The new Pixar movie, Coco, is amazing. It takes place on the Mexican Day of the Dead and is about a boy trying to uncover the place of music within his family heritage, and find himself in the process. As an aspiring musician, he has always been treated as an outsider in a family that hates music. As part of the movie he actually travels into the afterlife to meet his relatives, spending the night with his great grandparents and great aunts and uncles. According to Mexican tradition, on the Day of the Dead Mexican families put pictures of their relatives alongside food that the relatives used to love in life in order to bring them back at least for that one night. It is a true celebration of the power of memory in keeping the souls of the dead alive. In short, it is very Jewish.
What is also very Jewish is this is longing to find a true identity buried in our ancestral past. I can’t tell you how many conversations I have had over the years with people raised Christian who know or believe they have Jewish roots within their family. Almost every time the person will describe how he or she gravitated toward Judaism without knowing why, feeling at home within our faith, and then discovering along the way that they had parents or grandparents that were in fact Jewish all along. Many, many families hid their Jewish identities going all the way back to the expulsion from Spain in 1492, but also more recently in response to anti-Semitism in other parts of the world. We often call these Jews conversos, Jews that had been forcibly converted and yet, still retain Jewish practice to this day.
In many ways, Moses was the first converso. His journey down the Nile marked a separation from his family of birth. Only in this week’s Torah portion, Vayerah, does he finally come to terms with this past, traveling back from Midian to meet with the Hebrew slaves. In his conversation with God at the burning bush he fears that he will not be accepted, and in deed he is not. He does not speak their language or know their customs and as it says in Exodus Chapter 6, verse 9, the Israelites did not listen to Moses because, the Torah tells us, “of shortness of breath and hard work.” So overwhelmed by their enslavement, they cannot physically take in what Moses is telling them. The Hebrew slaves do not realize that it is someone from the outside, a converso, will be the one that brings them to freedom. Both the movie Coco, and Moses’ story, remind us that help can come from unexpected places, and that our family network can be wider than we ever imagined.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex