Pesach and springtime

We’re commanded to tell the story of Exodus — as the Haggadah of my childhood put it, “of the outgoing from Egypt” — on the night of the seder. We’re told to re-enact it, and not as if it were some parlor game of Charades and we were polite Victorians, but as if it were happening to us.

Of course that’s not possible. Not really. We have no idea what it would feel like to be an ancient Israelite, living in ancient Egypt, without any of the supports or science or technology or supermarkets or books or Amazon that make life what it is today. It’s hard to imagine all of that.

I’ve tried to imagine being the enslaved Eliza in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” crossing the river that was the barrier between her and freedom on a sheet of floating ice, because the image is so dramatic. In a way, it’s a variation of the Israelites’ flight to freedom; they went through the parted waters and she went over their frozen top. An army was in hot pursuit of the Israelites; dogs chased Eliza. And we have pen-and-ink versions of Eliza’s escape. But even that is unimaginable.

So I can’t imagine the Israelites’ plight and their flight, even if I try to.

But some historical periods make that imaginative leap easier than others. The worse the time, the easier the image. I assume that when Jews could make seders during the Shoah — and we know that some of them went to extraordinary lengths to try to mark Pesach, because their feeling of obligation didn’t change even when the possibility of fulfilling it did — they had a more instinctive understanding of bondage and the need to escape it than we do.

I am absolutely not saying that our period resembles the early Nazi period — it doesn’t — but I do think that it is getting easier for us to understand the feeling of being unwelcome, even here, in our home country, America. Jew-hatred is rising, and so is Israel-hating. Zionism is rapidly becoming a dirty word, and politicians are saying that yes, they believe Israel has a right to exist, as if its right to existence could ever be questioned. Do the United States and Canada, both fairly new countries that displaced and degraded the people who lived here first, have the right to exist? Or the countries of Europe? Most of them — all of them? — went through centuries when roaming bands from neighboring areas slaughtered the people who lived there, who themselves were the descendants of roaming bands from other areas who’d murdered the earlier residents. So yes, either we all have the right to exist or none of us do.

But Pesach is also the holiday of spring, and it’s spring outside. Hope is real, and we need it, and hope blooms whenever we go out and we feel that the air is different and our bodies react immediately with pure joy. There are more early-spring flowers poking up every day than there had been the day before.

And it’s a season of surprises.

This morning, I walked on Riverside Drive, glorying in the freshness of the new spring, when I heard music that I was pretty sure wasn’t coming from my earbuds. Political podcasts rarely play music from brass bands. It turned out that there was a real band, complete with a monstrously huge tuba, standing by the stone wall underneath a flight of stone steps in Riverside Park. I don’t really know what oompah music is, but I think it was what I heard. I don’t think they were very good — not that I could tell — but they were wonderful.

How magic can you get?

So this Pesach, we will feel the burden of history, doing its metronomic thing, going back to the ugly times. The holiday will stiffen our resolve to fight it. And we will also feel the lightness and joy of the newly baby-green spring, and its occasional gift of oompah.

We wish all our readers a chag kasher v’sameach.

—JP

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