Go Down Moses

April 8, 2022

Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA

            It happened approximately 3,200 years ago that a shepherd came in from tending his flocks in the wilderness of Midian, summoned by the voice of God.  Moses, the man of God, somehow found his way into the presence of the Egyptian Pharoah, most powerful man in the world, and spoke to him a message of freedom: “Thus saith the Lord, God of Israel: shlach et ami…Let My people go.”

            After a long sequence of plagues and immense suffering, in the night of the tenth plague, our Israelite ancestors marched forth from Egypt, from slavery to freedom.  One week from tonight, at our Passover seders, we will once again tell the story and sing our old songs, and remember the bitterness of slavery and that night of terror and of liberation.

            That story, the story of our liberation and birth as a people has traveled an amazing journey.  For over one thousand years, our ancient ancestors came every year, on foot, to celebrate the Passover festival in Jerusalem, and to offer the Pesach sacrifice, to tell the story of Exodus, and to relive the night of the tenth plague.  And our scribes wrote down the story and it became the central narrative of our Torah, our sacred scripture.

            After many centuries, Jerusalem was destroyed and while we found new ways and new places to carry on our traditions of ritual and storytelling, a new religion was born, Christianity, which took our sacred scripture and kept reading it, carrying it to the farthest corners of the globe.  Beyond our ancestors’ wildest imaginings, our Torah became the sacred scripture for all of Christiandom.  Translated of course, into Greek and into Latin, and then into virtually every language on earth, becoming the best-selling book of all time.  Our story of freedom became known and cherished and brought again and again to life, by human beings everywhere.

            Hundreds and hundreds of years passed, many generations of the human family, until the first Europeans came to this hemisphere, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French and the English, all of them bringing with them the Bible and the church.  And in one of history’s most mind-boggling ironies, the Europeans brought with them enslaved human beings, bodies and hearts broken by brutal violence, to provide the slave labor to work their vast plantations of sugar cane, of tobacco and of cotton.

            Even after this country was founded in 1776, with a document declaring it self-evident that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, millions of enslaved human beings in the southern United States were held as property, to be sold at will, whipped, beaten and tortured, children separated from their parents, all with the complete blessing and approval of the government.

            Those enslaved people were not allowed to assemble, which would pose an unacceptable threat to their enslavers.  Nor were they allowed to learn to read, another subversive activity.  But they were allowed to attend church.  And there they heard our old story, the story of Moses and God and the Exodus from slavery to freedom.  That old story came alive inside of them and they began to sing freedom songs. 

            Sometime around the year 1800, an unknown enslaved singer took our old words and sang: “When Israel was in Egypt land, let my people go, oppressed so hard they could not stand, let my people go.  Go down Moses, way down in Egypt Land, tell old Pharoah, to let my people go.“  In 1849, Harriet Tubman was a five foot tall, escaped slave who became known by the nickname “Moses.”  After escaping to freedom, Harriet Tubman returned to the slave state Maryland thirteen times and led over 70 of her people to freedom on the underground railroad.  “I never lost a single passenger” she declared.  And she would sing “Go Down Moses,” which served as a signal to her passengers.  If she sang slowly, that was a sign that there was danger ahead.   If she sang quickly, it was safe to move forward.  

            In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of Jews came to this country, seeking refuge from persecution in places like Russia, Poland and Ukraine.  Our grandparents and great-grandparents.  They wanted two things: to be Jewish without fear, and to become American.   And so it came to pass that in the middle of the 20th century, American Jews discovered a body of songs which combined both: our ancient Jewish story and one of the richest and most profound forms of American music, the African American spirituals.  After its long journey through many centuries of translation, its meaning infinitely deepened by its importance to enslaved African Americans, our Exodus story came back to us.  “Go Down Moses” became a basic component of thousands of American Passover seders.

            This week, Ketanji Brown Jackson, a black woman descended from African American slaves, was confirmed by the United States Senate to be the next justice of the US Supreme Court.  The first black woman to hold that post. 

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation experience in the Senate bore some striking similarities to the confirmation of Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, in 1916.  Like Jackson’s, Brandeis’ nomination was bitterly contested.  While previous nominees to the Supreme Court had been confirmed or rejected by a simple up-or-down vote on the Senate floor, often on the same day on which the President had sent the nomination to the Senate, Brandeis’s confirmation process stretched out for four acrimonious months.

In 1916, Louis D. Brandeis was our Jewish Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Personally I was deeply moved by Justice Jackson’s dignity, grace and intelligence as she responded to increasingly hostile and baseless questions and accusations from her opponents.  And I was grateful to the Republican senators who voted for her, preserving a shred of the old senate tradition of bipartisan approval of a worthy nominee.

This week, as we celebrate our journey from slavery to freedom, and especially if and when we sing at our Passover seder “Go Down Moses,” we should take an extra sip of wine and sing with extra volume and joy, to celebrate this milestone in the Black American journey from slavery to freedom.

Shabbat shalom.