We Have Not Earned a Happy Passover This Year

1. My Tradition and My Decision

I come from a long and great cultural tradition of cosmopolitan left-liberal Jews: leaders in natural science, social science, literature, the arts, philosophy, and human rights. I identify this tradition with serving God, however conceived — or at least serving “godliness” and goodness.

My flavor of Judaism — agnostic and steeped in ethics and consideration for others in the present, from the past, and the uncertain future — as legitimate as any other. And I have decided I will not drink tonight or anytime this week from a chalice of propaganda.

I cannot attend a Seder this year. Marking my nation, the “people of Israel” — having escaped bondage, at a time that we impose horrors upon Palestinians, and rip apart the society that has succored the nation of Israel — feels obscene. “Celebrating freedom” — if it means using cash and threats to dominate the U.S. political system, and killing as many people with claims adverse to ours as we decide we must in order to make us safe (if stopping short of “all” is indeed an option) — is a moral abomination. We should never do this to ourselves, we should never have done this to ourselves, and to the extent that we have done it we have to extricate ourselves from it.

I didn’t think that celebrating Passover was something to be earned. But now I do. We have not earned Pesach this year

Passover has long been my least favorite Jewish holiday, thematically, because — even though good-hearted people can adjust its signature communal meal to become a “Peace Seder” or an “Inclusivity Seder” or some such — the Seder itself is fundamentally an exercise in self-justification and indoctrination of kids and of taking a shared vow as adults. It is not alone in that among Jewish holidays. Chanukah (which I write as “Khanukah” to ward off readers from pronouncing the first syllable like the last name of Jackie Chan — and yes I have heard this) tells the story of divine intervention allowing continued religious practice under the Romans; Purim tells the story of how a beautiful young Jewish woman’s canniness saved the Jews in Shushan, Persia from the evil designs of the King’s counselor.

The most well-known traditional children’s song regarding Purim includes these lines:

“Oh once there was a wicked, wicked man and Haman was his name, sir!

He would have murdered all the Jews and they were not to blame, sir!”

If that last phrase sounds jarringly defensive, please appreciate that it (described only as “Traditional”) probably predated the Holocaust. (Hitler didn’t invent anti-Semitism, though he did mechanize it.) Avoiding (usually spurious) blame from non-Jews for pretty much any calamity is a common theme in Jewish arts and letters. (I think I’ve mentioned my being accused by a classmate in around 5th grade of having murdered Jesus — and I literally had no idea what he was talking about!) So, yeah, a small, proud, and stubborn people gets lots of flak from others over the centuries — so it indulges in self-justification and revenge fantasies. (In the unvarnished telling of the Passover story, as recounted in this delightful article by a rabbi who practiced at a famous Reform Jewish temple in LA, the Jews of Shushan (Susa) — a real city in the Khuzestan region of present day Iran — rebel against the heinous injustices done to them and kill 75,000 of their enemies. So satisfying!)

The Passover (Pesakh, and you know from above why I use “kh”) story is like Khanukah times Purim raised to the power of Yom Kippur. Here, centuries of slavery (following having been welcomed after an initial flight into Egypt) culminated with a revolt led by Moses, who had a generally good personalized (they would argue) relationship with God. Moses was trying to convince the Pharaoh to free his slaves, and brought plagues upon Egypt — each of which is mentioned at the Seder. God repeatedly “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” — a topic of much learned discussion, largely trying to exonerate God from sadism — after he considered capitulating after each plague; he finally told the Jews to get the hell out of there fast after the death of all first-born male children (where blood marked Jewish-occupied houses were “passed over.) Perhaps egged on by God’s final act of heart-hardening, the Pharaoh decided to pursue and murder the Jews as they approached the Red Sea. But God parted the waters of the Red Sea, allowing the Jews to pass on dry land; then, as the Jews were past and the Egyptians were in hot pursuit, God suddenly took away the force parting the waters and they combined once again, killing Pharaoh and his forces.

This gives us some insight into the views that Jews had of themselves, and God, during their 80 to 430 years (scripture differs on that) in Egypt, initially as a relatively privileged foreign class and later as something like slaves: they are deprived and put upon — but they also have an ally the strongest ally imaginable. So there is room for both self-pity and prideful swagger.

The Seder — “Seder” literally means “order,” with most the different steps in service spelled out in a certain order, surrounded by some readings and activities of the celebrant’s choosing — indulges in both the self-piteous and the overweening pride aspects of the day. The story shows, as with Purim, that they all could have been murdered — and they were not to blame, sir. But it’s also a delicious opportunity to razz and condemn the temerity of those who take on the Jews, especially given the covenant with God.

Most years, I can handle that. The relatives we visit will have some good vegetarian dishes for me (beyond the apples and raisins in cinnamon that are supposed to represent the mortar Jews were supposed to have to mix and lay out as part of their labor — which is counterintuitively delicious, given its metaphorical role) — and I get to sing lead on the Kaddish prayer a few times, a melody that just happens to fit perfectly within my narrow baritone range. I can suffer listening to some indoctrination; I’m sort of old for that anyway.

This year, however — I just can’t.

2. How We Got Here; Where We’re Going

The injury suffered by Israelis — aimed at some of the most liberal portions of the society, by the way, the ones who lived without fear near Gaza and those who attended pop music festivals — was shocking and real. But so was the pain and frustration of the Palestinians, waiting for decades, who understood that they were getting no closer, over the passage of time, to regaining their ancestral family lands — and hope was receding. Hamas made a calculation that the Israelis would react to their sneak terror attack with overwhelming force and brutality: that was largely true, even early on, and definitely later — and that the rest of the world would have to rise up and condemn Israeli excesses and force a plan for peace. This prediction was horribly wrong — almost the same exact miscalculation, in fact, that the Palestine Liberation Organization had made with the Munich Olympics bombing of Israeli athletes in 1972. Guess what: most of the world just doesn’t actually care that much about the Palestinians (which is horrific and unfair, but also a fate shared by Tibetans, Uyghurs, Somalis, Bosnians (back in the day), Kurds, aboriginal Americans from Nunavut to Patagonia, Africans generally, etc. That is unjustifiable and horrifying, but its the sort of unfairness in the world that rationally, should have informed them that their plans would fail.

But it didn’t. And so Israel under Netanyahu and his gang of Stephen Miller approximations kept getting further and further out of hand — lying, driving civilian refugees around to new places where they could be bombed, and so on — because Netanyahu, like Trump, needed a victory to stay out of prison. Some of those actions were merely disproportionate, some (in my opinion) were war crimes, and some have satisfied some of the less strict definitions of genocide. (This include transfers of population, wiping out large portions of a group, at least in given territories — even of not attempting to kill all of a group the way Hitler did, which is at the high end of genocidal actions but far less heinous acts qualify as within the definition of genocidal acts under some conditions.)

I argued online with a frenemy early on in the course of events about which side would prevail in the war. She was convinced that if the U.S. cut off aid, Israel would topple within weeks. I said that I thought that Israel would find a workaround if need be — it might, for example, make a deal with the Russians, or simply rely on smuggling that the U.S. would look past — but that the most significant result would be that Democrats would lose the next election because Jews (led by, but to some extent despite, AIPAC). You know how that worked out.

What the original Nakba was to the Palestinians, the Holocaust (the “Shoah”) was — in much stronger form — to the Jews. I think that it drove us crazy as a people. As the documentary film Oscar nominations have showed for years, a large portion of us are obsessed with the Shoah, and obsessed with ensuring that others are obsessed with it as well. And frankly, we Jews have a lot of power in society — including the power to become single issue voters and major donors and destroy the Democratic Party’s chances to win elections — that Muslims still can’t approach. (I think I’m supposed to skirt that issue, but who do we think we’re kidding? Non-Jews, I suppose.) What Jews have not understood, though, is that they too would have to live with the America that they would help to create — and that sooner or later demands that they would not be willing to meet, giving them to choice of losing their lives or their souls.

If you’re going to a Seder tonight, or later in this week — that’s your choice and I hope that it nourishes you in more ways than one. But I can’t stand sitting still while people act like nothing has changed. Things have changed for both the horrible and the horrific. I won’t pretend otherwise for a night.