Did I catch your attention with that cryptic title?

As the summer progresses and we gear up for our community campaign, we’ve been focusing on the idea of WHY. Why do we do any of the things we’ve come to see as necessary for Jewish life to flourish? From tzedakah to advocacy, from strengthening our unity to securing the places we gather to pray, learn, help and celebrate, why?

I think we have to go back, almost to the beginning stages of our identity, the first stages of our evolution from the families of the sons and daughters of our patriarch Jacob/Israel into the tribes of the people of Israel. Our miraculous exodus from Egypt not only freed us in a temporal sense from generations of enslavement and cruelty, it gave us the essential rationale for all that came after.

Overthrowing the tyranny of the Pharaoh and his armies was the first step; and it demonstrated that our families, our future, our connection with the past and the promise of sovereignty, gave us the backbone to throw off the slavemasters and the superpower behind them.

From the point where we started writing down our Siniatic constitution, we began to use the phrases “Zecher L’Yitziat Mitzrayim” - in memory of the exodus from Egypt, and “Ki Gerim Heyitem B’Eretz Mitzrayim” - because you were indigent strangers in the land of Egypt.

One of these phrases usually consecrates time, holiness and celebration in a way, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, that we were unable to control and sanctify as slaves, but only as free people.

The other is a demand on our memory, to leverage our experience of terror, slavery, and powerlessness to ensure that none of our brothers and sisters (and to the extent we can while still defending our own existence, no one anywhere) should experience hunger, or homelessness, or be alone to face the vagaries of the world as cruel as it often can be.

Remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You can walk in the shoes of the needy because it is in your generational memory. You can stand in the place of the threatened, because you, your grandparents, or your ancestors have stood in that spot. You can stand up to help because you have dozens of generations of written history and custom, law and practice to guide you in how to do so.

And it all comes back to our collective memory of Egypt. Remember who you were and who you are. Remember who and what you depended on to get out of there, until you reached your homeland and could begin to depend also on each other. Remember what it felt like to be helpless, powerless, oppressed, singled out, and seemingly alone against a world spanning empire. Remember what you can do as a united people looking after and protecting your family within the worldview we began to grasp at Sinai. Everything follows from there.

And now, you know why. Like many of you, I was charged with the responsibility to act on the words of Holocaust survivor and philosopher Victor Frankl - that we were all told about through the incredible strength of Hersh Goldberg-Polin HYD - “Once you have a ‘why’ you can endure any how”. The ‘why’ has been clarified. It’s up to you to act on the ‘how’.

Shabbat Shalom