Oppression against being a Jew

My grandfather was a jeweler, a sculptor and a compulsive tinkerer. He once took apart a Model T Ford, piece by piece, and put it back together again, just so he could learn how it worked. His hands were marvels of dexterity, and the precise, graceful dance they performed at every seder was a wonder to me. What I often wondered about was this: had the turning of pages, the pouring of salt water, and the breaking of the afikomen been performed by my grandfather’s grandfathers in the same way? Did they twist the parsley with one hand to break it, lift their glasses with all five fingers turned up, cup their grandson’s cheeks as if they were hatchlings? And would my hands ever do the work theirs’ did?

To be a Jew, by which I mean to be a person, is to wonder such things.

The Passover seder teaches us that to be a Jew is to be a stranger. Strangers wander, they have time on their hands, and so they wonder about things. To be a Jew is to wander the wilderness, like Moses, and Abraham before him, to be at home everywhere and nowhere. We tell the story of Passover to remind ourselves to love the stranger. No other commandment in the Torah—not even to love God—is mentioned as many times as the commandment to love the stranger as we do ourselves.

In Leviticus: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Because the stranger is you. Because you once walked where he walks. You know the heart of the stranger because your heart has been estranged. It is eye-opening to realize how emphatically the Torah warns against the threat of xenophobia, to not only the hated, but the hater. The Passover seder is a mnemonic device, an exercise of repetition, designed to help us ingest the memory of oppression, to make it a permanent part of our collective body and memory.

It is as if the sages were saying: argument is useless in the face of this hatred, politics are inadequate. Only the force of memory is strong enough to reconcile us with our estranged selves, the shunned, shamed or banished aspects of ourselves that we allow to languish uncared-for at our peril. Only memory will provide the strength of will required to keep our hearts and our homes open to strangers from everywhere, to overcome fear, doubt, prejudice and all the other plagues of a hardened heart.

The seder is a ceremony of welcome, to strangers within and without. It in fact makes no distinction between them. It places our grandfathers’ hands on our cheeks, our mothers lips on our hands, and our daughter’s brows on our lips, impressing the weight of our stories, our history, on our hearts. It invites us to unbind each other and ourselves, to open our doors to the world, to believe in a Promised Land we may never reach but will move our children toward. It reminds us to fight the good fight against oppression, wherever it occurs, and for freedom wherever it is threatened. On this night, and every night.

Did you like this example?

850

35