Family by Family

WEcome into this world as individuals, legs thrashing, voices wailing, charged with a mission no one else can fulfill.

We experienced revelation as a nation, when masses stood shoulder to shoulder under a desert mountain.

But we savored our first taste of liberation as families. Individual families huddled together in sunbaked homes, hardly daring to believe that we had just defied the law of the land, slaughtering then roasting the deity of the people who, just months before, had been our sadistic masters.

When we envision the families on that dramatic night, we see them bearing visible scars of the years of slavery. The fathers likely had missing limbs, skin lacerated by whips, eyes blinded by clubs. The mothers were bent and bowed from loads far heavier than a woman’s capacity, their skin dry and shriveled from hours laboring in the unforgiving heat.