B’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot et-atzmo, k’ilu hu yatzav mimitzrayim.
In every generation, everyone is obligated to see themselves as though they personally left Egypt.
The beauty of Passover is that we consciously place ourselves in the shoes of people struggling to be free. We remember a story that happened long ago and far away. But our real job is to remember – personally – the slave’s struggles – any slave – and to identify personally with the underdog, the little guy, the bigot’s victim, the person whose destiny is not in his own hands. For most of us, Passover will always be a warm ritual of Jewish history, one in which we enjoy the company of family and friends – and all those cups of wine. For others it mirrors very real struggles that continue even today.
I read a wonderful article by Michael Twitty, a chef, and an Afro-American Jew. He was writing about what went into his seder plate. Exactly 150 years ago, one of his ancestors, Elijah Mitchell, was released from slavery, virtually at the moment the Civil War ended. At Passover Twitty serves a bitter herb – collard greens – on his seder plate. Instead of a shank bone there is a chicken leg – of the sort his family took with them when they began their way North during the Great Migration. For Twitty freedom is personal. The Civil Rights movement brought freedom another step closer for Afro-Americans. But who would say the struggle is over? For Blacks, like Jews, there have been numerous flights to freedom, each time discovering there is always some new way to strip them of rights and dignity. But the value of remembering history, the value of Passover, is that it illuminates the present.
Passover is a call to action. It is a constant struggle to be free. It always has been, and this is still the case today. We are at a point in our history where our democratic freedoms are threatened by any number of things. Our American ideals, and our Jewish ideals, have gone wildly off the rails, both here and in Israel.
If we really value freedom, we cannot deny it to others. A nation built on inequality and injustice, xenophobia, militarism, surveillance, paranoia, bigotry, and privilege for a small group of people is not free. Those of us who feel free, like German Jews before 1935, are at least partially deluding ourselves. The strongest person or group in a twisted society can become the most vulnerable – in the blink of an eye, in the signing of a piece of legislation, or in the interests of national security.
Unless we are the ones shaping our own government – and not Big Money or their friends in a growing police state – we can never be free. And until everyone is free, even the most vulnerable, none of us truly will be. You will not be free.
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