A (0:05)

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a quick bonus episode I'm doing from the road. I'm traveling this time with my family, so it's actually kind of wonderful. Usually I travel without them. It is Thursday, April 10th. In two days, April 12th is going to be Passover Pesach. We're going to have the Seder, the big meal, which is built as one of the most astonishing lessons and lesson plans that have ever been written. I think instead of sort of bringing the kids in and dumping a lot of information on them, which is a lot of times how education works, there's an entire theory of education that goes into the Seder. We do weird things. We eat weird foods. We perform, you know, various observances of Judaism differently than we do at other times. We try and create situations where kids, out of sheer curiosity, will look at us weird adults doing weird things and say, hey, wait a second, that's weird. Something's going on. What's happening? And then we say to them, well, thank you for asking. Here is the story. Here is the story of the exodus from Egypt, of the Jews becoming a people. Here is the meaning of that story, the power of that story, the reason that story still matters to us today. So it is a pedagogy of drawing curiosity out of the child and bringing that curiosity into the table, into the conversation. It's a wonderful, beautiful thing. It's an exercise in the best kind of education. You do the strange thing, say the strange thing, and then wait for the question. When the person has, of their own initiative, asked the question, when their curiosity is engaged, they're open to being taught, to being shown something new. That is the Passover Seder. It is a holiday of freedom. What we will be telling our kids is this is how we became a free people. This is how we became a people at all. It was a story of liberation. And we will be telling them that when 59 of our people are still hostages in the dungeons of Hamas in Gaza, we'll be telling them that when there's still war, when there's still suffering, when there's still pain. And I think that for me, every year I teach three specific lessons. And I try and open those lessons up, open a window onto them, and draw my kids out into these lessons. And. And this is, for me, the foundation of the Seder. I want to share those thoughts with you today because it's a special year and a difficult year for that because of all the prevailing conditions around us. First, I want to tell you about the sponsor of this episode, which is The Sapir Journal, S A P I R. It's an amazing quarterly journal on Jewish issues on Israel, on Middle east, on issues of concern to much larger audiences than literally Jews in Israel. There have been issues that are thematic. They're organized around specific ideas, specific questions. Zionism, faith, antisemitism. College campuses. What the heck's happening in the culture wars on college campuses? Many, many diverse voices go into these journals. The current issue is about diversity, and it's voices from the United States, from Israel. President Buji Herzog of Israel is one of the writers. I like sapir, and I think you will. And what they're doing right now is if you live in the United States, you can actually get it in the mail for absolutely free. So it's beautiful. It's got art on the COVID It looks good on a coffee table. You can sign up for your free subscription by going to sapirjournal.org Askhaviv that's s a P I R journal.org Askhaviv I hope you do. I've gotten out of it a lot. I've been reading them for years before they became a sponsor of this podcast. Three simple thoughts for this Pesach the first thought for this Pesach that I teach my kids at H Seder is that we are slaves. We ourselves are slaves. The question of slavery raised in the Haggadah. The book we read at the Seder, which literally just is called the Telling, and it's the telling of the story of the Exodus from Egypt, but it's more that it's the telling of the story of the telling of the Exodus from Egypt. In other words, a great deal of the Haggadah is stories about rabbis a millennium after the Exodus from Egypt, discussing the meaning and the teaching and the thinking about and the profundity and the problematics of the story of the Exodus from Egypt. And it begins at the very beginning with a lament, a profound and fascinating lament. Halachma Anya. This is the bread of our torment. This is the bread of our torment that our forebears ate in the land of Egypt. That's a reference to the matzah. All who are hungry, come and eat. All who are in need, come and feast. This year we are here. Next year we shall be in the land of Israel. This year we are slaves. Next year we shall be free. The Haggadah often says, now we are free, but here it says, this year we are slaves. Next year we shall be free. Every generation of Jews is commanded to say, we are Slaves in the present tense. And to declare our faith that we shall one day be free. Egypt isn't a memory, it's a present condition. The matzah isn't an artifact, the bread of our torment. It's an acknowledgment that something in the here and now is happening. And it goes to the fundamental understanding of our sages, of the sages of the Talmud, of what freedom is. Freedom is not an end. Freedom is not the final destination. Freedom is a path. It's not the escape from Pharaoh's tyranny. It's the becoming in the desert of a people. It's a revelation. It's a purpose granted to our lives. It's the filling. It's once we have lost the tyranny that prevents us from having meaning and substance, then the filling of our days and our lives with meaning and substance. And the greatest meaning and substance of our lives in Judaism is our responsibility and our devotion. That is how we become adults. That is how we become builders of the world, fixers of the world. Instead of thinking of liberation as this moment, this one off achievement, it's this ceaseless struggle to secure and deepen that liberation understood as a much larger purpose and devotion and community and the building of that along that tortuous path. We read about those who are hungry and we invite them to come and eat. Those who are needy and we invite them to come and feast. We meet these people and it is our duty to carry them along that path. Our freedom is indistinguishable with our responsibility to the people around us who need us. That is the fundamental understanding of freedom as responsibility. In the sages of the Talmud and in the Torah itself. I think after the seder meal and in every Greece, after meals, every bilkat ha mazon in Judaism, we say a line that I was always troubled by and great rabbis were troubled by because it's a lie. We say, I was a youth, I have grown old, dal haiti gam zakanti. And I have not seen. I was a youth, I have grown old. And I have not seen a righteous man neglected and his offspring begging for bread. Rabbis have wondered about this. It seems again a lie. We've all seen righteous people suffering, impoverished. We've all seen their children begging for bread. There isn't a direct correlation between one's individual righteousness and one's condition, material condition in this world. And so the rabbis answer this. And this is a lesson I take from my father, who is also a rabbi and a lawyer, and as a Doctorate. And in many other things. The operative word in that phrase, in that prayer, I was a youth. I have grown old. And I have not seen a righteous man neglected and his offspring begging for bread. The operative word is seen. I have not seen. The righteous do stand suffering before us, but we do not see. It is not a declaration of faith that this can't happen. It's a confession of blindness. And when do we say it? After our feast, when we're content, when we're satiated, we remember, we confess that the suffering righteous stand before us unheeded while their children beg for bread. Satiation is a kind of freedom, and so it is a responsibility. Two our enemies. This is a hard one, this year and last year. And our enemies are also God's children. Our enemies are also enslaved. It's hard in a war to talk this way when some foreign liberal person with the best intentions in the world says, everybody's equal and human and good and kind, it's not really a moral argument, because it's easy, there's no cost. But we who are in a war with people who declare themselves, as Hamas does, to be preparing our destruction, to seek the deaths of our children, we are the ones tasked with remembering that our enemies are God's children as well. For us, because it is hard, it is necessary. In the Talmud, in tractate Sanhedrin, page 39B, we're given an astonishing midrash. A midrash is when the rabbis are discussing a parable, a myth, a story, a history, something that isn't religious law. They're conversing, they're reflecting, they're talking about the philosophical ideas. And there's this astonishing midrash given in the name of Rabbi Yonatan. Rabbi Yonatan tells us that after the miracle of the exodus, with the 10 plagues, with the splitting of the sea, with a pillar of fire, with just unbelievable miracles and astonishing things. The great empire brought down, the great Pharaoh brought low, the great suffering of the Egyptian people. The Jews are finally free, and they come through the split sea and Pharaoh's army that is pursuing them, this literally genocidal army seeking their annihilation, that is its only purpose. And it pursues them into the sea. And the sea closes on them, and the army is drowning. And the people of Israel look up and they see the sunlit moment of their final, actual liberation. It is their first moment in 400 years of safety. And they sing. And in that great moment of liberation, that pivot of history, the angels want to sing before the Lord. Rabbi Yonatan tells us. And they start to in celebration of the great victory and liberation. And God rebukes them. God is hurt. God is quoted as saying, the works of my hands are drowning in the sea, and you utter songs before me. It isn't the Egyptian civilians, only that the Torah declares human and equal and important in God's handiwork. It isn't the children, yes, obviously they're innocent. It is the literal genocidal army. The people can sing, liberated from the machinations and desires of that army, but not the angels. God weeps for the soldiers drowning in the sea. Along our path of freedom lies our responsibility, even for our enemies, even for the Egyptians, who are as much God's children as we are, including even the very soldiers sent to annihilate us. This isn't the story of Passover. This isn't the center of the story, but it's there. And in the moments when we don't want to feel it, that's when we need to be reminded of it. This is not a call to pacifism. We are not obligated to let them win. The Torah repeatedly commands us victory against our enemies who arise to kill us. But we are told to recognize that enemy as the handiwork of God, of the same hands that made us. And I submit to you that they also are slaves. Slaves of their own real and imagined pharaohs, of dreams, of stories, of politics, of mental architectures that trap human beings on cruel and painful paths. This year we are all slaves. In this moment, in this place, each in his own Egypt. And finally, everything I've said until now is universal. But Pesach is not just universal. We are truly free. In the deepest way we can be free of the other's gaze, free of to just be ourselves only in our own place and in our own tongue, in our own voice. In this time of languishing hostages, of the schemes of enemy tyrants that surround us and plot our destruction. That's a worthwhile thing to remember that Pesach is also a promise of our specific liberation. This is the bread of our torment. Begins the song of the Haggadah in Aramaic. The entirety of the song speaks Aramaic right down to this year. We are slaves. It's uttered in the colloquial languages of the time and place in which it was written. It's part of the Babylonian experience, but the final declaration of our redemption, the trumpeting of our liberation. Next year we shall be free. That suddenly switches to Hebrew, to our unique language, to the only part of the reading that's in Hebrew. Because it is the fundamental thing that is ours. We do our suffering in the languages of other lands, in the landscapes of other peoples. But the path of freedom, in the end, can only really be tread in one's own place and one's own voice. Freedom is a universal human capacity. Everybody can do it, everybody needs it. But liberation is a specific act. Our specific liberation has always been signaled not by what is everybody's, but by what is ours alone. Chag Sameach. I hope this is a holiday of family and friendship and the building of meaning, infusing of our freedom with meaning, and ultimately of liberation.