Guest Post By Rabbi John Crites-Borak
Launching Leaders Worldwide Advisory Council
We Jews focus on freedom during Passover. We recount the moment the Exodus began, contemplate the journey through the Wilderness and embrace the dream of arriving in a Promised Land. All of these are good and proper, worthy of commemoration and celebration, but there’s another aspect of Passover too often overlooked: the introduction of the divine concept of freedom into Egyptian society.
The Hebrews had been slaves in Egypt for more than 400 years, yet the Torah contains no indication they ever considered freedom until Moses arrived. How radical the idea must have seemed! Yet everything that happened afterward depended on the Hebrews adopting a faith that, through God and with Moses, the impossible could be achieved. Before the Exodus came the idea.
Moses understood the journey and the value of the destination better than the people heled. More important, he introduced to Egyptian society – that land of so many ‘narrow places’ – the idea of freedom as a possibility through God. (The Hebrew word for ‘Egypt’, mitzrayim, literally means ‘narrow places’) I’ve always seen Moses as a kind of mentor. Now I wonder if Moses didn’t also serve as a surrogate parent.
Last week a father contacted me for advice on how to counsel his college-age son. The young man dreamed all his life of becoming a professional baseball player. He has some talent, but not nearly enough to achieve his ‘promised land’ of a spot even on a minor league roster. He’s on the baseball team at a local community college, ignoring his studies, taking menial jobs well below his abilities. The boy is adrift and his parents are worried.
I thought of the Passover Seder and of Launching Leaders. “Where does your son want to be in five years?” I asked the man. “Where does he want to be in ten, in twenty? What does he want to have accomplished when he’s your age, and mine?” (In other words, what is the son’s ‘promised land’?) “And what are his core values?”
“I have no idea,” the father replied. “I don’t even know how to ask him questions like that. They will only remind him of his failures.”
[What advice will the rabbi give this father? How will Launching Leaders help? Watch for the next post…]
