The essence of Passover is recounting our history. Or is it? Origin stories
BY AVI FINEGOLD
T rauma myopia. It’s a term I encoun- tered recently in the New York Times , in an article about alliances and tensions between Jewish and African-American ac- tivists. The journalist, Daniel Bergner, inter- viewed a young non-Jewish activist named Nicole Carty, who spoke about “a Jewish propensity for 'trauma myopia'.” “I’ve been to a lot of Passover celebrations,” she told Bergner, “and it’s so weird that the story is only of Jewish subjugation, even though subjugation is still so present for other people.” She went on: “Black people still haven’t had their histories honored. We are still gaslit about the impact of slavery and the continued impacts of white supremacy.” This highlighted a tension that has existed in Jewish thought for quite a while: How much of Judaism is rooted in particular- ism—in the notion that everything we do as Jews is uniquely by us and for us? And how much of it is rooted in a universalist mind- set, or the idea that we have a set of values that can be adopted and presented to the world at large? Are we required to remem- ber everything that has happened to every group when we discuss our past? What is the nature of the seder and why do we have one every year? Who is it for? The majority of Jews and Jewish thought lives in between these two endpoints—the upshot of which is that we need to grapple with this tension, especially at peak mo- ments in Judaism such as the seder. Years ago, I was invited to give a series of talks entitled "Judaism: On Pleasure." The first session was about Judaism’s relation- ship to food. It was before Passover, and we got to talking about the seder and how gathering around food and meals shapes
us as a community. One of the things I had mentioned as an aside was that there are rabbinic opinions that hold that one should not have any non-Jews at the seder. This stems from a technical halachic question, but it certainly became part of the rabbinic question of who is the seder for. If we say “let all who are hungry come and eat,” we need to define who all is. To my surprise, at the beginning of the next session I was told that my presence was a near thing: they had come close to retracting my invitation to finish the series. Just about everyone attending had non-Jewish family members, and they were insulted to learn that those kin might not be wanted at their seders. O ne of the formative questions that Ju- daism wrestles with is the relationship between universalism and particularism. Which of our practices and ideas are meant to be something we share with the world (don’t murder, take time off to rest, the value of learning) and which are specific to us as a people (pray with a quorum, sit in mourning for seven days, don’t eat leavened products on Passover)? The seder might be the ideal moment to contemplate this tension, precisely because the seder might be the peak moment of particularism in traditional understandings of Judaism. The story we tell at the seder is the story of our nation, our history, our relationship with the Divine. The story of the exodus is about of how a small family grew and evolved into a nation. And just like an individual who grows up and needs to assert their own identity, one of the central themes in this evolution is
differentiating ourselves from our roots in Egypt. When we arrive, we are the Chil- dren of Jacob. We leave as B'nai Yisrael, a people that define ourselves, very often, by how we are not like the Egyptians. We were instructed to sacrifice a lamb which was sacred to Egyptians. Our faith is not rooted in the movement of the stars and planets but in the one who placed those spheres in orbit. Most importantly, our ethical responsibilities are directly related
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