THOUGHTS ON ANOTHER PASSOVER
Passover 5763-2003
Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana
"And it came to pass at midnight."
They would never have believed it, those
Hebrew ancestors of ours who hastened so to make final preparations to leave this
cruel place of their tears and bitter servitude. The hundreds of years of Egyptian
slavery were at last coming to an end! The Egyptians themselves, following the
plagues and particularly, of course, the death of their first-born, were utterly and
understandably seized with hysteria as they hurried the now former slaves on
their way out of Egypt.
Here, take your bread the way it is! No need to let it rise! It will taste
just as fine if you leave it flat. Here, take some gold with you. You've
probably earned it from all your labors anyway! But please, get your
things together and leave. Go now! Be a blessing to us all just by
leaving us alone! And take along that invisible, no-name God of
yours, too.
Our ancestors, those Hebrew slaves, would never have imagined that 3,500
years later, you and I would still be eating that dry, unleavened bread of affliction.
We eat it not to relive, and not to commemorate, but to literally internalize
our own experience when the Lord brought us out of Egypt. In so doing, the
Jewish people recognizes-and always has-that no one knows freedom like a
person who hasn't had it.
We've all been watching the grateful exuberance of the Iraqis as they have
welcomed the liberating American and British troops to their cities. Years of
deadly repression and extremist rulings of a maddening dictatorship have sucked
the joy and optimism from their lives. And now, the Pharaoh is gone! And so are
his cruel henchmen! The hysteria of joy too quickly gave way to the anarchy and
greed of the formerly repressed.
Please God, the job will be done to promote social order, and the birth of an
indigenous democracy which will help to build a safer world for not only the
Iraqis and the Middle East, but for us all! It is all so predictable-even the looting
and rioting. History teaches us over and over.
Former slave Frederick Douglass once said:
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to
favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops
without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
lightning. They want an ocean without the awful roar of its mighty
waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never did and
it never will. Liberty means responsibility. That is why most people
dread it.
Here, tonight, in the context of earth-shattering events, let us, the children
of Egyptian slaves, not miss the point. It is to precisely such a struggle that the
Seder calls us! It demands far more of us than an elegant feast around a
graciously set table. We must be mindful that on this night, our main course is
Jewish History and not matzah ball soup or our favorite recipe for Charosis.
History, theology, sociology, psychology-all of these are the "specials" on
our menu tonight! For we feed our souls at Seder far more than our bodies, and
the soul is best nourished through human resolve to taste the bread of humanity's
affliction.
And so, once again, our recognition is demanded by the matzah, the salty
parsley, the egg, the shankbone, the bitter herb, the charoset and the wine, that
though Pesach is of antiquity, its symbols are timeless and as compelling as each
succeeding year's headlines.
And surely it is so.
For they always seem to call out to us-
Read all about it! Another Passover!
And this year, we Jews and the world around us, need it more than
ever.
Amen.