Freedom Is Not Self-Sustaining: Parashat Va-Era/MLK Shabbat 5786

Our TBE Civil Rights Journey group meeting with Dr. Lynda Blackmon Lowery (of blessed memory) in November 2025.

Toward the end of last week’s Torah portion, Moses goes to Pharaoh with God’s demand — shalach et ami, let My people go — and Pharaoh responds not with negotiation, not even with a simple refusal, but by tightening the screws. He increases the Israelites’ labor. He forces them to gather their own straw, make their own bricks, and meet the same quotas in shorter amounts of time. He makes life harder for an already overburdened people precisely because someone dared to speak out on their behalf.

This week’s parashah opens with Moses turning back to his own people, carrying words of promise — words of liberation:

“Therefore say to the Israelites: I am the Infinite. I will free you from the labors of Egypt, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God.” (Exodus 6:6–7)

And yet, the Torah tells us, the Israelites do not respond to Moses’ stirring promises with hope or relief. Instead, we are told:

“But they did not listen to Moses, because of kotzer ruach and hard labor.” (Exodus 6:9)

“Hard labor” we understand. But what is kotzer ruach? Literally, it means a constriction of breath or spirit. Kotzer ruach is what happens when people are so exhausted, so beaten down, so punished by the conditions of their lives, that even imagining change feels dangerous. It is not stubbornness or lack of faith. The Torah is not saying the Israelites refused to listen because they were obstinate or ungrateful. Rather, it is something far more human, and far more tragic: they could no longer hear hope. Their spirits had shriveled. Their inner world had narrowed under pressure.

Kotzer ruach is the shrinking of moral imagination under relentless strain. It is the feeling that hope is not merely futile — it is a liability.

Pharaoh, of course, understands this perfectly, perhaps instinctively. His response to Moses is not impulsive; it is strategic. He is teaching a lesson, not only to Moses, but to the Israelites watching what happens when someone dares to speak.

This is what happens when you make power uncomfortable.You speak, and the punishment escalates.You protest, and life gets harder.You dare to imagine freedom, and the cost will be borne by your body.

As columnist Michelle Goldberg recently wrote, such a system communicates that “life is a privilege bestowed by authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience.” That, the Torah would tell us, is Pharaoh’s governing philosophy.

Protest will be dangerous. Resistance will hurt. The way to secure your safety is through your silence.

Kotzer ruach is what happens when people internalize Pharaoh’s logic — when fear succeeds where violence alone cannot, when oppression becomes internalized and brutality normalized, when survival is conditioned on submission and dignity is conditioned on deference.

Earlier this month, many of us traveled together through Alabama and Georgia on a civil rights journey — not for nostalgia or self-congratulation, but to encounter and grapple with history that, to paraphrase Faulkner, isn't past.

In Selma, on March 7, 1965 — a day now known as Bloody Sunday — more than six hundred peaceful marchers set out to walk from Selma to Montgomery to demand the right to vote, a basic democratic promise systematically denied through intimidation, violence, and terror. 

When they reached the crest of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they saw a battalion of state troopers in riot gear waiting for them. The troopers ordered the protesters to disperse. When they did not, the troopers charged, violently tearing through the crowd of unarmed marchers with uncompromising brutality.

Among those marchers was a fourteen-year-old girl from Selma named Lynda Blackmon Lowery, whom we were privileged to meet on our journey as the newly-minted Dr. Lynda Blackmon Lowery.

Lynda was beaten so badly on Bloody Sunday that she required dozens of stitches to her head. She ran for her life believing her sister had been killed. She carried no weapon. She engaged in no provocation. She was simply present.

Did this fourteen-year-old girl on a nonviolent march in broad daylight pose a danger to the officers who brutalized her? Of course not. And yet her very presence — her insistence that her voice mattered — was deemed inherently threatening. The brutality was meant to teach a lesson: this is the price of challenging the status quo. If you do not want to meet the same fate, do not speak out.

On our trip, we also made a pilgrimage to Kelly Ingram park, the site in Birmingham where, in 1963, peaceful demonstrators — including women and children — were met with militarized police, attack dogs, and high-pressure fire hoses. That violence, too, was not accidental. It was pedagogical, intended to teach that dissent would be punished, that tension would be met with force, and that order would be preserved at all costs.

And yet, Martin Luther King Jr. explained that the Birmingham Campaign was intentionally designed “to create such a crisis and foster such a tension” that the injustice of Jim Crow could no longer be ignored. The violence protesters encountered was expected; organizers anticipated such a response, and believed correctly that by making the violence against peaceful protesters public, it might awaken the conscience of a nation that had grown accustomed to injustice. The purpose of protest, King argued, is not so much to create tension but, rather, to “bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive…out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.” 

In this respect, King’s approach to protest was informed in part by the great twentieth century Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who observed that societies often struggle to distinguish between moral challenge and social threat. Both feel destabilizing, and so both are met with repression. The disturbance created by people who refuse to accept the status quo is experienced as danger — and treated accordingly.

As Niebuhr put it – drawing on the tradition that Jesus was crucified alongside two bandits – nations “crucify their moral rebels with their criminals on the same Golgotha,” unable to distinguish between moral idealism that rises above mediocrity and antisocial behavior that falls below it. The disquiet produced by challenging the existing order so often meets with punishment.

God, it seems, understands this dynamic too. That is why, in this week’s parashah, God escalates the confrontation with Pharaoh through a series of increasingly devastating plagues — knowing full well that escalation will initially bring greater suffering to the Israelites. As the Etz Hayyim commentary explains, “the situation for both the Egyptians and the Israelites must become unbearable to overcome the tendency of both sides to maintain the status quo.”

If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen — but sometimes, if you want someone to leave the kitchen, the only way to do it is to turn up the heat.

At the same time, King always distinguished between what was and what ought to be. While he knew full well the danger of dissent, he also believed that justice should not require martyrdom. Protest is meant to dramatize a shameful condition; it does not legitimize the violence used to suppress it.

Yes, protest is dangerous. Pharaoh intends for it to be dangerous. Power always wants dissent to feel costly.

But once we accept that protest makes violence more excusable, we have accepted a world in which obedience becomes the price of safety and dignity becomes conditional.

Put simply: pursuing justice should not require putting one’s life on the line. Silence should not be the price of survival.

And yet we sometimes confuse what is with what ought to be. Our natural desire for law and order, our instinct to trust authority, our discomfort with tension and conflict can lead us to conclude — quietly, almost unconsciously — that power is justified in discouraging dissent this way. Part of us wants leaders who will instill kotzer ruach, lest the status quo be unsettled and disorder unleashed. 

We have seen this logic surface again in recent days in responses to the death of Renee Nicole Good, a Minnesota mother who was killed during an encounter with federal immigration enforcement agents. Some have argued that her presence at a protest complicates how we should understand what happened — that choosing to confront authority carries risk, and that perhaps this risk matters morally, especially if you are allegedly breaking the law or disobeying the directives of law enforcement, as has been claimed about her, even if you are doing so in a manner that is nonviolent and nonthreatening; even if you are willing to just drive away from the tense situation so as not to risk making matters worse for anyone. In other words, the argument goes, on some level, Renee Good got what she deserved.

But I know we do not really believe that.

I know we do not believe it because I cannot imagine any of us would say today that the Birmingham protesters deserved to be attacked simply because they disrupted the order of the Jim Crow regime. I cannot imagine any of us would say that Dr. Lynda deserved to be beaten within an inch of her fourteen-year-old life simply because she was marching for voting rights. I cannot imagine any of us would say that their participation in nonviolent protest made the violence they endured more understandable, more excusable.

I know we do not believe it because we venerate a declaration issued 250 years ago this July asserting that life and liberty are inalienable rights endowed by our Creator — not privileges bestowed by authority — and that governments exist only to secure these rights, not to condition them on compliance.

I know we do not believe it because we recognize this clearly when it happens elsewhere. When governments brutally crack down on protesters in Iran, we recoil instinctively. We understand that a regime that punishes peaceful dissent has forfeited moral legitimacy. The question Torah presses upon us is not whether that principle applies — but whether it applies only somewhere else, in bygone eras or faraway lands.

One of the hardest truths we confronted on our Civil Rights journey is that, as our tour leader – my friend and mentor Billy Planer – reminded us again and again, there were Jews on both sides of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Some marched. Some resisted. Some were courageous. Some were cautious or complicit. As a matter of fact, one of the most impactful stops on our trip was at our sister Temple Beth El in Birmingham, where we had an extraordinary opportunity to grapple honestly with the complicated history of the relationship between Birmingham’s Jewish community and the Civil Rights movement — a mixed bag of courage and fear, silence and speaking out. 

Indeed, the famous letter King wrote from his jail cell in Birmingham was addressed to an interfaith group of local clergy, including a rabbi, who had issued a statement calling the demonstrations "unwise and untimely." Speaking directly to the colleagues he refers to as his “Christian and Jewish brothers,” King concludes, with lament, that the “great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods"...who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom.”

In the workshops we participated in during our visit to Beth El in Birmingham, and throughout our journey, we came to see how, with the benefit of distance in time and space, we often imagine ourselves on the right side of history — marching arm in arm with those on the side of righteousness and justice — and to see the Bull Conners and Jim Clarks and George Wallaces and Pharaohs as history’s cartoonish villains. But we don’t always have the same clarity in the here and now. History is only clear in retrospect. In real time, the temptation of kotzer ruach is strong.

Confronting that history — and our complicated role in it — reminded us that the price of giving in to kotzer ruach is silently succumbing to suffering, accepting tyranny not just as the way things are, but as the way they must always be — a posture that effectively grants license to more oppression.

As Frederick Douglass put it in an 1857 speech: “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them… The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” The only antidote to oppression, in other words, is the refusal to endure it.

It is for this reason that our tradition invites us to combat kotzer ruach with an alternative posture: ometz lev — courage of heart.

Ometz lev is not recklessness. It is not bravado. It is not the absence of fear. It is the inner steadiness that allows a person or a people to act with fear present, without allowing fear to dictate one’s destiny.

When Moses dies and leadership passes to Joshua — at a moment of great uncertainty, when the untested forces under his command were charged with disrupting and dislodging an entrenched and unjust status quo — God tells him again and again: “Chazak ve’ematz — be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed.” The courage God urges Joshua to embrace is not a denial of danger; it is a refusal to let danger determine the direction.

Ometz lev looks like the protesters in Birmingham who showed up to demonstrate against segregation at Kelly Ingram Park in 1963 only to be confronted with militarized police, attack dogs, and fire hoses. It looks like the protesters in Iran showing up to protest the regime in the face of a brutal and bloody crackdown. It looks, I submit, like Renee Good, putting her body on the line to protect her immigrant neighbors who are being hunted by the government. And it looks like Dr. Lynda Blackmon Lowery, who — two weeks after being savagely beaten on Bloody Sunday — marched again, fifty-four miles from Selma to Montgomery, turning fifteen on that road to freedom. When we met her, she did not romanticize her courage. She spoke about her understandable fears. About the traumas she endured. About how crossing that bridge could still make her tremble. But she also reminded us again and again that love is not passivity and nonviolence is not submission. Sometimes, you just have to march, come what may.

Sadly, Dr. Lynda died just weeks after we met her. But her story echoes for me, haunts me, this Shabbat — her life and her legacy a testimony to the question we confront today and every day:

Will we allow fear to constrict our spirits and accept silence as the cost of survival? Or will we cultivate ometz lev — the courage to believe that redemption is possible even when the path is hard?

From ancient Egypt to the Egypt of the here and now, the Torah does not deny that protest is risky or that resistance is dangerous. But it refuses to accept that danger as destiny. It insists that there is a Promised Land beyond every Egypt — if we are bold enough, brave enough, and faithful enough to join together and march toward it, however dark and difficult the trek through the wilderness. As Dr. King reminded us, “progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God.”

May the Holy One strengthen our hearts when fear tempts us toward silence.

May we cultivate ometz lev — courage that is disciplined, compassionate, and shared.

May we build a society in which law exists to protect dignity, not crush it; in which safety does not depend on submission;and in which the work of justice does not require terror as its toll.

May we trust that redemption is not a fantasy, but a horizon —and may we have the courage to keep marching toward it, together.

So may it be God’s will. Amen.