Shabbat Hagadol
“In every generation” each of us is commanded to recreate the experience of the Exodus: to deeply imagine as if we were taken out of Egypt.
So join me in a fantasy of going out after the night of waiting and seeing another person. Perhaps an overseer whose heart is broken by the death of his son. In my imagination, he sees me coming out of my house. He is angry. He places his dead son’s body at my feet.
“Your people did this,” he says. He would hit me if his tears would allow him. But he is broken.
I show him my naked back, still oozing with lash wounds. “Your people did this.” I say.
“I had no choice. I would have been beaten myself.”
I look at his dead child. He looks at my back. “Perhaps these wounds go beyond what either of us could control.” I say. “A new day is here. We are leaving. Do you want to come with us?”
Find more commentaries on Shabbat Hagadol and Pesach.
He is the first of the Erev Rav, the mixed multitude that left Egypt with us.
“I’m afraid,” he says. “Your people will never accept me.”
“We will declare amnesty. It’s related to the word amnesia, to forget. We will purposefully forget your own personal actions. We will understand the larger forces at work. We and you will work together to fight those systems that enslave people. We will turn our common slavery into service for the good of all. Our suffering will be remembered, but we will remember your suffering as well. Prepare your son’s body as you feel you should. We’ll take him with us.”
Of course this is a fantasy. But a fantasy is also called a “thought experiment.” Einstein used gedenken/thought experiment to see a physical basis of the universe that was unseeable. And yet that thought experiment became understood as true, verified through experiment in the actual world.
In my thought experiment I want to experience the Erev Rav as allies. This is a change from the tradition where the Erev Rav play some part in the creation of the Golden Calf (see, e.g., Midrash Tanchuma Ki Tisa 21) and are even reincarnated in every generation to trouble the Jews.
That view makes it hard for us to trust anyone, not just in our gedenken experiment, but also in real life.
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The history that I have experienced in my lifetime tells me that the hatred of the other is a very effective path to group cohesion. Love might hold individual people together. And “love your neighbor as yourself” works in small-scale societies. But “hate the stranger” is unfortunately effective in binding large groups together. And more and more groups are bound together in hatred of each other.
This year I want to be a wise child who asks: “Can I be brave enough to go out and see who is suffering for my freedom? Can I use my freedom and power to join with the mixed-multitude of other people who are trapped and learn how to ally myself with them?”
“Pour out thy wrath upon the nations” must become “with whom can we be allied to fight against sexism and antisemitism and racism and the ‘power-over’ paradigm?”
Can we make “love your neighbor as yourself” a stronger force than the hatred of the other? Can we make better reparations than just a drop of wine?
The lesson of this year’s seder is to learn to become wise: At the seminal moment of the creation of our people, there were those who joined with us in creating freedom and justice. Let us find them today.
Rabbi Rim Meirowitz, part of the New York Havurah in the early ’70’s, was ordained by JTS in 1975 and moved to the CCAR in 1989. He is the Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Shir Tikvah in Winchester, MA. He guides many rabbis through the holy work of the pulpit.
