As we begin Torah anew with the Book of Genesis, this week’s daily kavanot will each focus on one of the five books. This is an invitation to stop, to reflect, and to get a taste of our most sacred text.
If I did not already know it, my attempts to belt “Me and Bobby McGee” at pretty much any opportunity are a good reminder that I am no Janis Joplin. But, belt it I continue to do!
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” she cries in a love story that isn’t. “Nothing don’t mean nothin’ if it ain’t free.”
Freedom, of course, is the central theme of the Book of Exodus—the book that begins in slavery and ends in freedom, begins in degradation and ends in praise, begins in darkness and ends in light.
Freedom, for our sacred text and perhaps for us, is not another word for nothing left to lose. Freedom is the freedom to choose, the freedom to live in covenant, the freedom to be in relationship with God and Torah and a vision for a better world.
In reading this narrative, again and again, we reimagine the choices, the covenant, the vision—and our role, and freedom, to bring ourselves and our world closer to them.
— Rabbi Sari Laufer