Parshah Musings
Prison Break

There is a well-known fable of a man in distress looking up to G‑d; "G‑d, You promised to walk besides me, but when I look behind me I see only one set of footprints trodden into the sands of my life?"

And a caring, compassionate voice responds, "My son, those footprints you see are Mine, carrying you as you traveled along your journey."

We read this Shabbat how, after the foretold galut (exile) which we are currently suffering, (and if we think we’re not suffering that just shows how blinded to the realities of our unnatural existence we’ve become), "G‑d will return home..." Note: not "G‑d will return you home"; rather He, too, is in exile, as it were, and the future redemption will see G‑d Himself resume His rightful place, as it were, in our common homeland.

That G‑d accompanies us on every step and stage of our lives, neither abandoning nor rejecting a single Jew, is self-understood and even expected. The theology-shattering implication of the above verse is, that in some way, G‑d waits and hopes for our redemption when He too will "come home."

Prisoners can’t escape without help from the outside. Someone’s got to smuggle in the file, bribe the guards or drive the getaway car. Leaving exile is no different. We rely on G‑d to break the boundaries of our separation and remove obstacles both physical (anti-Semites, bus-bombs etc.) and psychological (greed, football) between the way we are and the way we should be.

G‑d however, prepared the escape-route, as it were, from before our expulsion and exile. We are guaranteed that G‑d is prepared, willing and waiting, to redeem and rejoin us and lead us by the hand to resume our natural state--freedom to be true Jews and truly Jewish.