Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Passover 2010 by Harold M. Schulweis

If someone points his finger toward the moon, don’t look at the finger. Pay attention to the moon. Don’t confuse the sign for the goal. 

The rituals of Passover — matzoh, moror, charoset, carpas — are the fingers that point our attention to the revolutionary birth of the Jewish people. 

Passover draws the arc of our people’s trajectory, the root and branches of Jewish theology and ethics: It traces the origins of our relationship to God, and our relationship to each other. In our Sabbath and festival prayers, in our tefillin, in our Ten Commandments, in the recitation of our Kiddush, tradition hammers away at one event, at one collective memory: The Exodus. Remember your origin. Remembering your birth. 

We were slaves. We know the nature of God and our ethical obligations not out of philosophy or theology, but out of the lacerations of the ruler’s whip. We Jews first discovered God not as the Creator, but as the Emancipator. Therefore, we are mandated as a people to emancipate the down-trodden, the persecuted, the victims of greed and hate and exploitation. We learned God and Godly behavior not out of books but out of our blood. 

Passover celebrates a momentous clash between the cultures, between the most powerful empire of the ancient word, Egypt, and the tribes of Hebrew slaves, defenseless, voiceless, leaderless. 

Passover marks the confrontation between totalitarian and democratic culture. The Pharaoh of Egypt, Ramses II, sought his own immortality by building great monuments from bricks and granite, and constructed sphinx and pyramids, remains that can be seen today in Luxor and Karuan. Ramses II, who had colossal statues made to deify him. Pharaoh saw himself and would have us see him as God incarnate. The Egyptian prefix of Ramses is “Ra,” which means “Sun God.” 

Against the imperious screaming of Ramses at the groaning slaves, we hear a stammering voice of a man of heavy tongue (kvad peh). Moses, raised in royalty but drawn to the repressed, cries out on behalf of the hoards of immigrants, nomads, itinerants, forced laborers, slaves who move on their knees with the taskmasters’ heel on their neck. 

Moses the stutterer rose to defy the royalty that adopted him. “Let my people go. Let them breathe. Let them breed. Let them worship.” But Pharaoh stood astride and mocked him: 

“Moses, who in the world will go with you? Who is to be your army? The few, old, decrepit, frail, faltering, old men and their wives? Who will do battle? Just the young, naïve children, helpless, born in chains, cringing with fear? Who will go with you?” 

The answer Moses was prophetic, seared into our four-millennia history: 

“We will go with our old and our young, with our sons and our daughters.” This is the biblical Jewish declaration of human independence. Written in blood and fire in the 14^th century, before the common era. 

We were born in the 14^th century B.C.E. But leap now to the 18 century in the common era, to the American revolution, and the birth of American civilization, and hear the resonant vibration of our liberation. 

A small particular people of history shares the universal model of democratic society. In Philadelphia, 1776 C.E., Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson meet to design a seal for the United States. From what would they draw their American image? 

Benjamin Franklin proposes a seal bearing a picture of Moses lifting his staff and dividing the Red Sea, and on the seal these words: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” 

Thomas Jefferson proposes for the seal of the United States a picture of the Israelites in the wilderness, lead by a "cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night." 

The founding fathers drew their inspiration from the Jewish bible. In the center of Philadelphia, in Independence Hall, where our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were drafted, stands the Liberty Bell. Around the top of that bell are words taken from the 25th Chapter of Vayikra — Leviticus in the Jewish Bible: "You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land, for all its inhabitants." 

Mind you, liberty for all its inhabitants — for the rich and for the poor, for the free man and for the servants, for the native and for the immigrant, for the citizen and the stranger. 

"We hold these truths to be self evident." No, not so self-evident. Self-evident, because the Jewish spirit in Egypt won against Pharoanic violence; self-evident because Moses won; self-evident because we did not submit, surrender, submerge our dignity. Self-evident because a small people (even today, but one-quarter of one percent of the world’s population) possessed a sacred idea: the sacrilege of the enslavement of another human being. Again and again, you cannot wound the human being. You shall not destroy the lame, the pariah, the stranger, the poor, the widow, the orphan, the homeless. Remember, people shall not be slaves to people. Color? Race? Ethnicity? Religion? … mean nothing to a people whose foundation rests in the earliest chapters of creation: "that every human being, male or female, Jew or Gentile, believer or pagan, is created in the image of God: everyone’s human rights are inviolable. 

Heinrich Heine summed up the Passover spirit: "Freedom has always been spoken with a Hebrew accent." Against the nations that surrounded them, and even the Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle argued, "Some people are born to be slaves." In Plato’s idea the masses of men and women are held in bondage. Among the stoics, the masses are called typhloi, in Greek, "blind fools." 

That is not Jewish talk, and it is not American talk. We Jews live in two civilizations, and these two civilizations feed each other. Both civilizations need each other today as it did in their formative years. For there are murmuring in the land from those who would today move us back to the hardened heart of pre-civil war days; who today would polarize our country into segregated classes and colors — black and white and brown and yellow and red; believers and unbelievers; patriots and traitors, native born and immigrants. There are venomous xenophobic voices that do not rejoice in the emancipation, much less the elevation to high office of persons from minorities. Not everyone celebrates the Passover redemption of former slaves. 

"Mah nish tana ha yom hazeh?" Why is this day different? Because of you eleven. You who are honored, honor our tradition. You have declared by your presence, by your study and by your prayer, a single message: the Bar Mitzvah and the Bat Mitzvah and the confirmation are not for the young alone. It is not enough that "Our children go to school." It is not enough to think, "Let the kids read the text, let them learn to chant from the Torah. Let them learn the benedictions. We will pay for it." You rejected the tearing apart of generations, and you eleven reaffirmed your ancestors’ vow: "We will go together, with our young and our old, and our sons and our daughters, and our grandsons and our granddaughter." 

You eleven stand together today as a link, unbreakable in the chain of the tradition of our people. You gave voice to the same sacred narrative that our people read for two millennia. You broke the rope of rationalization which gives excuse for loosening the strands of our tradition. You eleven give life to the written word. 

I admire your resolution. I admire your loyalty. I admire your teacher, Yossi Dresner, who transmits Jewish wisdom with the gift of "hit lavuth" the flame of spiritual enthusiasm. Together, one generation is bound to the other. "Adonai oz li amo yitain" — God gives strength to his people. 

And I turn to you — fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, of all ages and all energies — enlist, join, commit yourself for next years’s adult b’nai mitzvah Passover. Don’t abandon your past or dismiss your future. As we embrace the congregation encircling you, whisper to the rabbis and me: "I will. With our sons and daughters we will link arms, strengthen our faith and declare our freedom. "

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