Forgiveness and Letting Go in Light of the Passover Seder Song "We were Slaves in Egypt":
First things first. Who and what can be forgiven?
When an injured party perceives genuine sorrow and a desire to repent
for misdeeds that have been done by one who has some how hurt another,
the wronged party can more easily justify offering or extending
forgiveness to the wrong doer and, thereby, begin his or her own
internal process of letting go of the anger and vengeful feelings that
he or she may, and more than likely, will be experiencing until such
divestiture of angst can be allowed to happen by his or her own
internal monitor of self-defense; which may be ones conscience or ones
sense of morality but is surely the thing inside all of us that makes
us wary of putting our hand on any another stove after touching a hot
stove. Better safe then sorry, is the overarching category under which
this natural feeling of self-defense might be filed.
So, forgiving is only one side of the emotional equation that must
come into, or, be brought into balance before the letting go of ones
fears and feelings of distrust can begin. It takes much energy to
remain vigilant and, though one would prefer to be able to relax and
enjoy life without having to stay in the "en guard" position, to
borrow a phrase from the sport of fencing, to do so without knowing or
believing that our attacker is through attacking us, would be
imprudent; foolish; and, even self destructive.
The 400 years of the Jewish people's bondage in Egypt started to come
to an end, in one sense, during the Exodus, but the constant pursuit
of the Egyptians all the way to the Sea, where they were
destroyed, had a negative effect on the newly freed people causing
them to fear almost everything and everyone in sight, and rightly so.
There was, after all, absolutely no expression of remorse on behalf of
their former enslavers; no, they were chasing them to re-enslave
them because Pharaoh had changed his mind; OK, the Lord had hardened
Pharaoh's heart; but in either case, the Jews were back in play as the
free labor source that they had been for so long.
Once Pharaoh and his army were drowned in the Sea, it would appear
that there was no longer anything to fear. The threat of attack was
gone. Freedom could be enjoyed fully and openly one would think.
But, that was not the case. What was the case? Well, the newly freed
Jews were lead to the Land of their ancestry, then referred to as
Canaan, i.e. the Land of the Canaanites, and were told to first scout
it out to get the lay of the land as it were, and then, based on the
knowledge gleaned from the scouts, to attack the Canaanites and, with
the help o the Lord, capture Canaan for the Jews. The spies, for the
most part, were a disappointment. Only two told of a Land flowing with
milk and honey and one that could be captured with the help of the
Lord. The other ten told of giants and pending doom. The Jews believed
the ten naysayers and cried out that they would have been better off
if they had remained in Egypt as slaves.
In deed, it was as if they were still in Egypt because even in light
of having seen the God of their forefathers perform fabulous deed
after fabulous deed, they remained culturally, if not physically,
enslaved and could not let go of that mindset. Freedom could never be
theirs. They were doomed to remain so effected by their slave
existence that unlearning those ways and mindsets was an impossibility
for them. They were punished, as it was for having rejected the Lord as
being able to guide them to victory over the Canaanites, by being
sentenced, as it was, to live out their days wondering around in the
desert for the next forty years when the last of that slave generation
died out. Then, the children of those slaves, the Jews who had not
actually known first hand the feel of an Egyptian whiplash, or seen
the punishing labors performed by their forebears, or witnessed any
other part of the slave existence directly, then, and only then, could
Jews appreciate freedom.
It might be asked, why did the Lord even attempt to allow the Jews who
had experienced slavery directly to scout out the land of the
Canaanites, later to be known as the Land of Israel and as the Holy
Land, when He knew all too well that they were incapable of rising to
that challenge? Perhaps He wanted to use the experience as a kind of
acid test; and, to draw, you should pardon the expression, a line in
the sand to show just where slavery ended and freedom began. Perhaps.
But, what it pointed out for all Jews who came after was that you
really don't know what someone else is going through until, as it is
said, you walk a mile in their moccasins. "We were slaves in Egypt" is
how the song goes. We say it with conviction to pass on to the next
generation what the last of the Jews who actually did serve as slaves
in Egypt must have been saying until the last of their numbers finally
died in the desert; that the Egyptians really did do the things we say
they did; they really did oppress us as we say they did, they really
did kill the first born on that awful day as we say they did; they did
it all as it is said.
There is a similar thing happening in our own day with regard to the
survivors of the Holocaust, who are at last and before it is too late,
telling their stories, lest the stories be forgotten, or worse, remain
untold, and lest the naysayers of the day phew phew their stories and
discount them right into oblivion.
It is for us to continue to tell the stories of the slavery in Egypt
and of all similar atrocities and to do so as if we were actually
there so that we can know and remember that to a man, there was not a
smidgen of repentance on the part of the Egyptians for what they had
done to the Jews and that letting go of the wariness learned from that
enslavement would be unwise, dangerous and ill advised. Forgiveness is
due and letting go can begin only when repentance has been done. Not
before.
