“Silent and Silenced,” Rabbi Elaine Zecher’s Shabbat Awakenings
January 31, 2025 | 2 Sh’vat 5785
Welcome to Shabbat Awakenings, a weekly reflection, as we make our way toward Shabbat. You can listen to it as a podcast here.
To be a slave is to be silenced. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t cries of agony or sobs of despair. It does mean, however, that one’s voice no longer matters. The Israelites toil in silence because to speak up or call out the injustice would mean they had power. They had no such agency held in bondage in Egypt.
Pharoah hoarded it all. He decided the course of their dreadful lives. He determined their fate as part of his destiny to rule as a god. He was not a mere king. The Pharoah was divine. At least, that is how he perceived himself and demanded his courtiers and his sycophants to regard him in this way.
Pharoah was a tyrant, narcissistic and self centered. He cared little for the lives of the people who served him and ruled by instilling fear in his subjects. He could make royal orders that ruined lives. Those in his court, could only speak in the manner instructed by their supreme ruler. They would lose their life and livelihood. It wasn’t only the slaves who were silenced into silence. No one dared to challenge him.
Except God.
We know this story of the showdown between humans, such as Pharoah, who view themselves as divine and the Divine One. Step by step, plague by plague, Pharaoh began to lose some of that power.
Silence can be dark. The ninth plague is darkness, so dark that it could be touched. (Exodus 10: 22) Being silenced is also dark because it, too, touches the depth of one’s soul that yearns to speak up but cannot. The Torah tells us that despite the darkness, the Israelites experienced light. This light is different than what the eyes can see. This light came from a hopeful belief that the oppressive behavior of the Pharoah could cease because of God’s involvement.
Perhaps, it wasn’t just light but rather lightening.
Emma Lazarus described the Statue of Liberty as “a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightening.”
Where the Statue of Liberty stands as a silent beacon of hope to the ideal of welcome in America, those days in the darkness in Egypt would enlighten those imprisoned by the silence of tyranny. They would soon cross through the parted waters toward freedom where their voices of songs of triumph would grow as loud as the shofar blast.
This week began with a day of remembrance when Auschwitz was liberated as an International Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust. During the week, some hostages were freed from the torturous darkness they experienced for 481 days. And now we enter Shabbat with our story of liberation. The voices of the people matter wherever they may reside so that freedom can ring across the land.
Shabbat Shalom שבת שלום
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Rabbi Elaine Zecher