Exodus

Last night on Tavis Smiley's show following the convention, guest (Democratic) Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia told a poignant story. He said an African American man from his delegation watching the official nomination of Barack Obama and crying, said "They only let my father be a waiter, and now I'm seeing this."

At our seder this past April, we spoke of the symbolism of forty years since Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. For the uninitiated, the Seder is the ritual meal and celebration that Jews observe to recount and commemorate the long slavery in Egypt, the Exodus from Egypt, and the wandering in the desert for forty years until the children of Israel reached the Promised Land of their ancestors. Rabbinic and Talmudic thought has explained the reason why the Jews had to wander 40 years before reaching their homeland. (And no, it wasn't because none of the men would ask for directions). The Jews had to wander in the desert for forty years until the slave generation, and its slave mentality, had died off. Only a new generation, one having grown up as a free people, would be fit to enter their homeland, once again a free people, to re-inherit the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Our country wandered in the desert for many more than forty years; at the very least, counting back from the end of the civil war and slavery until Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, it was almost one hundred years. And even after that, there was much struggling to be done, along the way losing our own Moses of the United States forty years ago.

But since that tragic loss forty years ago, to an enormous degree, the slave generation has died out. The proof is that forty years from Dr. King's killing we are witness to this amazing day when a black man will run, and G-d willing, be elected as a progressive Democrat in November. And his acceptance speech comes on another symbolic date: forty-five years ago today, our own Moses, Dr. King, gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington.

I remember vividly, as a child of twelve, listening to that speech with my father, sitting in our Chevy station wagon with car radio on, my father throwing caution to the wind and endangering the car battery, just so we could listen. I have no doubt that I will be as moved tonight when I hear my candidate's acceptance speech, as I was that day, forty-five years ago.

Heideleh