Pesach 4/23/24
Pesach 2024 / פֶּסַח5784
After months of challenge, unrest and uncertainty, Passover, the Festival of our Liberation, has once again arrived. As we sit down this weekend, to relive our Exodus from slavery, let us be thankful for the miracles in our lives, starting with the gift of having one another. Each Passover, I write the holiday greeting for our Seder guests. This year, I’m addressing the elephant in the room: on the heels of an historically tense weekend with Iran, why would I return to Israel, with my young family, to celebrate Passover? The reasons are many.
First, my king of a father-in-law has Parkinson’s and I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not confident he’s got another Seder left in him. Secondly, and this is not naivety, I trust Israel to do everything in its power to keep its citizens safe. There is a lot of hand-wringing about WWIII, but we’re smack in the middle of an eye-poking contest until the US Presidential election in November. Thirdly, if diaspora Jews don’t support Israel, especially during a holiday season, no one will. But the biggest reason is that there is no better holiday for what Jews are experiencing right now. And the significance of experiencing in Israel in palpable. In the Haggadah, we say Vehi SheAmda: “in each and every generation, they rise up to destroy us. But the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.” Pharaoh, Greeks, Romans, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Pogroms, Hamas and Iran - they have all tried to destroy us, and we are still here.
The Seder service on Pesach is the oldest surviving ritual in the Western world. It dates back roughly 3000 years to the night, possibly in the reign of Ramses II, when the Israelites ate their last meal in Egypt, preparing for their journey to freedom. Since then, once a year, every year, each Jew is commanded to relive the experience of Egypt as a constant reminder that the battle for freedom is never finally won, but must be fought in every generation, just as the IDF is doing now.
The ritual of the seder, which means order, is important because there is a profound difference between history and memory. History is HIS story–an event that happened sometime else to someone else. Memory is My story–something that happened to me and is part of who I am. To be a Jew is to know that over and above history is the task of memory. Judaism made this a matter of religious obligation. Pesach is when we recount not our history but our collective memory as a people, where the past does not die but lives, in the chapter we write in our own lives, and in the story we tell our children.
Pesach is a transformative story of hope. It tells how an otherwise undistinguished group of slaves found their way to freedom from the greatest and longest lived empire; not just of their time, but of all time. To paraphrase Rabbi Sacks ztz”l, whom I dearly miss, it recounts how the Supreme Power intervened to liberate the supremely powerless. It is a story of the defeat of probability by the force of possibility. And it defines what it is to be a Jew: not a symbol of victimhood, but a living symbol of hope.
Next year in Jerusalem! Am Yisrael Chai!
Kelly