"In Every Generation..." How Passover locks shut the Jewish imagination

For our Passover meal this year (Monday 14 April) I have a fifth question and answer to add to the traditional quartet of the Ma Nishtanah.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

Because on this night we make a meal, literally and metaphorically, of our unique story. Via mouthfuls of bitter herbs, salt water, nuts and raisins mixed with wine, and unleavened bread, we promote the damaging mindset that tells us that we are the world's eternal victims.

I expect an immediate challenge to my liturgical liberties.

"Enough already with your iconoclastic itch! How can you say such things? Surely, Passover is the quintessential expression of our physical and spiritual liberation. Hasn't the escape of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery become the biblical paradigm of freedom from oppression that has brought hope to countless peoples across the centuries?"

I know, I know.

But my fifth question and answer is true none the less.

This is the night when we are most at risk from locking shut the Jewish capacity for empathy and blinding ourselves to the suffering of others - most notably, the Palestinians.

There will be some around the Seder table who will resent me wanting to recount the woes of another people ("the Palestinians for heaven's sake!") rather than those of my own kith and kin.

"Please can we celebrate the Exodus and our founding mythology of Jewish nationhood without dragging all that stuff into a nice family gathering! Let us enjoy the remembrance of our liberation by a God who intervenes in history with 'a strong hand and an outstretched arm'. Or are you going to insist on playing the part of the 'wicked son', the one in the Haggadah that cannot see the point of the celebration? Now have some more Motza and shut up!"

So, I will have to take a deep breath and try to explain how we have reached this immensely regrettable state of affairs. I may need a fifth cup of wine to get me through.

There are two powerful themes at work within the Seder night service. Two themes that have dominated Jewish self-understanding since at least the Middle Ages when the Seder night service, as we know it today, was first woven together.

The first theme can be characterised by this beautiful sentence that comes early on in our Passover meal:

"Let all who are hungry, come and eat; let all who are needy come and celebrate Passover."

This is the Jewish voice of welcome, of empathy. It marks the Exodus as the ancient anchor of Jewish ethics and reminds us of our timeless belief in a God that bends His universe towards justice and compassion.

The second theme arrives, with a chill air around it, towards the end of our evening of story telling, after the last terrible plague, the death of the Egypt firstborn, has persuaded Pharaoh to (temporarily) end his tyranny.

"In each and every generation they rise up against us to destroy us. And the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hands."

This is the collective cry of a people that has been oppressed and discriminated against throughout its history. A people left physically and psychologically scarred. A people that feels justice for them has been long delayed. This is our story told as one long pogrom.

It is a passage that reinforces the sense of the Jews under perennial siege all the way from biblical mythology to modern history. From the tribe of Amalek trying to thwart the slaves' escape from Egypt, to Haman's planned genocide of the Jews of Persia in the story of Esther, to Adolf Hitler's near success in making the European continent 'Judenrein'

In every generation there is always another Pharaoh who is out to get the Jews.

It's not difficult to understand how this idea repeated each year, at what is still the most widely observed Jewish festival, has profound emotional consequences for the Jewish imagination. And the resonance of the message does not end with the singing of the final verse of 'Hud Gadyah'.

We leave the Seder table convinced, once again, that we are the eternal victims, outsiders, never accepted, forever threatened. It is the worldview that helped to propel 19th century political Zionism into the 20th century Jewish mainstream. Zionism, brilliantly and dangerously, wrapped together a religious longing for spiritual and physical redemption with a nationalist colonial project dressed up as a rightful 'Return'. It was a compelling and heady mix. The world will never accept us, so the theory goes, so we must have our own state in our own land where we can live in safety and normalcy. And never mind who might be living there now, for our needs our greater than theirs, our story more important, and our ancient Promise more profound than any set of civil rights.

In our post-Holocaust, Israel-centred Jewish consciousness, the 'Every generation...' passage has continued to grow in significance, eating away at our moral sensibility. So much so, that we have difficulty understanding modern Jewish history and politics without constant reference to this paradigm of oppression and threat, or, as it is now more often described, 'Security'.

Benjamin Netanyahu happily taps into all of this with his new demand that the Palestinians accept Israel as a 'Jewish State' with all the implications that has for Israeli Christian and Muslim Palestinian citizens, the rights of Palestinian refugees and the chances of the State of the Jews ever being truly 'Jewish and Democratic'. John Kerry and the Obama administration have failed to challenge the same "In every generation..." mindset and so find themselves acting as Israel's legal team rather than as honest brokers of peace.

And meanwhile...whatever happened to: 'Let all who are hungry, come and eat...'?

In Hebrew, the word for ancient Egypt is 'Mitzrayim'. The same word can also be translated as 'the narrow place'. Today, we Jews are living our lives in a narrow nationalist echo chamber where the chanting of our past suffering bounces off the walls blocking out every other sound to our ears.

It is true, we celebrated many Seder nights in the ghettos and shtetls of European oppression. But we are now in a radically different place and we are yet to adjust to our new circumstances. We have failed to notice that in this generation it is we who have the power, we who have status in every country where we live, we who have a nation state with a great army and Super Power backing. And it is we who have constructed our own apparatus of prejudice and injustice in the very land we call 'Holy'. Today, we have become the Pharaoh we once despised.

At this point I'm hoping that my Seder night companions will turn to me and ask, with at least a hint of humility: "So what is to be done, Rav Micah?"

I have a remedy. But it will not be easy.

A new Exodus is needed to set the Jewish mind free and open our imagination to those that suffer at our hands. The theme embodied by "In every generation..." must be understood anew. It must be claimed for the same Jewish spirit that invites the hungry and oppressed to share at our table. We must see that in every generation, even among ourselves, the narrow vision of 'Pharaoh' can rise up. Our task is is to bring it down in the name of the same God that rescued our ancestors with 'a strong hand and an outstretched arm' and delivered us to uphold a moral universe.

This year - we remain trapped in the narrow place. Next year - may we find our new Exodus to liberation.

Hag Sameach!

P.S. If you found this blog post provocative, stimulating or just plain annoying, then you may like to read 'Occupy the Hagaddah' from 2012  and the poem "On the Impossibility of Passover" from 2013.

Occupy the Haggadah! - Radical thoughts for Passover

Passover approaches and a fearful angel descends upon the homes of the Children of Israel.

But this is not the Angel of Death, sent to take the first born son from every household of ancient Egypt. And this time, no daubing of blood on our doorposts will tell this angel to ‘pass over’ our homes.

For this is the Angel of Ignorance and Denial.

This is the angel that blinds us to our own ills, that curses us to become the very Pharaoh we say we despise.

In the days to come, as we have for thousands of years, we will sit down together and tell the story of our freedom from slavery. We will open our wine-stained and motzah-crumbed Haggadot, and from its pages we will relive (as if we ourselves were there) our founding mythology, our birth as a people liberated from oppression.

It is a powerful and compelling tale that weaves its message through every part of our holy scriptures and prayerbook liturgies. We are told that a tyrant can be brought low, a people can be made free, the world can be changed.

The Pharaoh lodged in our soul

But do we revere the Exodus text while dishonouring its message? Each year we celebrate our freedom but fail to recognise the Pharaoh that shares our Seder night meal with us, lodged somewhere in our soul, distorting our view of ourselves and others.

We are mistaken if we think our own suffering at the hands of countless Pharaohs throughout our history has somehow made us immune from the seductive powers of Pharaoh-ism.

We sit down to celebrate our survival as if survival were an end in itself. We forget that we were forged in the heat of the desert for a meaning and a purpose. Survival cannot be for survival’s sake, just as freedom was not given for freedom’s sake.

The encounter at Mount Sinai set for us a demanding (perhaps impossible) mission - to do right by God and right by each other. Wandering in the desert, without our own land or borders, we recorded the commandments that were meant to shape us as a people.

"You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt." Exodus 23:9

"You shall not stand idly by while your neighbour's blood is being shed." Leviticus 19:16

"Love your neighbour as yourself." Leviticus 19:18

"The strangers who resides with you, shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Leviticus 19:34

And here's the showstopper!

"Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live, and inherit the land which the Lord your God gives you" Deuteronomy 16:20

Limping back to Egypt

But when it comes to the most fundamental issue facing Judaism and Jewish identity in the 21st century, we have not just failed the mission, we have turned our back on it. We have limped back to the Red Sea and Pharaoh's chariots have caught up with us.

In spite of all we have experienced in our two millennium of wanderings, we prefer to keep ourselves ignorant of the meaning of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and the condition of Palestinian Israelis and refugees.

We choose not to see the house demolitions, collective punishments, land confiscations, water appropriations, the olive groves up-rooted, the wells blocked. The harassment, intimidation and murder of Palestinian men, women and children goes unnoticed. Settler violence and a brutalised army of occupation means nothing to us.

And on the other side of the wall, we insist we are the only democracy in the Middle-East despite a fifth of the population (the Israeli Palestinians) feeling like, and being treated as, unwanted strangers in their own land.

We choose to see another people’s displacement, another people’s exile, another people’s daily humiliation and discrimination as an acceptable price for our own national renewal.

One of Israel's finest writers, David Grossman, wrote the following words just a few weeks ago:

"I think about a people which has dumped a whole other nation on the side of the road and has backed the process to the hilt over 45 years, all the while having not a bad life at all, thank you. I think about a people which has been engaging in a brilliant genius-like denial of its own responsibility for the situation. I think of a people, which has managed to ignore the warping and distorting of its own society and the madness that the process has had on its own national values."

Are we incapable of tasting the bitterness of another people's oppression? On Seder night, we dip our food twice in salt water to symbolise our own tears of slavery. Should we dip a third time for the tears we have brought to the 'strangers' and 'neighbours' in the land we insist was promised to us?

Occupy the Haggadah!

It is time to reclaim our own story. We, the authors of the Exodus paradigm, must breathe new life into our scripture. We must return ourselves to the desert and re-learn the mission.

To use this year's favourite phrase of radicals, we need to 'Occupy' the Haggadah. We have to invest this medieval liturgy with the power to transform us into the people we were meant to be. We cannot let this text simply reinforce our identity as eternal victims (leaving no space in our hearts for any other victim). The Haggadah must haul us back to be the custodians of Justice we were called to be.

This year when my family sits down for the annual re-telling of the Exodus story, there will be some new additions to the evening's order of service.

We will include prayers for justice, thought-provoking reflections on the meaning of the Holocaust from Jews and Palestinians, and acknowledgement of our own complicity in taking freedom from others. We will dip into salt water three times to remember not only our tears but the tears of our neighbours too.

And alongside the salt water, Elijah's wine glass and Miriam's cup, we will make an addition to the Seder plate. Next to the bitter herbs, the horoset, the motzah, the shankbone, we will add some Palestinian olive oil to remember that the land has meaning to another people too. And when we break the motzah, we will do so as a symbol of sharing the land. And to soften our brittle 'bread of oppression' we will pour on some of the Palestinian olive oil.

This is no act of self-loathing criticism. On the contrary, this is taking Judaism back to its beginnings, reclaiming it from the narrow, extreme nationalism that has become our 21st century's golden calf.

As well as making us alive to the past and the miracle of our own survival, we will open our eyes to the present and to our own participation in Pharaoh's modern franchise.

On Seder night it is traditional to ask the question: Why is this night different from all other nights? This year let the difference be this: from this night on we will no longer allow our story to blot out another's.

And to paraphrase the last words of the Haggadah service:

This year - in slavery to the Pharaoh of our own making.
Next year - liberated to pursue our mission of justice.

Hag Sameach, Happy Passover, Occupy the Haggadah!

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