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SERMONS
PESACH JOY IN THE TIME OF COVID-19
RABBI CHAIM STEINMETZ
(Note: I wrote this last year before Pesach. Looking at it now, it reminds me how the thought of Dayenu is even more important in good times than in bad. It is so easy to forget our blessings. I added it here to reflect on how much we have to be thankful for, and to recognize how far we have come in a year.)
This is a terrible time to celebrate Pesach. A holiday when we tell the joyous story of liberation at intergenerational gatherings has arrived at a time when we hide from each other and listen to news accounts of grief, suffering and economic devastation. Under ordinary circumstances, this would not be a time for laughter and joy, but the calendar says Wednesday night is the 15th of Nissan, and it is time to celebrate.
This jarring change of mood is familiar to anyone who observes shiva during Shabbat or before a holiday. The Talmud explains that we cancel the traditional mourning period of shiva in the face of a holiday, because one must push aside personal grief to make room for the communal celebration of the holiday; the mourner needs to celebrate as well. The mourners are expected to make the emotional shift from grief to joy in the course of an afternoon.
This is not always possible. Indeed, Rabbi Moshe Isserles allows one to cry on Shabbat if it offers the person emotional relief; this helps the grief stricken to better enjoy Shabbat. But the ideal remains complete emotional control. In his Halakhic Man, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik relates an anecdote about the Gaon of Vilna, who was informed about the passing of his brother on Shabbat. The Gaon continued the rest of the day without any show of emotion, but at the conclusion of Shabbat immediately burst into tears. He was simply holding his emotions in check.
This type of emotional self-control seems out of place in a culture which values self-expression, and sees emotional expressions as cathartic. But that is what halakhah expects of us as the holiday of Pesach arrives. The commandment to rejoice on the holiday remains the same this year, whatever our own emotional state might be.
In many ways, joy is actually more important this year. In good times, we get on a hedonic treadmill, and pursue big dreams while ignoring smaller blessings. But in times of crisis, you appreciate all the things without which you couldn’t live. Each year we sing the Dayenu song, saying that each step in the Exodus was worthy on its own to be the cause of celebration; each step was Dayenu, enough of a blessing. But this is the year to embrace the idea of dayenu in our own lives. Dayenu to have friends, even if we can only reach them by phone.
Dayenu to have food, even if there is a long wait to enter a supermarket.
Dayenu to be blessed to have a healthcare system with incredible heroes on the front lines.
Dayenu to be blessed with a community with multiple volunteers rushing to help others.
There is so much we take for granted in other years; this year is the time to appreciate overlooked blessings.
Joy is particularly important in times of crisis. In one of his books, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote a comment critical of the Roberto Benigni film Life is Beautiful. While he said that he appreciated how important humor is to keeping one’s sanity, he disagreed with the film’s thesis that humor can keep you
“You are wrong,” … (he) said to me, and then, he told me his story. He and another prisoner in Auschwitz had become friends. They reached the conclusion that unless they were able to laugh, they would eventually lose the will to live. So they made an agreement. Each of them would look out, every day, for something about which they could laugh. Each night they would share their findings and laugh together. “A sense of humor,” said the survivor, looking me in the eyes, “kept me alive.”
Sacks concludes by writing: “I cannot say I understand such courage, but I found it awe-inspiring.”
Sometimes joy is the foundation of courage. At times of crisis, we must find a way to celebrate, and inspire ourselves to hold on to our love for life; we must continue to sing, so we can reconnect to passions we have forgotten behind a mountain of worries.
That is why this year rejoicing on Pesach is critical in the battle against the coronavirus. Yes, joy does seem out of place right now, but Pesach was Pesach even in the worst of times. We need to celebrate, we need to sing, even if we are singing alone, because an inspiring Pesach is exactly what we need today. P
REMEMBERING, FORGETTING, & TRANSCENDING SLAVERY
RABBI CHAIM STEINMETZ
Are nightmares worth remembering? Should we block out traumatic events? This question was a constant debate among Holocaust survivors. In my own family, my aunt talked extensively about her experiences during the Holocaust, while my mother rarely spoke about those events. When I got older I asked my mother why, and she explained that she wanted to protect us from the horrors that had ravaged her young life.
This debate is a very old one. The rabbis of the Talmud already wondered if we should try to supress anguished thoughts, or speak about them with others. 1 Some philosophers have felt that suppressing negative memories is the path to happiness. Nietzsche, in Genealogy of Morals, writes that: “... we can immediately see how there could
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be no happiness, cheerfulness, hope, pride, immediacy, without forgetfulness. The person in whom this apparatus of suppression is damaged, so that it stops working, can be compared (and not just compared –) to a dyspeptic; he cannot ‘cope’ with anything…” 2 In Psychology, a very different view of trauma took hold. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud treated their patients by making them recall repressed memories of traumatic events. As they put it: “The repressed idea takes its revenge, however, by becoming pathogenic.” 3 We might intuitively think that forgetting trauma is helpful, but Freud takes the view that repressed memories can cause more pain while forgotten than when remembered.
Remembering and forgetting is not just an issue for philosophers and psychologists; it is a political issue. Revolutionaries would rather forget the past. One example is the Cultural Revolution in China during the 1960s. In 1966, a concerted campaign was made against “The Four Olds:” Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. Objects of veneration, traditional literature, and ancient cultural artifacts were all eliminated. In Mao Zedong’s view, you need to forget the past in order to embrace the future.
The same revolutionary spirit can be found among many early Zionists. They wanted to “negate the exile,” and begin a new society with a new identity, because the past was a weight holding Jews back from sovereignty. Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his Eulogy for Herzl that “our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite ... because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is trodden upon and easily frightened and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent…..The Yid wants to conceal his identity from strangers and, therefore, the Hebrew should look the world straight in the eye and declare: ‘I am a Hebrew’” Revolution occurs by turning your back on the past.
The Zionist ideal of “negating exile” made it imperative for many to forget the Holocaust. In general, there was a feeling in the air that people wanted to move on. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg describes the experience of being a young American attending an early Holocaust memorial service as similar to “crashing a funeral,” because these events were then only attended by survivors. Native North Americans often made survivors uncomfortable. A friend of mine - who is a survivor - told me that when she emigrated to Canada after the war, she found that if she tried to talk about her experiences, people would say to her “Well, in Canada, we also had butter rationing.” She quickly learned to keep her mouth shut. In Israel, there was an even harsher attitude. There are multiple anecdotes about young Israelis demonizing the survivors themselves, as if they were responsible for being victims. Aharon Appelfeld, in his autobiography, tells of survivors visiting Israeli schools and being questioned accusingly about why they didn’t resist and were led like sheep to the slaughter.
But this attitude changed in the 1960s. The Eichmann trial in 1961 reopened conversations that had been pushed aside. The Six Day War in 1967, when so many were worried about Israel’s annihilation, enabled many in the “new generation” to recognize that they had more in common with the old generation than they had previously realized. By the late 1960s, the Jewish community understood that it could no longer cut itself off from the traumas of the Holocaust.
This change in attitude is welcome. Yes, focusing on past tragedies can reinforce a negative self image as a victim and increase pessimism, but it also can teach critical lessons on the road to freedom.
The Talmud tells us that the format of the Haggadah is that one “begins with (the Jewish people’s) disgrace (slavery) and concludes with their glory (freedom).” 4 One might think that the importance of mentioning the disgrace of slavery is merely a narrative device, the background to the triumph of redemption. But actually, the Talmud elsewhere remarks that the narrative of disgrace needs to spoken in a loud voice, 5 to ensure that slavery is remembered, as well.
What is the point to revisiting the trauma of slavery? Because it can strengthen our sense of freedom. Nicolas Taleb in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, notes that the opposite of being fragile is not being durable; it is being able to adapt to every threat and to overcome them. He uses the example of hormesis, which is the ability of organisms to become stronger when exposed to low-dose stress. In humans, exposure to small doses of a
poison increases the body’s ability to cope with larger doses of poison in the future; similarly, vaccines expose people to a weakened or dead form of a virus that triggers the immune system, and readies it to fight off future threats.
On a psychological level, the same thing occurs when retelling one’s family history. Marshall Duke, a psychologist at Emory University and his colleague, Robyn Fivush, director of Emory’s Family Narratives Lab, have found that the most resilient children are deeply familiar with own their family’s history, and are taught an “oscillating narrative”: that the family has had challenges, but then overcome challenges. Knowing how their own family overcame adversity in the past made children psychologically stronger. This is psychological hormesis, where children learn how to transcend their own challenges by remembering past challenges.
Psychological hormesis is why we recite the full Exodus story from the beginnings of slavery at the Seder. We recall the traumas of exile to teach an important lesson to our children: If we have transcended slavery in the past, we can do so again in the future. As Michael Walzer puts it: “Wherever people know the Bible and experience oppression, the Exodus has sustained their spirits and inspired their resistance.” 6 We retell the story of slavery because it strengthens us and helps us transcend future challenges.
Each year, I feel like I need to explain anew the importance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which follows Pesach by just a few days. People wonder why we would want to remember such horror, and there is a yearly flurry of op-eds about why there is so much emphasis on the greatest tragedy in Jewish history. 7 But in actuality, the question isn’t much of a question. The Holocaust is part of an oscillating story of exile and redemption; retelling it, along with the heroic stories of survival, actually build resilience.
In 2002, I read an article that encapsulated the importance of always telling our moments of slavery in a loud voice. After 30 people were killed in a suicide bombing at a Passover Seder in a hotel in Netanya, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield. During the campaign, in May 2002, the following newspaper account was written about one of the Israeli Generals: 8
During the fierce fighting in Jenin, Israel’s Commander in Chief, General Shaul Mofaz, came to inspect the fighting forces in the area. He gathered the commanders and officers for a briefing. He suddenly noticed that one of his Major Generals, Avraham Gutman, had a long rip on his army shirt. He immediately asked him about the tear; Gutman told him that his mother had passed away the day before and that he had just come from the funeral. (One of the customs of mourning is the tearing of one’s garment.)
General Mofaz immediately ordered him to leave the command post and return home to sit shiva for his mother. Avraham refused his Commander in Chief, and told Mofaz the following story.
He had volunteered to join his unit when he heard that they had been called up for Operation Defensive Shield. Within days his unit began preparations around the terrorist enclave in Jenin. It was not too long before he and his unit began the painstaking mopping up operation in the city.
In the midst of the second day of battle, as he was speaking to the Regional Commander, Eyal Shlein, his cell phone rang. He saw that the caller was his 92-yearold mother. All of his family knew not to call him while he was in the army, so the call itself was a mystery. His commander said to him, “Your Imma (mother) is more important than anything else... answer the call.”
His mother said, “I have two things to tell you. The first is that as a commander in the field you have a responsibility to bring your soldiers back home, safe and sound.”
Then she said: “Remember Avraham, you are my revenge against the Nazis.” With that she hung up.
Several hours later Avraham Guttman’s mother passed away, and he went to her funeral. So why did he return to his troops? Guttman explained to Mofaz: “I have no choice. I am returning to battle. This was my mother’s last request!”
Avraham Guttman’s story is our story. From our very beginnings in Egypt, the Jews have never forgotten past traumas, but we haven’t been defeated by them either. Instead, we have used memories of slavery to transcend slavery, because the lesson we have learned is that if a people can be redeemed from exile once, they can be redeemed from any exile. And by remembering slavery this way, we have found a way to turn tragedy into strength. Just ask Avraham Guttman. P
1 Yoma 75a 2 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay two, Section one 3 On Hysteria, by Josef Breuer & Sigmund
Freud, The Case of Miss Lucy R. 4 Pesachim 116a 5 Sotah 32b 6 Exodus and Revolution, page 4
7 I have offered other responses in
“Why Visiting Auschwitz Still Matters,”
Jewish Week, February 27, 2018 8 Avraham Guttman: A Soldier of the
Jewish People, Hatsofeh, May 3, 2002
THE HAGGADAH ORDER AS UNDERSTOOD BY THE RAV IN WORDS AND IN MUSIC
BY RABBI HASKEL LOOKSTEIN
The Mishna in Pesachim (116A) describes the story of the Haggadah as follows:
לאוש ןבה ןאכו ינש סוכ ול וגזמ
“They pour for him (the leader of the Seder) a second cup and the child then asks his father:”
The Mishnah then presents the four questions and continues:
ודמלמ ויבא ןב לש ותעד יפלו
And according to the understanding of the child, the father answers him:”
חבשב םייסמו תונגב ליחתמ
“He starts with degradation and ends with glorification.”
The Mishnah does not explain what the father is talking about, namely, what is the degradation and what is the glorification? The Gemara asks that question and gives two answers.
Rav says: “In the beginning, our forefathers were idol worshippers and now God has brought us to His worship.” In other words, the degradation was our beginnings as an idolatrous people because Abraham came from the home of an idol manufacturer, and the glorification is that God brought us to Mt. Sinai where he gave us the Torah and we began to worship one God. “And Shmuel said: “We were slaves to Pharaoh.” In other words, the dynamic of moving from degradation to glorification is the story of moving from slavery to the liberation of freedom.
Our Haggadah contains both stories. The first, Shmuel’s view, seems to be avadim hayinu – from slavery to freedom - while the second comes shortly thereafter, following the section on the four children, when the Haggadah quotes the Book of Joshua (24:2): “In the beginning our fathers served idols, but now God has brought us to worship Him,” which is a direct quote of Rav’s words in the Gemara.
Rav Soloveitchik asks two questions about this order in the Haggadah. First, the Haggadah does not follow the order of the Gemara. The Gemara has Rav’s story first (from idolatry to the worship of God) and only then quotes Shmuel (from slavery to freedom), while the Haggadah has Shmuel’s story first and Rav’s second. The second question is that there is actually another iteration of Shmuel’s story in the Haggadah, when the Haggadah quotes all of the verses from Deuteronomy which are a synopsis of the Exodus story (Arami oveid avi); in other words, Shmuel’s version of the story. If Shmuel’s story is cited twice by the Haggadah, Rav’s story must also be cited twice. If so, where is the second citation of Rav’s story and does it solve the problem of having the Haggadah’s order coincide with that of the Talmud?
The Rav’s answer comes from the Rambam in Chapter 7 of the Laws of chametz and matzah.
:דציכ .חבשב םייסלו ,תונגב ליחתהל ךירצו חרת ימיב וניתובא ויה הליחתבש רפסמו ליחתמ רחא ןיפדורו לבהה ירחא ןיעוטו םירפוכ ,וינפלמו ונבריקש ,תמאה תדב םייסמו ;םילילא תדובע ןכו .ודוחייל ונבריקו ,תומואהמ ונלידבהו ,ול םוקמה לכו ,םיירצמב הערפל ונייה םידבעש עידומו ליחתמ ,ונל ושענש תואלפנו םיסינב םייסמו ;ונולמגש הערה דע יבא דבוא ימרא"מ שורדיש אוהו .ונתוריחבו השרפה לכ רומגיש
The Rambam presents the father’s response to the child, paralleling the Talmud, as follows: “One has to start with degradation and end with glorification. How so? He begins and tells the story that in the beginning our forefathers, during the time of Terach and previously, were heathens who mistakenly followed nothingness and pursued the worship of idols, and he ends with the true religion: that God brought us close to him and separated us from the nations and brought us to His oneness. And then he begins and explains that we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt – and all the evil things that Pharaoh brought upon us – and he
ends with the miracles which were performed for us, and our freedom, and he explains the passage: Arami oveid avi (my father was a wandering Aramian; the passage from Deuteronomy referred to above).
In other words, Maimonides clearly follows the order in the Talmud: first the spiritual redemption (from idol worship to the worship of one God) and second, the physical redemption (from slavery to freedom). It is Rav before Shmuel. Maimonides also indicates that the Shmuel story has two iterations: the first is Avadim hayinu and the second is the passage from Deuteronomy. In our Haggadah, between these two iterations is the Rav story of spiritual redemption, mentioned by the Rambam (“In the beginning our forefathers in the days of Terach…”).
Inasmuch as Maimonides follows the order in the Talmud, there must, says Rav Soloveitchik, be some mention earlier in the Haggadah, of Rav’s story (the spiritual redemption) before Shmuel’s story (the physical redemption).
The Rav finds that mention in the Kiddush which begins the Haggadah and which is recited over the first cup.
“God chose us from among all nations, raised us from among all peoples and sanctified us with his commandments.” And the Rav finds the reference to the Kiddush in Maimonides’ statement above (see the underlined sections in Hebrew and English). If you read the underlined Hebrew words you will notice that they use the same meter as the words in Kiddush. As a matter of fact, if you sing Maimonides’ words in the melody which we use for Kiddush, the Kiddush melody fits Maimonides’ words
The Rav, besides having a clear perception of how Maimonides read the Talmud and how the author of the Haggadah incorporated the Talmud into the order of the Haggadah, also had a great sense of the meter of the language which Maimonides was using. The meter is so similar to the Kiddush that the nusach of the Kiddush actually fits the words of Maimonides. I suspect that the Rav understood that too, because he had a great sense of nusach. After all, the name “Soloveitchik” means “little nightingale.” P
HOW TO ACHIEVE TRUE FREEDOM
RABBI MEYER LANIADO
Aung San Suu Kyi, State Counsellor of Myanmar and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, fought for democracy and liberty against her country’s oppressive military regime and won. Once she came to power, she followed the same repression tactics and subjugation, slaughtering tens of thousands without trial and suppressing freedom of speech and democracy. As Bill Richardson, a US diplomat, said: “Her government has been as enthusiastic about jailing journalists and government critics as the military government that preceded hers.” This cycle has been repeated time and time again the world over in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. Once freed, the oppressed become the new oppressors.
As Paulo Freire stated in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that is the natural course: “But almost always…the oppressed…tend themselves to become oppressors…” Since “the very structure of their thought has been conditioned…” and “their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity.” That is why he concludes that “it is a rare peasant who, once ‘promoted’ to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself.” They do not know a more profitable management style.
On the other hand, Elias Canetti explains the transformation from oppressed to oppressor as a way to free oneself of ‘the sting.’ The sting is the pain one feels, whether consciously or subconsciously, from the subjugation, threat, or violence from another. One of the ways of ridding oneself of the sting is to pass it on to another. As he explains: “He retains it in its original form until an opportunity arises to get rid of it by passing it on to someone else” (Crowds and Power 330). The cycle of oppression continues, and, regardless of the freedoms that were fought for, the newly freed will find themselves subjugating others using the same tactics used against them.
Our Torah is aware of this cycle of oppression, and it offers humanity an antidote to break the cycle of the oppressed becoming the oppressor. It is a revolutionary model and one of the most powerful messages contained in our Passover holiday. We are told to remember the bitterness of our own enslavement, and instead of becoming the new oppressors, we are to become agents of emancipation. The Jewish mission is to restructure society from a hierarchy of the powerful dominating the weak to a society that uplifts those on the bottom rung. The memory of our pain, the sting, should cause us to turn the poison that is slavery into medicine for others. The Torah reminds us of this message thirty-six times (Bavli Bava Mesia 59b). One of the examples is Exodus 23:9, “And you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger since you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” And so, the experience of Egyptian slavery serves the role of creating empathy in us towards the stranger, the weak, and those in need. In that way, we create a horizontal society with freedom for all, simultaneously liberating ourselves and our once masters. Without this model, the freed become enslaved to their oppressor’s ideology. Their oppressor will always live inside of them. The Torah teaches us how to dislodge and purge the painful experience of slavery by transforming it into empathy.
It is what Rabbi Akiva was referring to when he said his famous phrase: “Love your fellow as yourself, that is the major principle in the Torah” (Sifra Kedoshim 2:4). His statement continues in Midrash Rabba (Beresheit 24) and says: “Don’t say that since I was embarrassed, I will embarrass another.” In other words: ‘Do not pass the sting.’ Transform your experience into empathy. Rabbi Akiva’s predecessor, Hillel, explained to a prospective convert that the central message of the entire Torah is: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to another” (Bavli Shabbat 31a). When mistreated, we learn about what not to do, empowering us to treat others better. It is a reversal of the cycle of the oppressed becoming the next oppressor.
In turn, our Egyptian slavery becomes the basis of our care for the foreigner, the downtrodden, and the weak. As the Torah references our experience: “…because you know the spirit of the foreigner” (Exodus 23:9). While we are sovereign in the land of Israel, enjoying the fruits of our labor, we bring our first fruits to the Temple. There we recite what is now the base of our Haggadah, arami oved avi, the section about which we are told that the more we elaborate, the more praiseworthy it is, hare ze meshubah.
There we remind ourselves that we were once the wanderers, the strangers, and the oppressed. Now that we are ‘the haves,’ we should treat the ‘have nots’ with empathy. That is the culmination of the arami oved avi paragraph:
Then, you shall rejoice with all the good that the Lord, your God, has granted you and your household you, the Levite, and the stranger who is among you. When you have finished tithing all the tithes of your produce in the third year, the year of the tithe, you shall give [them] to the Levite, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow, so that they can eat to satiety in your cities (Deuteronomy 26:11-13).
This learning from our difficulties empowers us to improve ourselves and, ultimately, the world. As Rabbi Steinmetz expressed in his letter to the community after recovering from his fractured femur in 2019:
During my first few days in the hospital, what shocked me is how ignorant I had been all my life. I had visited hospitals hundreds of times and listened to people describe their pain. But I never understood what they were going through until I myself experienced the extreme agony of being absorbed in my own pain to the exclusion of everything else.
Rabbi Steinmetz internalized the feeling of vulnerability and created meaning from his struggle. This is what the arami oved avi paragraph is all about: never forget our vulnerability, especially when we are celebrating. That is how we improve ourselves and serve as role models for the world. It is how we break the cycle of the oppressed becoming the next oppressor because it is easy to forget when everything is rosy.
This is a core message of the Torah, which is why it reminds us of this over thirty-six times: “Do not oppress the stranger.” Why? “Because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). We need to remember that we were once in their shoes. We need to feel empathy. We need to help break the cycle of the oppressed becoming the oppressor. We need to reach out to the person who is where we once were, trying to find a job, working through a challenging relationship, ill, or struggling with a loss. We need to raise them up to be the person we wish we had been during our time of difficulty since “you know the spirit of the stranger.” You know what it was like, so do not ‘pass the sting,’ but transform it into the cure, veAhavtem et haGer, “and love the stranger” (Deuteronomy 10:19). In this way, we will serve as a “light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42:6, 49:6, 60:3), offering a new model of real freedom and liberty for all. P
