Rabbi Hilly Haber, in writing about Parashat Mishpatim reminds us that:
This week’s parashah, Mishpatim, takes place against the backdrop of one of those “in-between” spaces. It sets forth laws given at Mt. Sinai as the Israelites journey through the wilderness from slavery in Egypt to an unknown future in their own land…As Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us, the borderlands are a place of both pain and joy, a literal and poetic landscape in which imagination and possibility take root.
While I love nothing more than teaching about the spaces betwixt and between, I am struck today—this week, this year, this Repro Shabbat—by the Torah’s imperative to move forward. Unlike Anzaldúa, who perhaps remains in that borderland, we are progressing.
In their resources for this Repro Shabbat, the National Council of Jewish Women shared this song, inspired by Psalm 37. With a refrain of “we won’t go back,” it is presented as a call to action for reproductive rights—but also a statement about our journey as a people. And, because I cannot resist a musical theatre reference, I also offer this—perhaps just as Jewish.
In her Tony acceptance speech for Suffs, her Broadway musical about Alice Paul and the fight for women’s suffrage, composer Shaina Taub shared that the epigraph on the Suffs script is the oft-quoted text from Rabbi Tarfon: You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. And in an interview, she explained:
“It’s part of the thesis of the show. So much of the language of activism is about this finality of finishing a struggle — never again, enough is enough, if not now, then when. But the fights and the struggles for equality and justice are never finished, and no generation really completes that work. It doesn’t mean you don’t still have to work and fight and organize as if you could finish it. It’s holding that contradiction in your head as an activist, and as any person working towards a better future.”
Written by Jewish composer Shaina Taub for Tony-award winning musical Suffs, “Keep Marching” is the anthem of the show. Sung by the suffragettes, the song both imagines the future they are trying to create, acknowledges the pace of progress, and implores the generations after to keep fighting the good fight. Her show is about women’s suffrage; it could be about reproductive rights, or it could be Moses speaking to the Israelites. The imperative of the desert, with all of its twists and turns, is a call to action for today too: Keep marching.
P.S. Today is national chocolate mint day, much to my son’s delight!
—Rabbi Sari Laufer