As we were just beginning to prepare for this year’s Passover Seders, our world was facing the spread of the Covid virus. What an unbelievable setting for contemplating our Passover journey.
Passover is the most essential story in our people’s life, and this year, we are united, all of us, as strangers in a very strange land. We are inundated with the reality that we and the world are more precarious, that our trust in everything has been somewhat undermined. That if you’d interviewed each of us just six months ago (less) we wouldn’t have put pandemic on our list of concerns and now it’s at the top!
This year, the overwhelm and challenge is daunting. And yet, in Passover, we know the journey is from challenge (physical and spiritual) to certain spiritual opportunities. Where there is fear, we see families walking together in the streets, riding bicycles, going on family hikes, trying to balance the concerns for survival with the need for continued learning. Where there is isolation, we see neighbors more available for conversations that share meaningfully at a safe distance, of course, the travail of our age.
Why is the Passover journey so important? It’s not just that it’s our national birth story, it’s because it embodies hope and vision and celebrates resilience not only in “their” time, but in our’s. It’s message: when there is darkness, there is light. And when there is despair, there is an opening of our hearts that can lead to our telling the story, our story, as we move from winter to spring, from memory to vision, from despair to fundamental caring.
Yet this year is so much more challenging. Passover, for us, is about sustenance, people, joy, singing, togetherness, renewal. And this year, we are “social distanced” and challenged to make it work. Look, it’s not a new problem: too many of us have been “social distancing” a long, long time. Look at the sociology of America: it’s all about loneliness and being a stranger. We teach our children more about fearing strangers than about welcoming them. Look how the cries of immigrant children separated from their parents have faded from view. Look how the borders are being sealed. They have been for a while; before the pandemic. A nation of immigrants? We Americans have lost our way in the darkness and it’s time to rise up and know that our mission needs to be renewed.
For a while, we thought we could social distance together, confirm that we don’t have symptoms and come together safely. Now, we know otherwise. For a while, we thought, if we were symptom free, we could be with others who were also symptom free, and then, we learned about how the virus is symptom free in about thirty percent of people, who will then spread the virus! So, we have resorted to a virtual seder as a measure of our dedication to telling the story in the night. Passover, for us, is about food, it’s about singing, it’s about drinking Shikker Rebbe (drunk rabbi) wine, that we make, and Sober Rabbi grape juice. It’s about homemade gefilte fish. It’s about slave clothing and drama and being in the middle of the Red Sea. It’s about reaching inside and making it a dramatic telling, a personal one, of just how we are all are slaves, being freed, searching for a different kind of home. It’s about celebrating resilience and the stories of resilience.
So, this year, we need you to make your own Passover food, and provide your own “slave clothing.” If you are in Portland, we can provide gefilte fish, Shikker Rebbe (wine) and Sober Rabbi (grape juice). Simply RSVP and come by to pick it up safely at a distance.
The reality: while we are most aware of the darkness that pervades our beings, this year, incrementally as it grows, each day, a little more in our awareness—the economy in tatters, the lack of testing, the worry, the ominous darkness in the future, the deaths—isn’t there also a few spiritual opportunities. Many of our families are at home, more are commenting virtually, more are using Zoom, Skype, and other ways of virtually coming together. People are returning to Facebook. I can tell from the amount of comments. This next election may be completely virtual in its campaigning. And aren’t there opportunities in the withdrawal from day to day demands to work?
We have an opportunity to take aim at what’s really important. What we are left with is the opportunity to covenant (binding action together) as citizens, Americans, as citizens of the world, as Jews, as religious, as skeptics, as iconoclasts, and to come together as a force. We will take aim at ending tyranny. Again. We will defeat it. And we will celebrate heroism: our doctors, on the front lines of treatment; our scientific researchers, devoting their lives to searching for an antidote; our elderly, emboldened to reach out beyond withdrawing; our children, yearning for a safer, better future; our clergy, comforting those afflicted, providing hope; our teachers, finding a way to continue teaching safely; our parents, comforting, creating, providing. And we’ll celebrate heroism again.