Passover in terrible times

JVL Introduction

Passover this year occurs at a terrible time, in the midst of a war of vengeance and genocidal intent waged by Israel on the Palestinians.

When Israel’s leaders claim to be acting on behalf of all Jews worldwide and behave as they do, with the enthusiastic support of a large proportion of Israeli Jews, we have to wonder what celebrating liberation can mean today.

Diana Neslen offers some reflections.

RK

PS: Our fifth liberation seder, in aid of the British Shalom Salaam Trust’s Gaza Trauma Appeal, will take place on Thursday 25th April. See below and register here.

Passover in terrible times

With the healing of the world must come Freedom and Justice for all those between the river and the sea.

Diana Neslen, 19th April 2023

Each year we celebrate the festival of Passover, to remind ourselves of our redemption from lives of bondage. It is our special time. And we invite all those who admire the story of triumph over adversity to share this time with us. The story of the liberation of the Children of Israel from the yoke of bondage has resonated down the ages. The African slaves in America used the Biblical story as their lodestar to advance their drive for freedom. Oppressed people everywhere look on this story as a guide and salve for the trials they face. This speaks to the universalist quality of a story for those under the burden of persecution. And even in our darkest hours, in the ghettos of Europe the hope provided by our liberation fuelled the desire for survival.

But not now. Today this season will be for many of us a time of pain and anguish. We must not hide from the sense of grief that envelops so many of us as we contemplate the devastation around us. October 7th was for too many in our community a clarion call for revenge. While we share the grief of the mourners that day, we remember the warnings we gave about the wages of oppression. Warnings that went unheeded. The Haggadah we read at Passover tells us that in each generation they will rise up against us. There are those who take these words as a battle cry to indulge in violence and terror. Their excuse is that Jews were persecuted throughout the ages and therefore we must become warriors to prevent this persecution.

Our Rabbis throughout golus (diaspora) cautioned against the turn towards violence. They saw that Jewish people had only suffered loss through their propensity to take to the sword. The temple was lost, the people dispersed and in a hostile world nonviolence was the best survival strategy. They cautioned that the best way for the Jewish people to react against brute strength was to build its own inner life on the foundations of justice and spirituality. Their wisdom enabled this embattled community to survive across the centuries. But once a Jewish state became a reality this caution was dismissed with contempt.

And the results of this contempt are now available for the world to see. The dehumanisation of a defenceless civilian population has led to an orgy of destruction, plausibly a genocide. The stain of this terrible moment will be forever etched in history’s pages and the perpetrators will be shunned by those who recognise criminality when it occurs. The army of the state of Israel resembles that of ‘those who rise up against us’.

So, on this night we need to return to our sages and to our best traditions. They may be spiritual, they may be ethical, they may be political, but we find them in all Jewish history. And we find them in the passion with which so many Jews have chosen to resist the depravity of the state which presumes to act in our name. We find it in our own history of struggle for justice throughout the ages and in so many theatres. We find it in the common cause with which we today challenge the powers, who provide arms and cover for genocide, and we find it in the warmth of comradeship in struggle. We are the seeds of a better future and when we say: Let all who are hungry come and eat and all who are needy come and share the Passover we mean it from our deepest recesses. We redouble our efforts for tikkun olam, the healing of the world without which there is no future. And with the healing of the world must come Freedom and Justice for all those between the river and the sea.

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