Here is an idea from this week's commentary essay on #Bo: 🇬🇧 bit.ly/2GAcXMN / 🇮🇱 bit.ly/36D8OlL / 🇪🇸 bit.ly/36D2kn0 / 🇫🇷 bit.ly/2t3WVHI / Family Edition bit.ly/2U82iAH / Listen spoti.fi/33Npq9s. #ShabbatShalom
Cultures are shaped by the range of stories to which they give rise. Some of these have a special role in shaping the self-understanding of those who tell them. We call them master-narratives.
They are about large, ongoing groups of people: the tribe, the nation, the civilisation. They hold the group together horizontally across space and vertically across time, giving it a shared identity handed on across the generations.
None has been more powerful than the #Exodus story, whose frame and context is set out in this week's parsha #Bo. It gave Jews the most tenacious identity ever held by a nation.
In the eras of oppression, it gave hope of freedom. At times of exile, it promised return. It told two hundred generations of Jewish children who they were and of what story they were a part.
It became the world’s master-narrative of liberty, adopted by an astonishing variety of groups, from Puritans in the 17th century to African-Americans in the 19th and to Tibetan Buddhists today.
I believe that I am a character in our people’s story, with my own chapter to write, and so are we all. To be a #Jew is to see yourself as part of that story, to make it live in our time, and to do your best to hand it on to those who will come after us.
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