Terry H. Schwadron
April 19, 2024
For Jews around the world and their invited families, this week likely is proving a wrestle over how best to celebrate the ancient Passover holiday of freedom with the current realities in the Middle East.
This Passover arrives amid confusion about squaring our values against what humans are willing to do to each other in the name of winning, for Jews and non-Jews alike. For openers, the array of horrors and dangers on display these days makes it essential to set aside what arises from religion or identity from what demands ethical and humane attention.
The story retold over centuries in home-centered Seders in countries around the world addresses history’s first recorded slave revolt and it relies heavily on the gratitude — and responsibilities — of being granted the chance to survive and blossom, despite continuing harassment, pogrom, and anti-Semitism through various cultures, including the European Holocaust.
What makes things different this year, of course, are both the horrors of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and hostage-taking by Hamas and the nature of the Israeli hyper-sized response that has razed most of Gaza, leaving 2.2 million Palestinians, including civilians, women, and children, homeless and starving while governments flail at self-preservation through efforts to demonize enemies. Where the ancient story provides for an increasingly awful 10 plagues to liberate those held against their will, we now witness Hamas attacking Israelis from tunnels under hospitals, Iran and its proxy armies raining drones and missiles on Israelis, and Israeli strikes killing emergency food aid workers and insisting on grabbing land from Palestinians in the West Bank. Early today, there were reported Israeli strikes on an Iranian military base.
You don’t have to be a partisan in these efforts to rue violence veering out of control in a never-ending cycle that refuses to stay within its borders. That politicians worldwide leap on various aspects to denounce calls for ceasefires makes as little sense as do U.S. congressional hearings over the way college campuses find themselves turned into battlegrounds over assumptions about identity, religion, and the changing definitions of the goals of Zionism born from a desire for a home safe from persecution.
Enslavement to Violence
Just as we need no reminders of the current “enslavement” of civilian hostages held for no reason other than Jewish identity, we also need no reminder of enslavement to inhumane treatment of others. In the Middle East, it is useful to remember that there is no goal beyond the current desire to defeat Hamas or for Hamas to rid the region of Jewish occupiers.
We are enslaved to a cycle of continuing violence whose tentacles not only threaten the world order, but along the way kindle partisan political fires of nonsense passing as debate in the U.S. Congress and inane statements by Donald Trump that “all Jews who vote Democratic hate Israel and their religion,” or those by Joe Biden to continue to provide offensive weapons to Israel while calling for ceasefires.
The Seder’s central story about a yearn for freedom remains the same, but much of it seems upside-down. Indeed, seder participants otherwise celebrating family reunions and the arrival of spring, are being pushed in the plethora of alternative texts finding their way onto the Internet what actions we need to be taking towards preserving our own democracy and to keep Israeli leaders from reflecting Pharoah-like oppression. What are we supposed to do both about growing reports of anti-Semitic and anti-Palestinian feelings of unsafety far from the battlefields? What does a fight over security along the Israel-Gaza border or within range of Iranian weaponry have to do with allowing civilians to starve or for a speaker on a campus to be able to offer an opinion about what has turned “security” into “oppression” for too many. Why aren’t college campuses ideal locations for intelligent debate over serious issues rather than targets either for personal attacks or for untethered political attacks on university presidents for a singular view that even the wartime participants cannot identify?
Chef José Andrés, head of World Central Kitchens, offered an op-ed recently in which he noted that as a guest at seders, “I have heard the ancient Passover stories about being a stranger in the land of Egypt, the commandment to remember — with a feast before you — that the children of Israel were once slaves. It is not a sign of weakness to feed strangers; it is a sign of strength. The people of Israel need to remember, at this darkest hour, what strength truly looks like.”
Diverse Roads to Humanity
In our family, — one generation from the Holocaust — there are cousins who live in Israel, those who have visited, those who see no tie to Israel, and those who have become disheartened by the evident effects in Gaza. We recognize that anti-Semitism is not limited to feelings about Israel and Gaza.
Our tradition is to change the story from year to year to reflect its fresh interpretation amid current circumstance. Rather than seek a holiday that is rote, we find meaning in tying it to reality to reflect a belief that we can be part of healing in our world, whether externally or internally.
This year’s ugliness shows us a world in which race, choice and identity are scorned rather than celebrated, in which celebrating as we await more violent retribution, this time in response to Iranian weapons, is a hanging sword. The “Israel” of which we are a part is a label for Jewish identity and not over real estate in the Middle East and a right-wing and religiously aggressive coalition government whose policies fly in the face of what we were raised to see as Jewish identity. In this household, stories about our gratitude for freedom reflect the idea that none of what we believe in has come easily, and that we should never rest easy while others are suffering.
We have new Pharaohs globally and domestically, some in the form of authoritarian leaders and some in the form of would-be populism based on fears of The Other. It has become too easy for someone to reach for a nearby assault-style weapon, to hoard oil, water, food, and money, to unthinkably blame others for creating circumstances that we ourselves do not protest vehemently enough. Life is harder with constantly rising prices and lowered expectations for institutions losing our trust. The politics of division is based on the incorrect notion that for the other guy to succeed, I must be losing – and I’m not going to let that happen.
Our search for dignity, joy and freedom can’t be just for a few, however “chosen.”
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