16 | MARCH 25 • 2021

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umerous cultures
around the world have
institutionalized slav-
ery, but for Americans, slavery
means race-based enslavement
of Blacks in America.
As we prepare for Passover,
Jews contemplate our ances-
tors’ enslavement in Egypt.
Freedom came to our ances-
tors, in the biblical account, by

Divine intervention. The end
of slavery came to Blacks in
America by the Union victory
in the Civil War,
but the long quest
for freedom and
equality drags on.
Rabbi
Kenneth Chelst
of Southfield,
a professor in

the College of Engineering
at Wayne State University,
devotes a book, Exodus and
Emancipation: Biblical and
African American Slavery, to
comparing the experience of
slavery and exodus as pre-
sented in the Bible and in
later Jewish thought with the
historical experience of slavery
and emancipation as experi-

enced by Blacks in America.
He emphasizes that “Blacks
saw God’s hand in their
emancipation and the Civil
War just as Lincoln did in his
second inaugural address.”
Rabbi Chelst hopes that Jews
and Blacks can use his book as
part of their mutual discussion
of the Bible and contemporary
issues.
That discussion happens in
the Coalition for Black and
Jewish Unity, a partnership of
the Council of Black Baptist
Pastors of Detroit and Vicinity
and the Jewish Community
Relations Council/AJC. The
co-directors of the
coalition are Mark
Jacobs of the
JCRC/AJC and
the Rev. Kenneth
James Flowers,
senior pastor
at Greater New
Mount Moriah
Missionary Baptist Church in
Detroit.
In words that echo Rabbi
Chelst’s observation, Rev.
Flowers states: “Blacks were
brought to this country in
chains. We were considered
property, not fully human.
This happened with the sanc-
tion of the government. We
are the only group enslaved
by law as chattel. And indeed,
people have worked hard to
tell us that we are not fully
human. That damages the
psyche.
“But people in the Black
Church read the story of
Moses, that God called on
Moses and delivered the slaves
in Egypt, and we believed
that God would deliver us,”
Rev. Flowers continued. “We
believed that God is on the side
of the downtrodden. The bibli-
cal narrative promised us that
God would give us what we
needed. This belief has helped
to sustain us through the era of
slavery and through the era of
Jim Crow.”

continued on page 18

PASSOVER

The Binds that Tie

Rabbi
Kenneth
Chelst

The Black and Jewish communities both share a
common abhorance of the evils of slavery.

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Rev.
Kenneth
Flowers