The seder nights with which Pesach (Passover) starts commemorate an ancestral exodus from slavery: the Biblical saga tells of oppression, a hard-hearted Pharaoh and a series of plagues that strike the Egyptians but miraculously spare the Hebrew people. The end of the seven day festival focuses on the drama at the Sea of Reeds, with the hosts of Pharoah’s armies pursuing the Israelites and the people having to trust that the way to freedom lay through the waters.
Between the
oppression of Egypt and thoughts of drowning in the sea, the narrative sets up a
scene crafted with much literary skill. The waters open up – but only by dint
of what the text describes (from the participants’ point of view) as a “strong
east wind” and the omniscient narrator’s point of view as “caused by Adonai,
the Eternal One” at the behest of Moses, whose role – “stretching out his hand”
– is also seen to be a vital element (Exodus 14:21). The natural event is the vehicle
for the miraculous. A strip of dry land appears, a very narrow ridge of dry
land – but for how long would it last? And
who would venture in when all was so uncertain?
The middle
days of this festival – the in-between days – set us up as inheritors of the
textual drama. Those that left Egypt were ‘in-betweeners’ too. They were in
between slavery and death, between slavery and the desert, between slavery and
the possibility of a new kind of life. But first they had to go in between the
walls of water. The story dramatizes in-between-ness.
And for Jews
following the traditions of old, this in-between-ness sees us between the
beginning of Pesach and its end, between that renewed experience of the taste
of the matza with all its associated memories of seders of the past, and matza
of the past – in between the experience of that, and the waiting for the
festival to be over. I mean how much matza can you eat? Don’t you get fed up
with it quite soon and long for the taste of a good bit of sourdough, or a
bagel, or just a Pret a Manger sandwich (other makes of sandwiches are also available)?
Like the
children of Israel we are also in between - when the appreciation of the tastes
of the seder and what they represent gives way to the feeling of deprivation, when
we begin to have a heightened awareness that part of the way we celebrate this
journey from slavery to freedom includes relinquishing the pleasures of the
foods we normally eat. It is not exactly oppression, but we are still choosing
to be bound up with servitude to an idea, a tradition.
Why is this
notion of being in-between resonating for me this year? Maybe because I sense that
this year we are also in-between in other more intangible or hard to articulate
ways.
There can’t
have been many sederim this year when the historical moment we find
ourselves in wasn’t present, perhaps very present. And it is a moment when I
would suggest this experience of being ‘in-between’ may have been very
emotionally demanding. Emotionally and spiritually challenging.
Because,
most obviously, we are living In between a profound concern for the citizens of
Israel, with sons and daughters at war, with hostages still unredeemed, with the traumas of the last six months
tearing at the heart - in between those feelings of identification (and even if
you don’t have family there or friends, your Jewish heart might beat in time
with the hearts of those going through this tragedy) – so, many have told me of
feeling in between those feelings, and other feelings about what has been
happening in Gaza: other sons and daughters lost, other children killed, and
not just firstborns, feelings that the Jewish heart might also respond to about
the victims of famine and displacement and loss of homes and fear for one’s
survival every moment of the day. If Pesach teaches anything it teaches us
sensitivity towards all those who experience oppression, ‘because you were subject
to oppression in Egypt’.
So this is
also an experience, a painful existential experience, of being in-between : of
being pulled by a concern for the Jewish people who have chosen a homeland as a
solution to the so-called ‘Jewish problem’ - and a concern for the cost of this for other
people, citizens of Gaza, and for those terrorized, killed, displaced, in the
West Bank by Jewish vigilantes. This is a concern that one might also have been
sensitive to for decades, a concern about the lack of justice that has been
ongoing for 75 years or so. We are pulled in between contrasting, conflicting
realities. Between ethnic identification and concern and compassion - and a
larger human connectedness and concern and compassion.
And here in
London, we might also be in an additional and strange psychological state of in
betweenness. On one level we just get on with our lives, our own important and mundane
everyday living – family, community, friends, holidays, shopping, work, studying,
dealing with illnesses and losses, celebrating the good stuff, having to manage
the difficult stuff, all the stuff of everyday life. We live between that and
something else that over this last 6 months or so has threatened to destabilise
our everyday lives: an awareness of antisemitism, both real and imagined, both anecdotal
and exaggerated, both experienced and feared. We have been living between
getting on with our lives and an awareness that something intimidating is
happening around us, and not only here in the UK, but around the world.
We might be
feeling our own feet are, amazingly, on dry land, but out of the corner of our
eyes we might also glimpse (or wonder if we see, maybe it is all a mirage) the
walls of water that could come crashing down on us at any moment. Though
miraculously they don’t.
And being in
between means the Egyptian armies haven’t caught up with us, but when we turn back
towards where we have come from we glimpse those who seek our harm. Or we think
we do - because the antagonists we fear in the present are always overlaid in
our mind’s eye by the antagonists of the past, who are always behind us, so to
speak, pursuing us. Traumas of the past will always effect, distort, what we
see in the present. It’s a problem. How does one learn to see clearly what is
going on? Or is that a fantasy - a wished for state of clear-sightedness?
So we are always
in between – between Egypt and the wilderness ahead; between the pursuers who
seek our harm and the freedom to live without fear; between the giant waves that
could drown us - no longer only a long-rehearsed metaphor from an ancient saga
- and the powerful natural forces flowing through the world that sustain us. We
are always in between.
‘Leaving
Egypt’ is a powerful image, metaphor. The story of the Jewish people, whether you read it as history, or
literary saga, folk memory or myth, the story we have inherited uses Egypt as
the symbol of oppression, of narrowness. I imagine you know that the root
meaning of Mitzrayim in Hebrew is tzr – narrow, constrained. It
is as if the Biblical writers were already inviting us to be midrashists,
to relate imaginatively to their language, to hear that the question of the
liberation from Egypt is not just a
national saga, but a personal one.
We know this
story is not just about our forerunners, the Israelites, but a saga relevant to
all oppressed people – in the 19th century and into the 20th
it inspired generations of African-Americans (we listened to Paul Robeson’s ‘Go
Down Moses’ at our seder); it fed into 1960s and 1970s Catholic liberation
theology in South America, and was used in the Protestant churches leading up
to 1989 and the resistance to communist oppression in Europe. Yes, it has been
part of many strands of collective history, Jewish and non-Jewish. But its
potency also resides in the way that it talks to each individual about personal
liberation.
‘Egypt’ is what keeps us narrowed down in our
life, it’s about old habits, destructive guilt, small-minded thinking, false
certainties we use to mange our helplessness, fears from the past that
constrain our choices in the present, all the ways we stop ourselves having
more life-enhancing, fulfilling, generous lives, more loving lives. So ‘to come
out of Egypt’ is to come out of whatever confines me, traps me, shuts me in. Pesach
also speaks about a personal, existential drama, psychological, spiritual. We
long to be freer, but we oppress ourselves. There’s a Pharaoh within everyone, who
won’t let us go, won’t let us live a fuller life.
And it is a
struggle to leave Egypt. We are always caught in between: in between a wish to
escape the burden and inhibitions and haunted memories of the past - and the regressive
urge in the human psyche to stay in Egypt, because it is safe and familiar, it
is the womb, it is home, it is a place of psychic retreat. We want to leave
Egypt – and we don’t.
The Biblical
text acknowledges this when the children of Israel, even before they have
reached the Reed Sea, see the pursuing Egyptians and cry out to Moses: ‘why
have you done this to us? Didn’t we already tell you, leave us alone, let us
serve the Egyptians, better that than to die here in the wilderness’ (Exodus 14: 11-12). There it is, incarnated
within the saga, the wish to get back to something familiar, to stick with what
we are used to, however much it diminishes our potential rather than face the daunting challenges of opening
ourselves towards the unknown future.
Maybe that
casts light on a strange midrash I came across recently:
‘Only one
out of five of the children of Israel went out from Egypt. Some say one out of
fifty. And some say only one out of five hundred. Rabbi Nehorai says: Not even
one out of five hundred’ (Mechilta, Massekta de Piska 12).
It is as if
the rabbis of old already intuited that within their ancestral story there was
a recognition of just how difficult it is to leave the familiarity of what is
known, safe and secure – even when what is known safe and secure is oppressive
and constricting. Maybe leaving Egypt is only for the bravehearted, or the
reckless, for the visionaries or for those who have got nothing left to lose. Would
we have left Egypt? Can we leave it now?
You need a
special kind of energy to keep going, to break through the waters in that
symbolic birth into the new, the unexplored, the uncharted daunting territory
ahead. And you need a special kind of
energy to keep going in this in-between place we find ourselves in today, in
all the ways I have been outlining.
Do we ever
leave Egypt? Maybe not.
Even if we
have left Egypt, do we have the courage, the resources, the faith, to take the
first step into the sea, which has not yet opened up a way through it. Again,
the rabbis intuited that being ‘in between’ is a place where we can end up stranded,
frozen by fear.
They created
the midrash about the children of Israel standing at the edge of the sea, each
person rooted to the spot saying ‘I won’t be the first one to go into the
water’ and it wasn’t until Nachshon ben Aminadav stepped in to the sea that it
began to part for the people. And
actually, continues the midrash, they had to wade in up to their noses before
the sea became dry land (Sotah, 37a).
That took
faith, that took a capacity for risk taking, that took bravery, which often
looks like foolhardiness.
I sometimes think
the Jewish people now have lost that faith, and particularly they have lost
leaders with the courage to make that move – too much oppression, too much
trauma in the soul, too much frozen fear, too much looking backwards.
The State of
Israel needs new leadership, self-evidently – preferably with some form of
Jewish moral compass; and the Jewish people need leaders with the courage to be
guided by the ancestral vision that the community of Israel has a destiny (as
Isaiah puts it in a passage we read on Pesach) of living where “Nothing evil or
vile will be done/ for the land shall be filled with devotion to Adonai,
the Eternal One of Justice, as waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9)
In these in
between days – when we are far from the enactment of that vision – we still
have to keep it in mind. That’s the goal, that’s the aim, beyond Egypt, beyond
the wilderness, the creation of a space where the values of justice and
compassion flood the land. Unless we keep this vision alive, unless we keep
telling our story this way, unless we keep faith with the humanistic and
universal wisdom of our tradition, we will remain in Egypt, suffering from what
the text describes the children of Israel suffering: ‘kotzer ruach’ (Exodus 6:9) – “anguish
of spirit”.
Leaving
Egypt means following the vision, leaving behind that ‘kotzer ruach’ - ‘shortness
of breath’ and ‘narrowness of spirit’ - that we have been living with all these
months. Only that vision will redeem us, only that vision will take us out of
our narrowness, through our Sea of Reeds, through our fears and doubts and
stiff-neckedness, through the wilderness. The destination is not in our hands –
but, meanwhile, we can make this journey together, supporting ourselves, in the
knowledge (as Rebbe Franz of Prague once said) “that it is, fortunately, a
truly immense journey.’
[based on
a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 27th, 2024]
