I am in rabbinical school largely because
of one man,
my teacher Rabbi Abraham Magence
He spent time in a gulag in the Soviet Union
He was tortured by the KGB
because he wanted to teach Torah
He was living proof that you can try to extinguish
the flame of Godliness
but it has a way of springing up anew
In the Haggadah we say,
בכל דור ודור
חיב אדם לראות את עצמו
כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים
that in every generation,
we have to see ourselves
as if we left Egypt,
as if we were slaves in Egypt
For my grandfather,
for my rabbi, that was easy
For Jews in history, for so many oppressed
minorities,
that is too easy
The story of the Muslim minority of China
is a familiar story for us
It's the knock at the door
that came in Egypt,
that came in the Crusades
It came in Spain
and it came in the Khmelnytsky massacres,
in the Shoah
when they came for my grandfather,
and in the USSR
We know this story
Police are raiding homes
terrifying parents and searching for hidden
children
Many parents in Xinjiang are saying
that their children
are a blessing from God
Yet those children
are being thrown into prison
camps
separated from their parents
Recently a Chinese scholar backed by the state
said that
the belief that "a fetus is a gift from God"
is a threat to the state's stability
He is right!
The belief that every child, every life
is created in the image of God
is a threat to the stability of
a regime that believes that
humans are numbers
that human rights are worthless
that individuality is a crime
That belief is a threat to Pharaohs everywhere,
my friends
Maimonides says that this is
a month of waking up
He says the Shofar tells us one thing
You know what that is?
עורו עורו משנתכם
He says,
"Sleepers, wake up from your sleep!"
That's what the Shofar is saying
Because sometimes the hardest sins
for us to repent for
are not the obvious ones
They're the ones we can't see,
that we're doing without even realizing
It's estimated that
a fifth of the world's cotton
goes through Xinjiang,
where the Uighurs and Kazakhs live
How many of us right now are wearing
cotton spun by Uighur slaves
by Muslim slaves?
It's so easy to close our eyes,
to be asleep
But we have come here to say
עורו ישנים
"Wake up!"
We have been asleep
but we're waking up
We're here to say
"Wake up from your sleep, Congress!"
Pass meaningful legislation!
Wake up from your sleep,
Olympic Committee!
Demand the Chinese get their act together
or cancel the Olympics
Wake up from your sleep,
corporations profiting from slaves
building the new Pithom,
and the new Raamses
And wake up from your sleep,
each one of us!
Each of us who wears clothes
who votes
who has a conscience,
who loves the oppressed
because we were oppressed
in the Land of Egypt
