BOULDER, Colorado: Passover came and went, and Jews around the world celebrated with ritual foods, prayers and a retelling of their ancient story. The Exodus narrative -about the struggle to endure under the tyrannical rule of the Egyptian Pharaoh – is arguably the central organizing principle within Judaism. It offers a template for faith in a redemptive power.
That faith and the story of their liberation from Egypt s Pharaoh have helped the Jewish people endure throughout a 2,000-year Diaspora. But the Passover story also serves as a mandate to the Jewish people. Freedom comes with responsibility: to fight against oppression of all kinds, to be ever-vigilant to injustice against marginalized members of society. The Torah says it plainly: “Love you therefore the stranger; for you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt (Deut. 10:19).
As with all archetypal stories, the Passover narrative invites us to examine our lives at present. The Chasidic masters taught that one can understand the locus of enslavement, Mitzrayim (normally read as the land of Egypt), to be any constricted state of mind, a narrowing of consciousness in which we are blind to our choices. In this reading of the story, the gravest form of enslavement is when we do not recognize we are stuck, when oppressive circumstances sneak up on us and we are caught in a situation not of our choosing.
But redemption can only begin when we wake up to our circumstances.
By this measure, Jews in Israel are in a perilous state of Mitzrayim. Even as the borders of the Occupation expand, settlements increase in size, and religious donors around the world provide fat budgets for museums and archaeological theme parks that infringe on the rights of Palestinians, there seems to be little awareness of the ramifications of these choices. The options on the path to peace are narrowing.
Because the need for security among Israelis has become the dominant force in determining policy, the contours of the Occupation have been allowed to expand beyond any sustainable measure.
Official Israeli policy to continue home demolitions and confiscation of private Palestinian property, coupled with the recent heavy-handed incursion into Gaza, have sown seeds of hatred and anger that will last for generations. One asks oneself: could Israeli Jews and Jews around the world be entirely unaware of the long-range consequences of these policies?
Apparently so. The Separation Barrier, checkpoints, segregated roads and ordinances that prohibit Israelis access into the occupied territories – all keep Israelis and Palestinians almost entirely segregated. Yes, Israeli citizens are now safer from harmful interactions with Palestinians. But such security is a double-edged sword. By not knowing what is on the other side of the barrier, Jews in Israel continue to narrow their awareness of the growing poverty and degradation among those they occupy. This compromises the true freedom of those living in Israel, keeping them functionally blind to the growing oppression and rage of the “stranger in their midst .
I recently asked an Israeli friend if she had witnessed the daily phenomenon at the checkpoints, where thousands of Palestinians stand in line for hours to obtain passes simply to get to work.
“Who needs to see? she answered. “It is their own violence that has put them there.
On another occasion, I was stopped at a checkpoint outside of the West Bank village of Qalquilya with other international human rights workers. The young Israeli army officer on duty refused our entry, yelling into our car incredulously: “Why would you want to go in there? Don’t you know they are all terrorists in there?
Terrorism does exist and must be fought. But to say that every Palestinian on the other side of the barrier is a terrorist, or caused his or her own suffering, condemns us to the worst kind of inhumanity. Far from the Jewish mandate to care for the “stranger in our midst, it seems we have fallen prey to the same kind of pernicious stereotypes from which we ourselves suffered for centuries.
Bowing to the powerful pharaoh of security, we have lost sight of an ideal that lies at the very centre of our story: to liberate others who are oppressed with the privilege of our freedom.
As a Jewish leader, I worry about the narrowing scope of my Israeli brothers and sisters, and grieve for a country that once held so much promise for Jews everywhere, a country described in its Declaration of Statehood, to be “based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel . In light of the Passover story, it is hard to admit that we may once again be in bondage, this time a bondage of our own making.
This year, Passover should serve as a reminder to Jews everywhere that we must work to free ourselves from our narrow confines and reclaim our core principles once again.
Rabbi Tirzah Firestoneis an author, psychotherapist and spiritual leader of Congregation Nevei Kodesh in Boulder, Colorado, where she is the founder of the Palestinian-Jewish Listening Circle. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
