Let My People Go, So That They May Serve Me

And G-d said to Moses, 'Rise up early in the morning, and stand before Pharaoh, and say unto him: Thus says G-d, the G-d of the Hebrews: Let My people go, that they may serve Me. (From this week's Torah portion, Va'eirah, Exodus 9:13)

"So that they may serve Me." This small phrase turns all the modern significance that we would like to attach to the story of the Exodus on its head. On the surface, the story is made for Hollywood (and it was!): It has the good guys and the bad guys. It has Moses, the underdog leader fighting for justice who defeats Pharaoh, the strong and evil king. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, the good guys live happily ever after, the bad guys drown in the sea, justice has been done, happy end.

There is just one small problem. That is not what is written. We were not redeemed from Egypt so that we could live happily ever after. We were redeemed from Egypt to serve the King of the world. Were it not for that fact, we would have remained there.

The famous verse from this week's Torah portion, "Let my people go" became the slogan of the struggle for Soviet Jewry trapped behind the Iron Curtain. It was a great struggle to be in; the Soviet Union was the bitter enemy of the United States and what could be nicer than fighting against the evil empire and dovetailing with the ethical and enlightened Western world?

The problem is that while we adopted the values of the US, the "good empire", we omitted the all-important phrase, "So that they may serve Me." All that we remembered was "Let my people go." Let my people go for the sake of freedom, for the sake of democracy, for the sake of Zionism, for the sake of the values of the Western world. Let my people go to the Pax Americana of which Israel is part.

But we - and the Americans - are in the process of collapse because we have forgotten that our purpose is to serve G-d.

We have lost our sense of justice for our existence and as a result, arrest warrants are already waiting for our elected government officials if they dare venture into Europe's capitals. In a sense, they are right. We did not leave Egypt to enjoy the desert climate and we did not establish the State of Israel because the world lacks democracies. Without the "serving G-d" factor, there is no significance to the Return to Zion - it only creates friction in the world. As far as the nations are concerned, if we do not carry the message that the world has been waiting for, we are extraneous - even a nuisance.

The Americans had a president who looked for meaning. He was inspired by the good Jew who helped to open the Iron Curtain. "Natan Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy, is always at my bedside," said President Bush. And so, the American Nation followed Sharansky's message. But unfortunately, Sharansky's book did not include the connection between liberty and the service of G-d. The attempt to force democracy upon Iraq failed, naturally and the defeat of America was remolded into the image of Obama.