Pesach/Passover
Added in April 2017:
Ofri Ilany The Forgotten Genocidal Commandment Behind the Story of the Exodus
“The Exodus is a terrific story. So national, yet so humanistic. The primary source of all enlightened values. But is the story’s depiction by Walzer, Ben-Gurion and others compatible with the biblical account? Not really. Because, attached to the story of freedom from bondage is a tale far less humanistic: the commandment to annihilate the peoples of Canaan during the conquest of the land. We should not forget that this is one of the most detailed set of instructions for genocide we have from the ancient world.”
Robert A.H.Cohen’s bitter-sweet lament, Zionism, Apartheid and the Delegitimisation of Passover
“Zionism, which set out to create a modern redemption of the Jewish People, has slowly and surely destroyed the integrity of our Passover remembrance. The ongoing persecution of the Palestinian people in the service of a misguided notion of Jewish national self-determination has delegitimised our right to proclaim our foundational story of religious and political freedom. Why would anyone take seriously our right to speak out as Jews on the great moral issues of the day when we fail to face into the moral catastrophe of our own making?”
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Pesach 2014
“In Every Generation…” How Passover locks shut the Jewish imagination
Micah, on Micah’s Paradigm Shift: Israel-Palestine from a UK Jewish perspective. Rescuing the Hebrew covenant one blog post at a time.
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!
Jewish Voice for Peace
For Passover let us return to our knowledge of exile and injustice
Occupy the Haggadah! – Radical thoughts for Passover
Robert Cohen, Micah’s Paradigm Shift,
31.03.12
Extract:
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…
The Forgotten Genocidal Commandment Behind the Story of the Exodus
The dark side of the story of the liberation from Egypt
Ofri Ilany, Ha’aretz, 15 April 2017
Can the Bible be taken as a moral and political exemplar? The American philosopher Michael Walzer believes it can. His book “In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible” (Yale University Press, 2012) has recently appeared in Hebrew translation, and his best-known work, “Exodus and Revolution” (1985), also exists in Hebrew. In the latter, Walzer depicts the Exodus as a revolutionary program and as a basis for a radical politics of liberation. “Wherever people know the Bible, and experience oppression, the Exodus has sustained their spirits and (sometimes) inspired their resistance,” he writes. This story, he argues, is a source for “the idea of a deliverance from suffering and oppression: this-worldly redemption, liberation, revolution.”
Walzer, who is Jewish and a Zionist, identifies the biblical tale with “the modern Exodus”: the establishment of the State of Israel. In his reading, after centuries in which the Jews did not have the opportunity to act in the real world according to that biblical model, Zionism made it possible. Accordingly, the author adds Zionism to the list of heroic struggles of liberation in the modern age, headed by the struggle to liberate the slaves and the subsequent struggle for equality of blacks in the United States, who used the biblical phrase “Let my people go” from the Book of Exodus as a central element in their rhetoric.
All this rings pleasantly in the Zionist reader’s ear. It’s flattering to get confirmation from one of the world’s leading philosophers that the Exodus from Egypt – the national story we retell every year – is a primary model for political liberation. Indeed, we have taken pleasure in this since the inception of Zionism.
A year ago, Education Minister Naftali Bennett recommended that Israelis add to the readings of the Passover seder David Ben-Gurion’s testimony to the Peel Commission, established by Britain in 1936, to investigate the causes of the Arab Revolt in Palestine that same year. Ben-Gurion took pride in the fact that, after more than 3,500 years, Jews still remember every detail of the Exodus and commemorate its date, the clothing worn by the Israelites and even the food they ate.
“Any Jewish child, whether in America or Russia, Yemen or Germany, knows that his forefathers left Egypt at dawn on the 15th of [the Hebrew month of] Nisan,” Ben-Gurion told the commission, adding, “What did they wear? Their belts were tied, and their staffs were in their hands. They ate matza and arrived at the Red Sea after seven days.”
The Exodus is a terrific story. So national, yet so humanistic. The primary source of all enlightened values. But is the story’s depiction by Walzer, Ben-Gurion and others compatible with the biblical account? Not really. Because, attached to the story of freedom from bondage is a tale far less humanistic: the commandment to annihilate the peoples of Canaan during the conquest of the land. We should not forget that this is one of the most detailed set of instructions for genocide we have from the ancient world.
Accounts of slave uprisings are truly enthralling. But what we have here is a somewhat different story. Let’s say you were told about a group of oppressed people who escaped from a certain country and then adopted a fanatic, murderous general as their leader. They invaded a neighboring country, ravaged its cities and did not even allow the original inhabitants to live under their rule. That’s certainly a far less heartening story – but it’s the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The emancipation cannot be divorced from the subsequent bloodbath: In the wake of the leader Moses perforce comes the conqueror Joshua. Walzer himself notes that “the end of the Exodus story, the promised land, was present at the beginning.”
And what is the promised land? It is not empty terrain, but a place in which other people live. This is stated explicitly in Joshua 24:13: “I have given you a land for which you did not labor and towns which you did not build, and you have settled in them.”
It was not by chance that the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said remarked, ““There is no Israel without the conquest of Canaan… then as now.”
Why, then, do we not tell the story of the annihilation of the Canaanite peoples each year? Of how the injunction “you shall not let a soul remain alive” was realized? Of course, there are some who live that tale, too. Many members of the settlement movement take Joshua’s conquests as the political model for their actions. But not only them. In the midst of the War of Independence, Ben-Gurion wrote a description in his diary of the victories of “Israel’s armies” and of how they launched a “massive attack on the centers of Arab power in the country.” According to this account, “they smote the kings of Lod and Ramle, the kings of Beit Naballah and Deir Tarif, the kings of Kula and Migdal Tzedek.”
B-G as Joshua
Ben-Gurion knew that there was no king in Lod in his day, but massacre and expulsion certainly took place there. He imaged himself as Joshua, and the ethnic cleansing that was perpetrated in various parts of the country as a mythic biblical war. That, too, regrettably, is the heritage of the Exodus. But for the benefit of the British authorities, he omitted that part of it.
In any event, even for those who do not advocate ethnic cleansing, not to mention genocide, it’s worth remembering the dark side of the story of the liberation from Egypt. Because, in the end, it is not a unique story. In many political movements, revolutionary energy is accompanied by a murderous dynamic. Together with the termination of the monarchical regime in France came the Terror; the removal of the czarist regime eventuated in the gulags; and in the wake of India’s liberation from British rule, 15 million people became refugees and hundreds of thousands were murdered. Freedom fighters quickly become cruel oppressors, spurred by the same momentum that enabled them to break the chains of oppression. Our own story illustrates that tragic dynamic splendidly.
On the other hand, it’s likely that neither the Exodus from Egypt nor the conquest of Canaan ever happened. Despite centuries of feverish research, not a trace has been found to this day of a passage across Sinai by nomads during the period of King Ramses. Scholars think the narrative emerged primarily in the period of Josiah, a few decades before the Babylonian exile. The annihilation of the Canaanites is also a non-event. According to the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, the Israelite entity did not arrive from outside but developed within the local Canaanite population. “In fact, the distinction between Israelites and Canaanites is quite slight,” he says. The ancient Israelites worshiped Baal and Asherah, and their culture was Canaanite. Eradicating the Canaanites would have been tantamount to eradicating themselves.
It’s more than likely, then, that the Exodus from Egypt and the atrocities that followed never occurred. When we relate this story, we can take solace in the fact that it is an imagined tradition that was invented 700 years after the events it ostensibly depicts.
Thank heaven for that.
This posting includes
Passover at a Time of Darkness, the Magnes Zionist, 29 March 2010
Happy Passover from Gaza, Sam Bahour, talkingpointsmemo.com, 28 March 2010
The Magnes Zionist writes:”I don’t have time to write a proper Passover post, and I don’t have the strength either. Only those who are of the “things-need-to-get-worse-in-order-to-get-better” school can take cheer this Passover…; and Sam Bahour, from Gaza, explains the six traditional items on the Seder plate and draws analogies between then and now, between the Jewish suffering in Egypt and the Palestinians in Gaza today, making an impassioned plea for Jews to speak out…
March 2010
A happy pesach to all our supporters and website users! We include ‘Thoughts for Passover’ from Rabbis for Human Rights, ,2010
Alison Prager reports from Jerusalem, April 2009
“Could there be a more effective way of engendering resentment and creating hatred towards Jews than stamping out everyday life for non-Jews at the same time as Jews celebrate their own freedom from oppression?…”