new world.
* * *
This Shabbat, we begin the book of Exodus, which Michael Walzer called one of the most influential texts for modern political movements — even “a blueprint for revolution.”
Amidst the grandeur and drama, one quiet verse captures the book’s most radical idea: “The Israelites were groaning under the bondage and cried out; and their cry for help from the bondage rose up to God” (Exodus 2:23).
For years, I skimmed this verse as a prelude to the main story. The story I knew was simple: God sent Moses and miracles to redeem the Jewish people. As we declare on Passover, “God redeemed us with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”
But read carefully, this verse reveals something amazing: before God intervened, the people acted. Their first act of freedom was to cry out — a prayer of protest, where humans look at the world, reject its unfairness, and imagine something better.
I didn’t fully grasp the power of this until a few years ago when I toured the Egyptian wing at the MET with my friend Nachliel Selavan, “The Museum Guy.” Nachliel showed us how deeply Egypt’s symbols were tied to slavery. Egypt wasn’t a place where Jews alone were enslaved — it was a beit avadim, a house of slavery, where slavery was the backbone of society for countless others. So deeply embedded and “natural,” it was nearly impossible to imagine a world without it.
Sociologist Peter Berger noted that man-made structures, like slavery, can feel as natural as the rising sun or pull of gravity. When social systems are presented as inevitable, people don’t resist—not because they agree, but because they can’t imagine alternatives.
In a beit avadim, slavery feels as inescapable as an inheritance. Your children inherit your chains as surely as your genes. You can’t resist what you can’t question, and you can’t question what you can’t imagine.
Frederick Douglass, who escaped enslavement, described something similar in his autobiography. At first, slavery was so thick and part of his reality that he didn’t understand the bitter songs of slaves crying out: “I was within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see.” Later, he realized these songs were both “testimony against slavery and prayer for deliverance.” These bitter song-prayers helped him envision a world beyond slavery.
This is why the Israelites’ cry was so radical. To cry out in a world where slavery was as natural as the Nile’s flow was an act of defiance. It was a recognition that slavery was man-made and evil. It was the belief that God saw them as free and that the human world could change.
In Exodus, this prayer is described as preceding — and perhaps even sparking — human action. It inspired acts of resistance from both Hebrews and Egyptians who dared to declare, “This is not the way the world should be.” Among these dissidents were the midwives who saved Hebrew babies, Pharaoh’s daughter who rescued Moses, and Moses himself, who stood against injustice even while still an Egyptian prince.
Each small act of defiance was a form of prayer — a declaration, through action, that the world could be different. This is the true beginning of Exodus: only once the Israelites dared to imagine freedom did God intervene.
* * *
This week, I shared words of Torah at the International Lion of Judah conference with 1,700 Jewish women leaders, whose energy and dedication moved me deeply.
One of the conference’s featured speakers, Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, left a particularly profound impression on me. Soft-spoken yet radiating quiet strength, she described her tireless work documenting Hamas’s sexual atrocities and even coining a new term — “kinocide” — to explain how familial love was weaponized by Hamas terrorists as a form of torture. She described a difficult road ahead, battling denialism, but also shared what gives her hope: a sense of transcendent purpose (shlichut) and the joy her children bring, reminders of life’s beauty and the normalcy worth fighting for.
Her words reminded me of the story we will read in Exodus: hope isn’t just an emotion — it’s a radical act of defiance. To imagine that the world can be different is to embrace the possibility of redemption. As Rachel Goldberg-Polin says: Hope is mandatory.
This is the story of Exodus. And even as we anxiously await news of our hostages, it is the story we are writing now.
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