Passover looms. It is getting to be a competitive sport, have you noticed? We are having 15 for the first Seder and the same for the second. Oh, but my friend X is having 18; Y counters that she’s having 30 but Z wins this year’s competition with 50 “Wait ’til next year,” grumbles X. Oh, and then there’s the time competition. Our Seder lasts until 11:00; ours ’til midnight; ours ends at 2:00 in the morning; ours lasts until the next Seder begins! Up and up goes the ante. We read most of the haggadah; we read the whole haggadah; so do we but we add to it; so do we but we sing each song in as many tunes as we know for each. Huff, puff. At Chez Stein (which when the children we young enough to live at home was called “Bedlam Hall”) the Seder will be over before 11:00, the company will be large enough so that it will be festive, but not so large that people won’t be able to talk to each other; we will read the haggadah as appropriate and an edited version of Exodus; we will discuss the moral implications of the story. Dayenu. Oh, and each year, though I say I won’t, each year I promise to remember but always forget that old Buddhist mantra: “Ohmmmmmmm, don’t be a chazar, Ohmmmmmmm.”
But while Passover is marked at its beginning with great feasts, at it end there is always Yiskor. As I help my wife set the table, as I smell the delicious fragrances wafting in from the kitchen, as I greet friends and relatives who come to our door bearing wine and flowers and good cheer, as we begin by asking the four questions, there is always, in the back of my mind, a fifth question, one asked by both the wise and the wicked son, to which I have no satisfactory answer. What does this mean to me? What does liberation mean? Is it personal freedom I celebrate or the potential of all men to be free from…from what? Franklin Roosevelt spoke of four freedoms, two positive, and two negative (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear). The US Constitution grants others—freedom to assemble and petition the government, freedom to vote, freedom (if in a well regulated militia) to bear arms and freedom to feel protected in our homes.
In Darfur the government and the Arab Janjaweed, randomly select villages and destroy them, killing the men, raping the women. In Afghanistan a man was to be executed for converting from Islam to Christianity. Am I, a Jew in Rhode Island, safe and secure here, free here, well fed here, to try to do anything about the Darfur millions? And the one man in Afghanistan? What can I do? It’s not likely that I can get onto a plane and rescue the poor guy or organize a brigade of overweight, exercise-deprived college professors to stand guard over the huddled masses in the Sudan and Chad. I can write to my congressman and to the president; I can sign a petition, but all of that seems woefully inadequate. In effect, I’m free, but powerless. I am free just enough to be tantalized—I can see the problem, but can’t resolve it, not as an individual anyway, but as part of a mass of other free people, then maybe, just maybe, our freedom, our liberation can be shared with the world. Look what we have done as collective individuals, often under Jewish leadership and inspiration—we have ended slavery, we have ended Jim Crow, we have organized labor, we have created public education—and it all goes back to that story of the liberation from Egypt, that great exemplar, that magnificent role model. What was done for us once, we now can do for others. Is it sufficient each Passover to read of the liberation of our ancestors? Is it sufficient each week that at the Shabbat table I thank God for the liberation from Egypt? Is that the secret message of Dayenu, It is enough? Is it enough that we know that Sisyphusian challenges await the free on behalf of those still enslaved by fear, persecution and economic deprivation? Not for Jew it isn’t. There’s always something more to be done in the constant challenge of repairing the world.
So our table will groan with the weight of the food, our friends and relatives will leave the house with their bellies full and their spirits lifted, but I’ll know that at the end of the holiday I’ll stand and recite Yiskor for my mother; I’ll know that somewhere the Janjaweed is lurking in Africa, somewhere there is hunger, somewhere there is still slavery. Dayenu?
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