Who knew marching could be so much fun? This past Sunday afternoon, Ashirah, the kids and I, went down to Niagara Square to participate in the Buffalo’s Women’s March. We gathered by City Hall, heard a few speeches, and then made a loop down Delaware to Church Street to Main Street to Court Street and finally back to Niagara Square.
All in all, it was about a half-hour of walking, surrounded by almost five thousand other Buffalonians, mostly women, but a lot of men as well, waving signs, chanting, and schmoozing.
I was proudest of our little Noam, who made it the whole way carrying a sign reading, “I am only four years old, and I know boys should be KIND to girls.” The experience was not so much about arriving at a specific destination, or making any specific changes in the world, but about showing solidarity with one another and taking on the fight for women’s equality together.
In this week’s Torah portion, BeShalach, we read about our people’s march through the Dead Sea into the Sinai Wilderness. This was a harrowing experience, fraught with danger at every step, made by a people who had yet to see themselves as one community. The rabbis actually imagine the Hebrew slaves marching through not one, but twelve different pathways – one for each of the tribes. They are a divided group. It is only on the other side that they become Israel.
Marching is a universal experience that every generation must embark upon in order to achieve freedom. As Princeton professor Dr. Michael Walzer teaches, “we still believe, or many of us do, what the Exodus first taught, or what it has commonly been taken to teach, about the meaning and possibility of politics and about its proper form:
Wherever you live, it is probably Egypt; There is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land; And, that ‘the way to the land is through the wilderness.’ There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.”
Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Alex