Tapestries-5 | Passover conversations
Trying to find a voice.
Photo by Panos Sakalakis
I’m writing this piece on the eve of the first night of Passover. I’ve just arrived home from Union Square after applying ‘tefillin’ for the first time in a long time. I usually avoid the over-zealous young religious men pushing ‘their’ Jewish rituals and customs upon me, but today I sought them out in a reversal of the usual harpooning. I grew up in a relatively observant Jewish household and strangely, the customs and practices I now distance myself from using quotation marks formed a party of my own daily rituals.
Customs and rituals hold a special place in Jewish tradition and observance. Like other religions, they run the gamut from banal to bizarre to beautiful. Passover — and specifically, the ‘seders’ — is a central tradition and my favorite in the Jewish year’s lunar calendar. The seders are held on two consecutive nights at the beginning of the festival, and are effectively an interactive meal where the story of Exodus is re-told and then, at least in my family, used as a vehicle to discuss modern day examples of slavery and persecution; be it human trafficking, sex slavery, racial vilification or even abstract concepts like slavery to our devices.
It is a wonderful example of bringing together multiple generations of families and communities to reflect upon where we’ve come from as a people and what lessons we should carry with us from that story of exodus and deliverance.
I consider myself a traditional Jew — the seders, together with the High Holy Days, are those traditions that I continue to observe. Judaism is a religion of engagement and active observance. Judaism celebrates disagreement with its tenets and principles and excels in the sparks generated by the friction of opposing viewpoints. What Judaism shies away from is indifference or disengagement. To be a Jew is to go with or against the religion, and either approach is equally welcome at the table as long as there is a level of engagement.
Judaism yearns for discussion and debate and for active participants. I generally (and potentially to a fault) hold strong views about the current state of our economies, governments, educational systems and anything else that involves an intellectual pissing contest. Today we live in a time of turbulence and change and there are no shortages of divides on which to stake a flag. Unfortunately, 2019 feels like a rolling yelling match; I am disheartened by the content of discourse but it’s hard to argue that it lacks engagement.
An element of the cacophony that is today’s public discourse is the resurgence of antisemitism. It is not a new phenomenon and has persisted for thousands of years. Throughout our history as Jewish people, dealing with racism has been existential. One has to look no further than the horrific violence perpetrated at the Pittsburgh synagogue in October last year (on the basis of antisemitic tropes) to understand that there is a direct link between dangerous, inflammatory rhetoric and catastrophic, real-life outcomes.
So with the above context, and on the eve of Passover, herein lies my quandary. I have just laid out to you the importance of engagement with Judaism, its history, its customs and its questions. The commitment to dialogue and exploration — and to conversations like those at the seder table every year — is likely what has given the Jewish people the ability to sustain its character, existence and survival through millennium of upheaval, dispersion, exile and persecution. But when it comes to addressing a modern-day example of vilification and threats — antisemitism — that the Passover story itself touches, I am conspicuously disengaged. There is a conversation and struggle taking place over the character of my people and history, and as a Jewish member of multiple communities, I don’t know how to partake.
I am an active participant in conversations of global significance but am not involved in the discussion about antisemitism that is so much more personally consequential.
Since this discussion about antisemitism is a personal one, it is important to provide context as to my personal experience, specifically to those of you that do not share a similar story. Somehow we’ve arrived at a place today where mentioning the Holocaust in a conversation about antisemitism feels alarmist. But the Holocaust was a real thing that happened to our families. My great-grandfather was the only survivor of 8 siblings. I don’t offer this to garner sympathy, but to show that the holocaust isn’t just a textbook genocide for us, but instead is a part of our narratives.
While the generation of Holocaust survivors lived, Melbourne was home to one of the highest concentrations of survivors in the world (outside of Israel); as such, the experience framed a lot of our upbringing as some of our parents and their friends were the 2nd generation of survivors. The school a lot of us attended, Mount Scopus Memorial College, is named (‘Memorial’) in memory of the victims. To be clear, I don’t personally carry the experience with me in any meaningful sense, but it is clearly a part of my make-up.
We use historical landmarks and reference points when trying to make sense of a present narrative. I’m not concerned that today’s antisemitism will result in the enslavement of the Jewish race for another 300 years in Egypt.
However, given the proximate history of my family and community (i.e. the Holocaust) and the dangerous rhetoric and real outcomes (e.g. the US saw a +57% spike in antisemitic crimes between 2016–17), I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned. As a Jew, I’m much more concerned about what might happen on the streets of Brooklyn than the streets of Baghdad, but for some reason, have a more vocal view on the latter, not the former.
From where I sit today, I feel conflicted between two opposing statements, namely:
The rise of antisemitism is a significant risk to the ongoing safety of the Jewish community, and as a member of a community who was taught never to stand idly by in the face of persecution, let alone my own, I am abrogating my responsibilities and should be a more vocal Jewish voice; or
Drawing a bow between modern antisemitism and the second coming of the Holocaust is alarmist; everybody is feeling the heat in the current climate and there’s nothing special about today’s antisemitism; wait until called for a response as there’s no need to actively engage at the moment.
What do you think? For those readers who aren’t Jewish, what is your view?