We hesitated to have a Passover seder at all this year. The Gaza war is toxic and unavoidable. The seder is a time to reflect on Jewish identity and I wasn't sure I could handle infusing that with the current volatile political agendas within my family and our guests.
But I found myself settling on three points to provided a framework for the seder story, none of which lays out an answer to the situation in the Middle East, or justifies anything that has been done there. But they did allow me to feel okay about moving forward, so I shared them with our dozen guests as an introduction to this year's seder. The result, thankfully, was a heartfelt and friendly ceremony and dinner, with civil discussion and debate.
1. Origin Stories.
The tradition of the seder is to tell the origin story of the Jewish people every year. This helps unify Jewish people round the world. We are lucky to have the freedom to tell our own story and enrich our identity every year, even as we raise questions in the face of events of our time.
The Passover story is the foundational myth* of Judaism, taken from Exodus, in which the Hebrews, or Israelites, are freed from enslavement in Egypt, spend several generations in the wilderness, receive the Ten Commandments and overcome ethical dilemmas such as their inclination toward the superficial gratification of the golden calf. Ultimately they are led into the Promised Land, the land of Israel.
That land is where the Jewish people became a people, as told in the Passover seder story. Becoming a people in a particular land at the beginning of historical memory is the definition of an indigenous people. Jews who have lived elsewhere in the world have been called the Diaspora, because they are not in their homeland. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Israelites branched off from the Canaanite people in the early Iron Age, and were identifiable through beliefs and customs such as monotheism and the lack of pig bones in their settlements. The first written use of the word “Israel” was on a stone pillar commemorating a victory over Israel by the Egyptians 3200 years ago.
The Jewish population of the area has gone through waves of ups and downs for several millennia but has always been there. The Imperial Roman Empire had two wars against the Jews of Judea, slaughtering about half the Jewish population by sword. After the second Roman-Jewish war, they changed the name of the place to Palestine, hoping to erase memories of it as being a Jewish land. But the Jewish population has continued to be there, through waves of growth and decline, expulsions and immigration.
2. Magical Thinking
Christian and Muslim theologies view the Passover story as their origin story as well, and the Holy Land has been a hot button ever since. It has given Jews, Christians, and Muslims a sense of ownership of the Holy Land. The Christians officially included the Hebrew Scriptures in their Bible after fierce debates with Marcionites in the 2d century, ultimately deciding that their “Old Testament” could validate their religion as having been prophesied and therefore as a credible improvement upon an old and accepted religion. The Qur'an tells the passover story often, and at one point, Mohammed even says the Muslims have more claim to Moses than the Jews.
There seems to be no end of leaders who rise to the top with epic fantasies of conquering or defending the Holy Land. After Mohammed conquered it and the Sultans took over, the Christians decided to take on 200 years of conquering, then the Sultans took it back, then the Egyptians, the Turks, the British, and the Israelis. This is not to mention the endless battles over that land by empires dating back at least as far as the Egyptians defeating the Israelites 3200 years ago.
While average people try to make a living, find food, and raise families in peace, leaders with epic fantasies force their people to suffer through or to commit war crimes.
Probably the biggest and most lethal fantasy has been the struggle for world supremacy between Christians and Muslims, both of whose theologies envision their eventual domination of the world. After 9/11, George W Bush called the war on terrorism a “crusade” and set off a furor, because the war between Christianity and Islam is still very much alive, and triggering to both sides.
3. The Terrible Legacy of Magical Thinking
I'm not sure how many people in the world have the luxury of never having had evil leaders with epic fantasies of power and heroism. Germans live every day with the legacy of Hitler, Russians with Stalin and now Putin, the Spanish with Franco, the Ugandans with Idi Amin, in addition to the people of Sudan, Congo, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Hungary, the British and their legacy of worldwide colonies, and many more. Americans have to live with having had leaders who instituted slavery and its legacy, or who participated in the killing of a million Vietnamese, or of 100,000 Iraqis in order to teach Saddam Hussein a lesson. Few spare a thought for Andrew Jackson, who displaced 60,000 people and killed 15,000 on the Trail of Tears. Somehow people live with and often ignore these legacies, primarily because they wish to live and raise families.
Now we have the Jewish people having to face the legacy of leaders like Begin and Netanyahu forcing our people to commit war crimes.
Contrary to millennia of projections from Christians, expert Soviet propagandists writing about the Elders of Zion, and more recently, Muslim PR campaigns, the Jews have never wanted to take over the world. Ancient Jewish sages actually admired the superior expertise of other people, such as the Babylonians in astronomy, but claimed expertise in ethics and morals.
And now we're like most people around the world, with glaring lapses in ethics and morals. We have to come to grips with not being so special, and others do too. This is especially hard to do in the face of magical thinking by so many others who stake a claim on Jewish ethics in order to validate their own theologies.
It doesn't mean we can't aspire to be better. And we can't forget that in every place, in every age, there have always been good people fighting to prevent evils that never made it into the history books, or working hard to resist evil leaders and sometimes succeeding over the long term.
Many of them were inspired by Moses in the story of the Passover seder.
*Some may object to Biblical stories being referred to as “myths.” Since the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance, many people have absorbed the notion that to be believed, stories must be literally true. In my earlier essay about literary vs political minds, I suggest that good literary fiction can often dramatize nonverbal truths better than nonfiction works in which authors select and present evidence to support their points of view. There is something tone-deaf about presuming that fiction is “lies” and nonfiction “truth.”
About the foundational myths of religions, I defer to John Dominic Crossan who, as a priest and member of the Jesus Seminar, was tasked with investigating the historicity of Jesus. In his book Who Killed Jesus?, Crossan concludes that all religions are founded on myth and interpretation, pointing out that “no amount of faith can turn an interpretation into a fact.” He suggests that we “compare one another’s myths and metaphors to see how fully human is the life they engender, but we cannot deny that everyone builds firmly on such inevitable foundations.” The challenge, he says, is “to accept our own foundational myth without shame or denial and that of others without hate or disparagement.”