“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
— Fannie Lou Hamer
We’ve seen these words a lot of late, painted on signs carried through the streets of our cities. A call to action, a reminder of the deep inequalities of our society. It is no surprise, then, that civil rights activists throughout history have turned to our shared narrative—the Exodus—for its vision of what freedom looks like: for you, for me, for all of us together.
Andrés Spokoiny is an Argentine Jewish activist, now living in New York City and is the President and CEO of the Jewish Funders. Writing about Passover, he wrote:
Judaism understood that the key to freedom is a balance between four players: me, my fellow human being, society, and God: a delicate equilibrium between my freedom and yours; between freedom from (the lifting of constraints) and freedom to (the capacity to work towards a goal beyond myself); between freedom as an end in itself and freedom as the foundation of a collective project…
We believed, 3,500 years before Thomas Jefferson, that every human being is created in the image of God and has, therefore, inalienable rights and freedoms. But Judaism has also believed, since the Exodus, that freedom is a collective endeavor. I can’t be free if my neighbor is not.
Our neighbor—here in the United States, around the world—is not free. We know that too many are enslaved to racism, to poverty, to war, and now to this virus. This week, how might we rededicate ourselves to the collective endeavor for freedom?
— Rabbi Sari Laufer