Shabbat Shalom.

498 days.

498 days. Our brothers and sisters have been held hostage in Gaza 498 days. Monday will mark 500 It’s hard to even conceive it’s hard to fathom, it’s hard to understand even what that number is in the suffering that has taken place. Do you remember last week or so we saw Eli Sharabi make his way to freedom and we saw his emaciated look, We saw the weakness in his body, and it brought us back right away to the images from 1945 It didn’t take long for us to snap back to Auschwitz, to know what it means for us as a people to be vulnerable like that, to be oppressed and tortured in that way.

498 days. I feel a bit of a connection to the Shirabi family last summer we were at Camp Ramon and one of the Judaic specialist that had come in, he and his wife. He was, I think, the child of one of my seminary teachers from when I was in rabbinical school, and she was, I think, the cousin, maybe the aunt i lose track now of a boy named Ophir. Ophir was 17 years old on October sixth of twenty twenty three and he lived just outside Jerusalem on a kibbutz called Ramat Raquel, which I visited many times.

And Ophir decided to go down to visit his girlfriend and stay with her family on Kibbutzpaheri on Friday October sixth twenty twenty three. And that brings us to a young woman named Yuval Sharabi, 17 then on October sixth twenty, twenty three, Same age as Caleb, same age as our kids, teenagers. We know what happened on October seventh, but if we focus in specifically on what happened to Yuval Sharabi, she survived and her mom and her sisters survived. But Hamas took her boyfriend of fear, and Hamas took Yuval’s father Yossi. And Hamas took Yuval’s uncle Eli, murdering his wife and children after they had taken him hostage.

And I think over these last many months often about Yuval’s Shirabi. And I was reminded of her again last week when Eli was freed. And of course, we know of the torture that Hamas continued to inflict on Eli by trying to get him excited to see his wife and kids again when they knew all along that they had been murdered.

And I think about Yuval. Yuval’s boyfriend, Ophir came back after 54 days he was part of that first round where they freed some of the hostages. It was found out that Yuval’s father, Eli, was killed in Gaza. He never made it home. And now Yuval’s uncle Eli was just released, looking like a Holocaust survivor to find out that his wife and children had been murdered almost 500 days ago.

And I think about Yuval, then 17, now 18 years old, and I wonder about her future. And I wonder about what will be for her and her contemporaries, and I wonder what it will be like for our children and what kind of world they and we are building for our kids and for our grandkids. With that, we turn to our Torah portion, Parshad Yitro, and the reading of the 10 Commandments. Now, most of us are pretty good at naming the 10 plagues. Why because we have a song to go with it,

Right? We can name most, if not all of the 10 plagues i will not subject you to a test to see if you can come up with all of the 10 commandments just as easily as you can come up with the 10 plagues. But you’re welcome to turn with me in your eighths crime Kumashim to our Torah portion this week. Exodus chapter 20 begins really on page four hundred forty two in your eighth crime kumashim.

And now when we frame the 10 commandments, what we see is our ancestors having just come out of slavery, out of centuries of oppression. And here as God is saying, that these next 40 years will be a birth canal to freedom and to the society that you get to build, the world that you get to found for your children and your grandchildren. And what should this society be rooted in what values and what priorities and what ideas and ideals will exist at the foundation of this society, the land of Israel that will be ours.

And I think if you start to look at the commandments here, page four forty two four forty three and so forth, what we come to see is that God says only I am God. You shall not put a leader above you and treat that leader as if they are God. It’s a direct refutation of Pharaoh being considered God of Egypt. The definition for our people of freedom is that no matter how powerful someone might be on earth, they are not infallible, they are not perfect, they are not divine.

And our 10 commandments, at the very core of the very first commandment, I, the Lord of your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the House of bondage, you shall have no other gods beside me, is a statement that all humans are equal. It is a powerful definition of our freedom that we shall never subject ourselves to despotism, that we should never elevate one person above all other people as a God. And from there the Torah goes on to tell us of the other commandments you shall not make for yourself a sculptured image or any likeness of that is in the heavens.

You shall not bow down to them or serve them, only God is God. You shall not swear falsely by the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not clear one who swears falsely by his name. Truth has to be at the foundation of any society. Rejection of despotism. And then the Torah continues to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all of your work. Not only shall we not subject ourselves to a ruler as if the ruler is God, but we don’t even subject ourselves to our employers.

No one can Lord over us with total control and total power. To be a Jew, to be free, means to recognize that no one has total authority over us, and we cannot allow anyone to have total authority over us. And then the Torah continues i’m now on page four forty six with the fifth commandment honor your father and your mother. Then you shall not murder you shall not commit adultery after saying that we shall not allow anyone to Lord over us and hold that kind of power over us.

We say we’re not allowed to exert our power over anybody else, that if each human is is created in the image of God, there’s a prohibition from us acting as God toward other people. We cannot take life the way God takes life. We have to protect the vulnerable, which I think is this commandment here of honor, your mother and your father. And then the Torah, of course, continues. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal, which Rashi tells us is not a commandment against thievery, but actually a commandment to prohibition against kidnapping. This commandment, lotig Nov, means we’re forbidden from kidnapping. Why because we cannot exert our will over another person as if we are God and they are subject to us.

And then we have the commandments against coveting because we are forbidden from treating any person as if they are an object. We are prohibited from engaging in transactional relationships that dehumanize a person. And in this way, we begin to see the foundation for the society that God commands us to build here at Mount Sinai god says you shall never allow a king, a ruler, a leader to Lord over you as if they are God and have total power. You shall never allow any human being to treat you in that way, and you shall never treat another as if you are God to them.

You cannot take their life you cannot take them hostage. You cannot Lord over them in that way. And then we cannot dehumanize we’re prohibited from dehumanizing or treating anyone as if they are object. That is the basis of our society that is the 10 commandments. I saw a great clip, by the way, from Ronald Reagan recently where Ronald Reagan says throughout the history of the world and even many nations in our own time, what happens is that a king or a ruler writes laws that the people are subject to.

But the United States, following in the biblical model, says we don’t operate that way. The people write laws that the leader is bound to follow. And of course we see that in Deuteronomy, where even the King of Israel is subject to the laws of Torah and must write for himself a Torah scroll and keep it handy so that he never thinks of himself as too powerful. That is the ideal by which we set for ourselves as the kind of free society that we are to build for our children and for our grandchildren. In the nineteen, eighties rabbi david, hartman a blessed memory, wrote a powerful essay called Auschwitz or Sinai, And in it he asks us to reflect on the state of Israel today and on the world today, to say, are the societies we’re building rooted in fear, or are they rooted in aspirational goals? And Rabbi Hartman framed it.

Coming out of Auschwitz, it would be very easy to justify every act of power because we’re afraid. But really what God wants us to do is to set the ideal, the aspirational goal, that we should seek to build a society rooted in how we treat other people, That we cannot Lord over them, that we cannot act all powerful toward them, and that we cannot allow ourselves to be subject to others who are going to do the same toward us. Do we want Auschwitz or do we want Sinai to be the defining moment for our children and our grandchildren?

And I think about Yuval Sharabi, that 17 now 18 year old young woman. What kind of society are we building in Israel for her and for the children who will follow after her? What kind of society are we building here in America for our children and our grandchildren? Is it Auschwitz or Sinai? What is the compelling force leading us to make the decisions that we’re making?

Aipac sent out a wonderful email last week, and one of the highlights of the AIPAC email was of a young mom, married with children, who on October seventh suffered burns over her body as a result of Hamas’s terror. Over 50 % of her body burned. This week she gave birth to a New Girl, a new baby girl. Somehow life’s goes on and the will of the Jewish people is second to none. And I hope as we look to build a society for those children and as we look to build a society for our children, that while we are mindful of the threats that exist against us, that while we are working every day to prevent another Auschwitz that is actually Sinai, that is coming to guide us.

The ideal of freedom, compassion, justice. And most of all, that we have an obligation to preserve and protect human dignity, certainly our own and that of everyone with whom we encounter on this Shabbat of Parshadi Tro, in which we read of the 10 Commandments. May this be the foundational text that guides us to build societies of righteousness and holiness, That we should strive ever to be a Mamlukhit Kohanim vigoy kadosh, a Kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

That we should pursue justice and offer compassion, and that indeed freedom, true freedom, should be at the core of everything we do. Ken yehi ratzon, may this be God’s will. May God bless us all with peace. May God bless us with safety and let us stay together amen and may the hostages come home, all of them, soon and safely.