Parashat Bo | Rabbi Deena | January 24, 2026

Exactly one week ago, like down to the

minute, I was sitting in a conference

room in a hotel in Birmingham, Alabama

with 19 BJ teens and a few staff

members. We had just finished a

beautiful shahit and Torah discussion

and we were joined by Pastor Gwen Webb,

who was a teenager herself during the

civil rights movement. She led many of

her fellow students on a walk out from

school to join the children's crusade,

the protests in Kelly Ingram Park. Maybe

some of you saw her in images at the

time that appeared in newspapers of her

and other young people being shot with

water cannons or attacked by police

dogs. Images that helped bring the civil

rights movement to national attention.

As she told us her story, Pastor Gwen

asked our students to stand in a circle

and to cross their arms and hold hands

with the people on either side of them.

Repeatedly as she told us her story, she

told our students the lesson that she

and her friends had learned as they

marched out of the 16th Street Baptist

Church and into a park full of police

police officers who are authorized to

inflict violence on them.

Do not let go of your friend. Whoever is

next to you, even if you've never met

them before this moment, if they're

marching next to you, they're your

friend. And you do not let go of your

friend.

On Monday of this week, we honored the

legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a

religious leader who heard the cry of

his people and led them towards greater

freedom. Dr. King was a strategist and

architect of the civil rights movement

as well as a pastor and a preacher who

called on sacred stories to move his

people towards justice. But as many of

the speakers on this civil rights trip

taught us, the movement was bolstered

and sustained by young people, many of

them the same age as our eighth and nth

graders on this trip, who saw the

darkness of their own world and came

together to make change.

The civil rights movement was in many

ways a success. The awareness and

activism it generated helped pass the

Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting

Rights Act of 1965. It gave momentum to

end segregation and to integrate schools

and businesses and communities. But as

we drove around Alabama, we learned

about and remembered that people of

color in America are still subject to

increased and excessive surveillance, to

police violence, to incarceration,

even to modern-day lynchings.

One of our speakers, Mr. Curtis

Carrington, was 13 years old when he was

beaten by Alabama state troopers on

Bloody Sunday. And still, he returned

several days later to the Edund Pettis

Bridge to march with Dr. king towards

Montgomery.

But when Curtis learned that our

students are Jewish, he said his heart

broke for them. Yes, for the

anti-semitism they face and also because

they go to school and do lockdown drills

regularly preparing to protect

themselves in case of a school shooting.

It was so hard for me to be rooted in

the stories of these speakers who were

children in the 1950s and60s when I felt

so hopeless that our children could or

would get a better world today.

This week, our para recounts the final

three plagues which escalate from

locusts to darkness to the death of

every firstborn Egyptian. In a time

where it feels like we read about

modern-day plagues every day in the

newspaper, as we brace ourselves here in

New York City for another storm of the

century that threatens to destroy crops

and homes and disrupt everyday life, we

might feel like the para hits closer

than home than usual this week.

When we read this story this week, when

we tell this same story to our children

around the seder table, our attention is

naturally drawn to the final plague, the

plague of death. both because it seems

so much more severe than the others and

because we know it's the climax of the

story, the 10th out of 10 plagues that

God affects to the natural world. But in

thinking about the para this week, I

felt my heart catch in my throat before

the final plague. At the very beginning

of this week's para, Moshe and Aaron

once again come to Pharaoh to ask for

the Israelites freedom. And once again,

Pharaoh refuses them. But before the

plague of locusts is announced,

Pharaoh's advisers who have been

supportive of him up until this moment,

say to Pharaoh, "Don't you know that

Egypt is lost? When are you going to let

up?" And as we know, Pharaoh doesn't

relent until his own son dies and his

entire country is filled with whales of

grief.

It is so frustrating to watch this cycle

of Pharaoh relenting and then or

considering compromise and then

hardening up as soon as things smooth

over. The midrash in Schmotra Rabba

teaches that this is the way of the

wicked that when they are in trouble

they affect humility but as soon as they

have respit they return to their ways.

We see in this week's para a lesson that

we know to be true. We too live in a

world that we are plagued by wicked

leaders or leaders whose hearts have

been hardened. It seems like no amount

of bravery, no social movement can

permanently shift the arc of history

towards justice.

I have lost count of how many plagues

have struck us over the last decade.

Mass shootings, storms that gain

supernatural strength because of climate

change, immigration raids that echo the

terrors of the Holocaust. I have

tremendous privilege in this country and

I know I'm often least affected by the

things that befall us and I am still

sickened by living in a world of so much

suffering. As much as I abhore leaders

who refuse to be moved by the suffering

of their people, I also fear my own

heartening by each catastrophe.

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Hessel wrote of

his involvement with the civil rights

movement, "Morally speaking, there is no

limit to the concern one must feel for

the suffering of human beings. That

indifference to evil is worse than evil

itself. That in a free society, some are

guilty, but all are responsible."

I wonder if the Egyptians who suffered

through these plagues, even as they

benefited from the oppression of their

neighbors, lost hope that Pharaoh would

ever see their suffering and be moved to

change. Pharaoh knew what was coming and

decided to let it happen. But Pharaoh

wasn't the only one affected by the

plagues. All the Egyptians were. Their

water turned to blood and their houses

filled with frogs. and they contracted

lice and boils and watched their cattle

die and hid from the hail.

Some Egyptians were complicit in the

oppression of the Israelites. But surely

many of them lived far from any

Israelites. And yet their land and their

bodies suffer just as much if not more

than Pharaoh.

The modern biblical scholar Aviva

Gotautle Zornberg quotes the Italian

commentator Sworno who notes that God

hardens Pharaoh's heart to give the

Egyptians a chance to recognize God's

greatness. The humanitarian point that

makes Scott Lee Zornberg writes is that

the Egyptians too are being addressed.

They remain subjects capable of change.

Even if our leaders cannot or will not

change, we ourselves can and we should

remain open to being changed by the

unbearable circumstances we encounter.

Though Pharaoh's heart is hardened first

by his own obstinacy and then by God,

Sworno seems to be exhorting us to

remain openhearted.

But at some point, our repeated

experience of communal fear and

suffering becomes too much to reasonably

bear.

When do you think it was too much for

the Egyptians? At the stage of

discomfort and inconvenience. When there

were frogs everywhere and they itched

from lice. When their livelihoods and

their food sources were affected by

cattle disease and hail and locusts. The

Midrash explains that Pharaoh's

magicians were broken by the plague of

boils which afflicted them so severely

that their bodies were never the same

again and prompted them to push back on

Pharaoh before the plague of the

locusts.

Their own intimate experience of

suffering changed their point of view.

But as Gotibly Zornberg writes, Pharaoh

is so motivated by his own power, his

own narrative of being outside the realm

of human suffering that he suffers from

a kind of spiritual rigor mortise and is

unable to be moved by the suffering of

his people.

I see this kind of rigor mortise among

our leaders and it infuriates me. But I

also see it setting in in our

communities and in myself and it

terrifies me. I read this para with a

sense of dread, knowing the impending

doom and tragedy of the death of the

firstborn. But as Pharaoh's advisers

called out, getting to that point is

already having gone much too far. And

they're right. The doom arrives before

the 10th plague. It comes with the

darkness.

The plague of darkness is described by

the Torah as a complete tangible

darkness. It's not just an unending

night. It's a total moratorum on daily

life for every single Egyptian.

A person could not see his fellow and

for three days no one could move about.

According to the Midrash, when the

darkness fell, people were stuck doing

whatever they were doing. If they were

standing, they couldn't sit. If they

were sitting, they couldn't stand. The

rigidity of Pharaoh's heart became

literal in their lives. And as his

heartened against mercy, the air

hardened around his subjects who

remained frozen in place by his own

obstinacy.

No one could comfort their fellow or

call out to ask if they were okay. And

no one could come together to build a

social movement to demand change.

The plague of darkness is not just about

the physical world. It's a preview of

the spiritual state brought on by the

final plague. Being unable to see each

other or move towards each other is the

penultimate plague before death touches

each and every household.

and we cannot let this happen to us.

I sometimes feel like the only way to

survive this time in history is to

harden my own heart, to retreat into the

darkness. It's too hard to read and

watch the news. It's too hard to see

videos of people abducted from their

homes in the dead of winter wearing

nothing but their underwear. To see

photos of small children forced into

unmarked vehicles. It's too easy to see

these patterns of abuse of people in of

people of color by people in power. And

it's too scary to think that our

children will be the ones responsible

for rising up.

But I will never forget our BJ teens

standing arm in arm around Pastor Gwen

Webb singing we shall overcome as they

held tightly to each other and then as

they wept while hugging her. I know

Pastor Gwen is right. Whoever is willing

to stand next to us to hold our hands as

we march against injustice,

they are our friends and we can never

let go of our friends.

I am sure that the coming weeks and

months will be filled with marches and

protests against oppression and

violence. I pray that the movement

building in Minnesota expands across the

country. That we will all be part of a

movement that demands an end not only to

our own suffering but of our neighbors.

that we will be moved to stand with our

other minorities and historically

oppressed people as friends and allies.

It is a dark time, but I pray that we

will face it holding hands with each

other. Though the words of Psalm 23 are

written about God, I believe they are

also true between people.

Though I walk through the valley of

deepest darkness, I fear no harm, for

you are with me. May we be blessed to

find friends in the people around us,

and may we hold tightly to each other

against the darkness. Shabbat shalom.