By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel
CHULA VISTA, California — For the second year in a row, we find ourselves asking the same question as we asked last year: “How is this Passover Seder in the era of the COVID 19 pandemic different from other Passover celebrations?”
Ordinarily, our Passover Seder opens with the following invitation: “All who are hungry, come and eat!” But this year, many of our friends and relatives are unable to travel to be with their loved ones on Passover. If anything, we probably will not open our doors for strangers to come and participate with us. Remarkably, families and communities have discovered ingenious ways for us to stay together. For this reason, most congregations will be observing a Virtual Passover Seder this year—as we did last year; families too across the world will be celebrating Passover via Zoom.
Judaism is a religion that values questions more than it does answers. Answers come and go, but good questions stimulate the mind and imagination to discover new truths and possibilities never entertained before.
The challenge for all of us is: How will we as parents make this holiday special for our families? This is an important question that families and communities need to discuss.
But I believe one answer may be found in the Passover Haggadah itself.
Think about it.
In a strange way, our Passover celebration this year (as was the case last year) resembles the original Passover of our ancestors who celebrated the Seder in Egypt as a plague was taking its toll on the Egyptian people. The Torah tells us that no Israelite was allowed to leave his or her home. It would be easy to imagine the trepidation and anxiety our ancestors must have felt.
I say this because there is a tendency in the cinematic midrashic adaptations of Hollywood to portray the Passover Seder as a truly joyous event. We can picture the Israelites high-fiving it to each other as they celebrated their Seder. That may work with Hollywood’s reinterpretation of the Bible, but the biblical story of the Exodus is one that is full of suspense, uncertainty, danger, hopefulness, and faith.
When viewed from this perspective, was the original Passover Seder a joyous event?
It depends on your perspective. If you are an Israelite waiting to be liberated, it certainly proved to be exhilaration. For the first time in their lives, our ancestors experienced the taste of freedom.
But if you were an Egyptian, you probably had a very different kind of experience. When the angel of death struck the Egyptian firstborn, one can only imagine a bone-chilling atmosphere replete with screaming and crying from the Egyptian neighbors who lived next door to the Israelites.
How could the Israelites celebrate without worrying about what was going on outside? Yet, they demonstrated their faith by eating the Paschal lamb. That took courage; it also reflected great optimism in the face of danger.
Flashforward to 2020-2021.
Until the Covid-19 virus occurred, I must admit I never thought much about this question. But when we see the nervousness pervading our country at this joyous time of the year—for the second year in a row, the masks and the social-distancing obviously heightens our anxiety.
Just as our ancestors most likely wondered: “Will we survive this evening?” We, too, are probably wondering about the same question. After all, so many of our loved ones, friends, and people we have known died since the pandemic raided our shores.
What can we learn from the original Passover? Despite everything that was going on in Egypt, our ancestors displayed remarkable courage and faith in the face of certain and uncertain evils surrounding them.
- The Karpas on the Seder Plate symbolizes the renewal of spring—a time when the world slowly awakens from its wintry sleep.
- Passover is the holiday of spring. It cannot be celebrated at any other time other than springtime.
- The Charoset symbolizes the mortar our ancestors used to make the bricks for our slave-masters, and yet at the Passover table it is not a symbol of suffering, but it is sweetened with wine to symbolize the importance of hope that sustained our ancestors in Egypt.
As the holiday of hope and renewal, perhaps we too can learn to affirm our faith with the hope that this pandemic will soon end.
So, how is this year different from all other years—in a time of a world pandemic?
For one thing, the numbers of people who have died since the outset of the pandemic are rapidly dwindling. Our country is slowly coming back alive.
So, in a nutshell, what should we tell our children at the Seder?
When we retell the story of Passover, we need to inspire our children and ourselves; we have survived dangerous times before; we have outlasted the Black Death of medieval Europe; we have out-survived numerous cholera epidemics, we will survive COVID-19 as well.
Soon this awful pandemic will eventually vanish.
Let us hope that all of us find the holiday message of Passover personally inspirational. Never forget that it is a holiday that celebrates the miracle of renewal and hope.
Life is continuous and we will survive.
*
Rabbi Dr. Michael Lee Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista. He may be contacted via michael.samuel@sdjewishworld.com