Tonight is the beginning of Passover. The Passover holiday commemorates the story of the Exodus, in which the ancient Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt. While the extent to which I was up on my Jewish holidays peaked back when I was 13 and going to Bar and Bat Mitzvahs every weekend and dancing with 79 year-olds to Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” and the ’94 classic “Macarena” (check out the hyperlink!), I’ve always enjoyed Passover for several reasons. For starters, you gather with friends and family to eat delicious foods like matzo ball soup (who doesn’t love matzo ball soup?!) and charoset (a divine mixture of chopped walnuts, apples, cinnamon and wine) and of course, drink lots of red wine. At least four glasses of wine. Any holiday where wine is part of the Seder, the official order of things, is going to be a good time. When I was a little kid, my favorite part of Passover was searching for the Afikomen (the dessert matzo); my Dad would always hide it somewhere next to impossible to find—one time it was hidden in between two records on the shelf—brilliant, and my sister and I would run around the house batshit crazy trying to look for it. Good thing we were only drinking grape juice.
Perhaps the lasting impact of Passover for me years later, now that I’m too old to run around looking for matzo, is that it is a story of exodus, story of freedom. Passover is a universal story because is describes freedom from oppression for all people, and offers an opportunity for reflection and renewal regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, or nationality. No matter where we live, no matter our religion, no matter how religious we are, no matter our politics, we can all accept the collective truth that there are injustices and inequalities that permeate the world we inhabit. So, on Passover, whether you keep kosher, only go to temple on Yom Kippur, identify as a Jew in so much as you love bagels and lox (this brand of progressive hipster reform Brooklyn-meets-Old Country Judaism is all the rage these days), are not even Jewish, or even if you are atheist: be thankful for the freedoms you have and keep in mind those living around us who continue to be oppressed and enslaved today.
The real lesson of Passover is thinking about the past as a way to understand the present and inform the future. Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow, a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College, writes:
We could forget the past; indeed, maybe we would much prefer to bury the past, but we are forbidden to forget it lest we fail to implement its lessons. Unless we truly know ourselves as oppressed, the haggadah seems to say, we will not be able to regard ourselves as though we personally had gone forth from Egypt and therefore will not feel the necessity of opening our doors wide to all who are still oppressed and hungry today.
This is to say that, on Passover, we not only think of those who are oppressed, who are hungry, who are enslaved, who are in prison, who are exploited for their labor, who experience genocide, who are refugees, who are without a home (i.e. those who face the same situations as our ancestors once did), but we stand as one with them, we open our doors wide to them, and build a more free world with them than the one that existed before. It’s a holiday worth celebrating.
