Friday, March 30, 2018

Passing Over

Passover, many Jews celebrate tonight, for me is a ritual of rebirth. Easter, often occurring at a similar time as Passover, is the story of the resurrection of Christ.  It symbolizes to me a victory over the slavish fear of death we must all face.  Both stories are liberating with an emphasis of renewal.  The Passover story of the Exodus in the Hebrew Bible tells of the escape of the Jews from slavery to freedom.  That story rings true for many around the world even in our time.  It did so in our nation for persons of color who knew the veracity of the genuine tortures of slavery, their person brought to this nation by ship in hellish conditions, against their will and in chains to be owned by another person who through accident of birth was born white.  The faith persons of color adopted in their new land suffering the gravest injustices gave hope as the story of the Exodus did for Jews that they would be liberated from slavery to freedom overcoming it, as the song dictates, some day they will.  The veracity of these stories matters not.  There is no hard evidence that Jews were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years nor is there hard evidence that Christ rose from the dead.  They are accepted on faith and by tradition.  What matters is that these stories bestow to people who need it the precious commodity of hope to choose life despite the vicissitudes of it and to go on to live another day.  Faith is the hope that the arc will, in fact, bend toward justice.

Today, however, in this land the freedom fought for so assiduously over 150 years ago is threatened by an entire major political Party which has morphed.  It has changed from the Republican Party of Lincoln standing for uniting the union with freedom for all to a Trumpian Republican Party devoted, in large part, to the top 2% richest, to white supremacy, hatred of the other, a denial of the vote to them, to others who believe differently from them and to do so by any nefarious means necessary.  It is a noxious effort by those who have lost the meaning of the Declaration of Independence essence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness ...
Those who fought to keep the union together and free knew the essence of the nation's principles, that all men are created equal was its pledge and to liberate those who did not enjoy its promise.  The historicity of Passover retold in the sedar tonight may not be literally true, as the Charleton Heston film version of the Exodus would like you to believe it is, but it is a story worth retelling if it can be retold with a sense of the promise of national and global justice.  The link of a new sedar book below shows how one can keep this tradition of the retelling of the Exodus in the most equitable and justice-infused way possible never forgetting those who still are not free.  It is entitled "Next Year in a Just World -- A Global Justice Haggadah."   Happy Passover and Easter to all!

https://ajws.org/who-we-are/resources/holiday-resources/passover/global-justice-haggadah/#download

NOT ANYMORE

  I wrote this last week and for the most part sat on it because I did not want my writing to imply anything against Israel. As stated agai...