Passover Amid a Pandemic
Tonight, Jewish people around the globe celebrate the story of Exodus. In the story, the Israelites (Jewish people) are enslaved by the Egyptians, led by the Pharaoh Ramses. Ramses will not let the Jewish people go free, so God sends ten plagues to persuade him. Eventually Pharaoh agrees to let them go, only to change his mind again and come after them. Finally, the Red Sea parts and the Israelites cross, only to see the Egyptians coming behind them get swallowed by the Sea.
One of the most vivid memories I have of Hebrew School was reading the story of Exodus. We learned that instead of celebrating their freedom upon arriving at the other side of the Red Sea, the Israelites were instructed to mourn the loss of Egyptian life. Because in Judaism, to lose a single life is to lose a whole world.
Every year, we are supposed to act as if we ourselves were freed from Egypt. To remember that we were once strangers. To relive the tears of affliction, the bitterness of slavery, and to remember the mortar that Jews were forced to use to build monuments to Egyptian might.
In normal years, we celebrate Passover and we reflect upon the theme of freedom, of what more we can be doing to help the stranger that we once were, of what enslavement — real or metaphorical — exists today.
And yet, this year, we are celebrating amidst a plague of our own — a worldwide pandemic that has shut off the world’s economy, threatened lives and livelihoods, and simultaneously reminded us how connected we all are and how precious life is. With questions of when this will be over, and what the world will look like when it is.
Upon leaving Egypt, the Israelites are beset with anxiety, fear of the unknown, without direction. Instead of taking them on a straight path, God leads them on a circuitous one. And when given the choice of freedom or fear, they choose fear. So the Israelites had to wander in the desert for 40 years before reaching the promised land. Because God needed a new generation, who didn’t know enslavement, to have the moral imagination to build a new society.
Right now, we are in the midst of the plague. And we need to mourn and grieve the loss of life and normalcy. But when we reach the other side, we too can choose freedom or fear. Fear of the unknown and a desire to revert to how things have always been. Or freedom to choose a new path, to forge the kind of society we want to live in, to do things differently. And I pray that this time it won’t take us 40 years to get to the promised land. And that together, we’ll empower a new generation of leaders and start immediately to rebuild and reimagine a new, more perfect world.
