Bo
Reflection by Carrie Watkins, Or HaLev Teacher
How do we choose to tell our stories?
"Parshat Bo brings us right into the heart of the Exodus story and really right into the heart of the Jewish story. We are told again and again to define ourselves by this story. We are told to tell this story even while the story is being told for the first time. Here in parshat Bo it says: remember this story later, continue telling the story later.
One of the places it shows up later in the Torah is in the commandment to love the other. The Torah says, you should love the other, you should care for the other, because you too were others, were gerim (strangers) in the land of Egypt. The story becomes an invitation into empathy, into seeing those people that we think are different from us, and understanding that actually we're not so different, that we have an obligation to support others alongside our obligation to support our own people.
The story might not have been told that way. You could imagine a different telling of the story in which God says `nobody showed up for you in Egypt, and so you don't have any obligation to show up for anyone else`. But it's not how we tell this story, and that's good, because the way that we tell stories has a real impact on how we act in the world.
We see this in mindfulness meditation practice. The more we pay attention to our inner landscape, the more we see those undercurrents, those stories that shape the way we show up in the world and the way we respond and react to what’s around us.
The more we see the stories, the more we have the capacity to change them: to choose how we tell the stories, to choose how we tell our stories, and to shape them in ways that allow us to show up with more empathy, with more wholeness, with more of who we want to be in the world and how we want to be in the world.”