Va’era, teshuva and the courage to admit mistakes

Exodus 6:2 – 9:35

“I have heard the wail of the Israelites whom the Egyptians have enslaved and I remembered my covenant.” This is God’s comment in the opening of Parshat Va’era and it starts off the greatest story always told. The Israelites are suffering in slavery, crying out and God leads them to Moses and 10 plagues and the splitting of the sea. Yay.

But, hold on, I don’t mean to be ungrateful but this pasuk seems to suggest that God had not heard our groans and God had not, in fact, remembered the Covenant before this. God forgot the Covenant with Israel?

We should remember that for around half the time they were in Egypt the Israelites did not groan. The Israelites seemed perfectly content living in Goshen. And who knows just how tightly they were maintaining their end of the Covenant? Maybe God figured that this arrangement didn’t work out as hoped for. There is a commentary that God finally heard them because they finally cried out. You cannot rescue a people that does not want to be rescued. But that doesn’t answer the question about God forgetting the Covenant itself. That seems really bad.

Would you like to know the greatest ethical moment in Judaism? It’s Yom Kippur. Not the length of the day or the liturgy or any of that. It is the singularly focused message that you will screw up and it is OK. You will make mistakes, sometimes really big ones, and here is a path to set it right. We have an entire day to be honest about our mistakes and do our best to make up for it and figure out how not to do it again.

In anticipation of our country’s 250th birthday the U.S. Mint has worked for years to come up with commemorative quarters. Among the moments originally proposed to be recognized were abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement. The current administration scrapped those in favor of images of the Mayflower, 18th-century presidents and the Gettysburg Address. The current administration is purging any corner of American history that is uncomfortable or presents us as less than perfect. This is not the Jewish way. The Jewish approach would be to accept the discomfort and acknowledge we are not perfect. Yes, we had slavery, we thought women shouldn’t vote and we were happy enough to discriminate against so many types of people in so many ways. That wasn’t great but let’s acknowledge it, admit it was wrong and make a plan never to do it again. And we can mint some coins to demonstrate our teshuva. It’s OK to make mistakes if we are willing to admit them and do better.

I think that is what happened in our parsha. God sort of, you know, forgot about us. God didn’t hear us and God didn’t remember the Covenant. But then God did hear us and did remember the Covenant and made teshuva, so it worked out.

People forget. God forgets. The important part is what you do when you remember. In the end God splits the sea for us and redeems us all and gives us the Torah. I think that more than makes up for temporarily forgetting. PJC

Rabbi Larry Freedman is the director of the unified religious school of Beth Shalom, Temple Sinai and Rodef Shalom. This column is a service of the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association.