Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. You can sometimes be so immersed into detail that you do not understand the purpose. You can sometimes limit yourself only to questions about how, when, where, how much, and miss the important question "what for?" 

What lies behind the search for chamatz and the search for the afikoman?  Passover is a revolution of ideas and ideals. It is a Jewish festival of the birth of a people, but equally it is the birth of a spiritual sensibility that lies at the heart of western civilization. Who is this pharaoh in our lives? Who are these slaves with whom we identify on this festival? One man in the nineteenth century who died in 1900 understood the subversive character of Judaism, understood what lies beneath the Passover revolution;  Friedrich Nietzsche and his writings in The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche in the tradition of Callicles, Thrasymachus, Machievelli and Hobbes believed that the human being naturally seeks power: the will to dominate, the will to survive, the desire to be strong and to rule.

He was unquestionably influenced by Darwin, who wrote his Origin of the Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, and who looked as nature "red in fang and claw," and survival of the fittest. This is the natural health of the creature. The lion sinks his teeth into the soft flesh of the lamb, the eagle sweeps down upon the sparrow.

It's in nature. And Nietzsche the philologist saw it in language as well. "Noble" means good, and villainy comes from "villain," which means poor. And "schlecht" comes from "schlicht," which means “plebeian.”

Judaism, said Nietzsche, is the religion of slaves. But these Jewish slaves introduced a rebellion not of swords or fists, but the revolution of the mind. Judaism of slaves introduced an umwertung der aler vertung, a transvaluation of all values. In its revolution, the lamb looks up at the lion and says it is bad to eat lamb. And the sparrow looks up at the eagle and says it is evil to devour the sparrow. The weak seeks to convince the strong that compassion, mercy, pity, rachmanas are good. The slave has introduced the esteem of conscience into the mind of the powerful.

Nietzsche introduced two opposing moralities in the world. One is "herren" moral, the morality of the warrior, of the conqueror, of the powerful, of the strong. And the other "shklaven" moral, the slave morality, the morality of the weak, of the impotent. In his Genealogy of Morals he wrote that only the Jews knew how to successfully counter master morality. The Jews argued, "The wretched are alone the good; the poor weak, and the lonely are alone the good; suffering the needy, the sick, the loathsome are the only ones who are pious … But you, on the other hand, you aristocrats, you men of power, are to all eternity the evil, the horrible, the covetous, the insatiable, the godless. Eternally shall you also be unblessed, the cursed, the damned."

Nietzsche pays a begrudging compliment to Judaism and to Jews. Nobody could do what the Jews were able to do:  "All the world's efforts against the aristocrats, the mighty, the holders of power are negligible by comparison with what has been accomplished against those classes by the Jews, that priestly nation of which eventually realized that the one method of affecting satisfaction on its enemies and parents was by means of a radical transvaluation of values, which was at the same time of the cleverest revenge.”

Nicolo Machievelli, in The Prince, in the 15^th century writes that laws and ethics and rules of society are written by, for, and of the powerful. But here comes the Torah and says in the name of God, "Be good to My children and I will be good to you. And who are God's children? They are the widow, the orphan, the poor, the stranger in your gates."

And the rabbis add, "And who is strong?" And they answer, "Not he who has muscles and power, but hakovesh et yitzro, he who can control his impulse, his drives, his power, his libido and the desire to rule, to exploit, to keep your foot on the other's neck."

And here comes the slave morality with its sabotaging the powerful. In Exodus 12: One law shall be to him that is home born and unto the stranger that lives among you.  Again the dominant verse of the Torah repeated thirty-six times, one verse with the same theme:  You shall know the heart of the stranger. You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Everything flows from that root experience, from that reminder that we were strangers and slaves in the land of Egypt. In Greece and in Rome, the fugitive slave who was recaptured was branded with a red hot iron. In Greece, the slave is an animated tool. In the Code of Hammurabbi, the fugitive slave's ear is pierced through. Now comes Deuteronomy 23:16 – "You shall not deliver unto his master a slave that is escaped from his master to you. He shall live with you in your midst in the place which he shall choose within one of your gates where he likes it best. You shall not wrong him." And now the rabbinic ethics follows, "You shall not shout at him. You shall not shame him. You shall not humiliate him, for he is sold to you for service but not for humiliation." Here is the heart of slave morality. It is found in the Book of Job 31. It weakens the master.  "Did not He that made me in the womb not make him?"

Passover may begin with the Jewish people but it is a world revolution. It is the radicalization of civilization. And Nietzsche understood this when he wrote, "It is the Jew who started the slave revolt in morals; a revolt with two millennia of history behind it, which we have lost sight of today because it has triumphed so completely." So I think we ought to read Friedreich Nietzsche as a piece of Haggadah commentary because he has understood that the treatment of the disenfranchised, the treatment of animals and of the submerged community, the tradition of compassion for the impoverished, the voiceless, the homeless, signifies a veritable cosmic revolution rooted in Torah.

Passover is more than Jewish history alone and more than ritual alone. Rabbi Israel Salanter observed and honored Passover and the ritual. He was a mashgiach, a supervisor for matzah "schmurah.” It was his duty to watch the worker preparing the matzah. Once, when he was ill, his disciples came and asked what they should look out for, since they would be taking his place. And he said, "You know those women who knead the dough and must do it rapidly, they are exploited and underpaid. They are weak. See to it that they are not underpaid. That is essential for "schmurah" matzah. When the bowl of water was brought to Salantar during the Seder, he would spill only a few drops of water over the tip of the fingers, not lots of water up to the wrist as the more stringent pietists would. When asked to explain his conduct, he pointed to the water carrier. "You see that small man who carries the buckets of water on a strap on his shoulders? I don't want to gain my mitzvah on his shoulders."

Passover is a festival of conscience and of liberation from the chametz of our lives. The Passover Seder begins with the "search for chametz," and ends with the search for the "afikoman" of new perception. Look for the "afikoman" in the forest,  which too often is missed for the trees.

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