Respect The Passover Jew

Efrat, Israel-.  “You must surely instruct your colleague, so that you not bear the brunt of his sin” (Lev. 19:18)

Judaism teaches that “every Israelite is responsible for the other, is a co-signer for his/her fellow Jew.”
Aside from the State of Israel - where the Jewish population has grown from 600,000 in 1948 to 5 & ½ million today - the Jews in the rest of the world suffer from internal hemorrhaging, with the six million identifying American Jews in 1940 quickly moving towards halving itself by the end of the 21st century. So how do we “instruct” our errant Jewish siblings so that they remain within - or return to - our Jewish peoplehood?

I believe that the Hebrew calendar which we are now celebrating contains the direction towards solution.  We have recently celebrated the festival of Passover, and we are “counting” each day towards the festival of Shavuot. The Hebrew term for the counting is sefirah, a word pregnant with meaning.  Its root noun is the Hebrew sappir, which is the dazzling blue - white sapphire diamond, the ethereal hues and colors of the heavens; as the Bible records immediately following the electrifying and inspiring Revelation at Sinai: “ Moses and Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, and the seventy elders of Israel then went up.  And they saw the G-d of Israel, beneath whose “feet” was something akin to the creation of a sapphire stone, like the essence of the heavens as to its purity” (Exodus 24:9,10)

From this perspective, the days of our counting must be seen as a period of spiritual growth and development, of a connection between Passover and Shavuot. But where and how does this spiritual journey begin?  It begins with Passover, the first real encounter that G-d has with His nation Israel at its very conception.  And the Hebrew sefirah (count, sapphire) is also based on the Hebrew noun sippur, a tale, a story, a re-counting the very essence of the Passover seder evening experience: “And you shall tell (haggadah, telling a story) your child on that day saying...” (Ex. 13:8); “And Moses recounted to (vayesaper) his father-in-law all that the Lord had done to Pharaoh and to Egypt because of the Israelites...” (Exodus 18:8); “ It is a positive commandment of the Bible to recount (le Saper) the miracles and wonders which were done to our forefathers in Egypt “ (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Hametz and Matzah 7,1).

We must remember that the Israelites came into Egypt as a family, the seventy descendants of our grand-father Jacob - Israel.  Hence the recounting of the story of our enslavement and eventual redemption is iterated and re-iterated as parents telling their children, as a familial recounting of family history.  A nation is a family writ large: in a family, there are familial memories of origins, of beginnings; in a family  there is a sense of blood-coated commonality and community togetherness; in a family there are special foods and customs, special holidays and celebrations; in a family there are mandated values and ideals, that which is acceptable and that which is unacceptable “in our family;” and in a family there is a heightened sense of a shared fate and shared destiny, “all for one and one for all.”

Every member of a family, down to the great grand-children who were not even born when certain well-known and oft-repeated familial histories took place, feel as if they had been there, had themselves witnessed the events.  Edah is the Biblical word for community (literally witness), and every real Community attempts to recreate a familial collegiality.  Family members willingly sacrifice for each other, helping each other monetarily and even donating to each other a needed organ such as a kidney.  The relationship within the family is largely horizontal - towards each other - rather than vertical - connected to a transcendent G-d.  And familial rites of togetherness are largely governed by familial customs rather than by a Divinely ordained legal code.  Most importantly in families - as well as communities - every individual counts (once again, sefirah).  Each member of the family is called by his/her personal name rather than by the collective family name, and is known by his/her unique traits and characteristics, (positively as well as negatively. )

Passover is our familial, communal Festival, at the very beginning of our calendar, at the very outset of our unique history, at the early steps towards our sefirah march.  At Passover we had not yet received our Torah from G-d, and we had not yet entered our Promised Land.  Torah, Land of Israel, Jerusalem, Holy Temple had to wait for Shavuot.  The Passover Sacrifice (Exodus 12) represents our celebration of our being part of a special, historic family, even before we became a religion at Sinai.  It emphasizes our willingness to sacrifice for our freedom from slavery - our sacrifice of the lamb which was a defiant act of rebellion against the bull-god of Egyptian slave-society, and it attests to our uncompromising belief in human freedom and redemption.  In order for everyone to really count, large communities must be subdivided into smaller - and more manageable - familial and extra-familial units, “a lamb for each household”or several households together.  Special foods, special stories and special songs define and punctuate the familial nature of the event.

And the only ticket of admission is that you consider yourself a member of the family and  wish to be counted in as such; this alone entitles you to an unconditional embrace of love and acceptance, to inclusion in the family of Israel.  Theological beliefs and practices of religious  observance are irrelevant; the only rasha (wicked child) is the one who himself excludes himself from the family - and even he/she is to be invited and sought after!

One of the rousing songs of the earlier part of the seder is Dayenu, it would have been enough.  “Had G-d only taken us out of Egypt, it would have been enough; had G-d merely brought us to Sinai and not given us the Torah, it would have been enough.”  Our Sages teach that when the Israelites stood at Sinai they were one people with one heart, a united, communal family.  The song teaches that such a sense of familial oneness - even without the 613 commandments - would have been sufficient.

 How do we engage our Jews so that they do not defect and fall away from us? We must embrace them as part of our family, love them because we are part of them and they are part of us, regale them with the stories, songs and special foods which are expressed in our Biblical National literature and which emerged from our challenging fate and our unique destiny, share with them our vision and dreams of human freedom and peace, and accept them wholeheartedly no matter what.  For some of them, it may be the first step towards their march to Torah and the Land of Israel on Shavuot; for others, it might be all they are interested in.  And that too must be considered good enough, Dayenu!  After all, the very first covenant G-d made with Abraham was the covenant of family and nation.

A personal family postscript:

My paternal grand-father was an idealistic and intellectual Communist who wrote a weekly column for the Yiddish Communist Newspaper, Freiheit.  On his kitchen wall were two pictures, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the other of Joseph Stalin.  He ate on Yom Kippur and truly believed that religion “was the opiate of the masses.”  Nevertheless, he conducted a Passover seder each year - which I attended as a young child - with matzah, marror, charoset, and the first part of the Haggadah.  He would add passages from the Prophets, the Talmud and Shalom Aleichem which dealt with consideration for the poor and underpriveleged, and checked that I could space my fingers properly for the Priestly Benediction, cautioning me to understand that the blessing was for world peace.

Despite my tender years, I noticed that there was still bread and rolls in the house which, if a grand-child wished, he received.  I couldn’t understand the contradiction (although I now know that on Pesach Sheni , a “second chance” one month later for those who had missed the regular Passover either because they were ritually impure, or  “far away”,  physically or perhaps even religiously; since the Passover Meal at this Pesach Sheni could be eaten even while there was chametz in the house, this ritual seems to have been strikingly similar to my grand-fathers seder!).

And then I was riding on a train with my grand-father, and there were two elderly ultra-orthodox Jews sitting opposite us, speaking Yiddish.  Two young toughs walked into our compartment, and began taunting the hassidim.  At the next stop my grandfather - who was fairly tall and strong - lunged forward, grabbed the toughs, and literally threw them out the open door.  When he returned to his seat next to me, I asked, ‘But grand-pa, you’re not at all religious?!  He looked at me in dismay.  “What difference does it make?  They are part of our family - and I am part of their family!”  Then I understood....