World Passover
It was 3,332 years ago that the Jewish people escaped Egyptian bondage for a life of uncertainty over food, shelter and their very lives.
Before they fled, all Jews were quarantined so that the angel of death didn’t visit them and take their first born. Families were torn apart through grief, fear loneliness and more.
Sound familiar?
In my family like in most Jewish households, the emphasis at Passover was on the plight of the Jews in ancient Egypt and through the eons. The tradition has been kept for all these years to remind Jews of the scourges they faced and undoubtedly will face again and how faith in God led them to safety.
That bothered me because the message I got was that Jews were the only ones who suffered and that Jews were chosen by God to be free. Of course, every religion fends for itself and offers redemption for its followers. But that’s is so old-fashioned and counterproductive.
If more than 3,000 years tells us anything, it is that suffering is universal and the challenge to survive knows no cultural or religious boundaries. In short, Jews never had the corner on the market of suffering or on redemption.
The Holocaust is the poster for Jewish suffering as it was. Not to infer that the Holocaust was anything less than horror and brutality at a scale never matched before. But from the beginning of time, all people have survived famines, floods, pestilence, wars and any other kind of miserable plight that man or nature can bring onto men.
The unbroken history of calamity goes from the Jews in slavery to Jesus’ crucifixion, through to the slavery of African Americans and the genocide of native Americans through the ongoing wars and pogroms to the present COVID-19 pandemic.
At this time, when the world could truly be tottering on the brink, we need to reach out to all of humanity.
I propose that this year we celebrate Passover for the whole world. It is time to to turn off our prejudices, hatred and more.
Arundhati Roy wrote about how the COVID-19 virus is threatening India’s existence. Roy wrote that pandemics or other mass tragedies have have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.
“This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it,” Roy writes.
It remains to be seen if people will see the handwriting on the wall and change their ways. Now more than every in past memory, we all have an obligation to join with others and to feed the hungry, house the homeless and generally comfort the afflicted everywhere. Sounds like hippie claptrap but the stakes are now greater than ever before.
Passover is the timeless reminder that God kept the plagues away and that with the help of God, nothing stopped the human spirit from beating the plague. It can happen again.
“Next year in Jerusalem,” are the guiding words for Jews around the world. We should work to bring all of the world to Jerusalem sooner than later.