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The Power of Passover During a Plague

Most Jews in history have not been free, whether from murderous regimes, famines or pandemics like this one. What we have been is devoted to the idea that we deserve to be.

By Alana Newhouse

Ms. Newhouse is the editor in chief of Tablet Magazine, which just published “The Passover Haggadah: An Ancient Story for Modern Times.”

March 30, 2020

This year, Passover falls at the beginning of April — smack in the middle of what some experts estimate will be the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in America. It’s not just the timing of the holiday — built around a retelling of the Jews’ exodus from slavery in Egypt — that feels off. It’s that every aspect of its story and rituals now seems almost cruelly ironic.

The Passover Seder centers on the experience of being thrust out of our homes, but these days we feel trapped inside of them. The story involves miraculous plagues that saved us; today we pray for the end of one. There’s the commandment to clean our homes of all non-Passover food, which we just spent innumerable hours and dollars hoarding.

Then there’s the real heartbreaker: The Seder is when we traditionally gather with family, friends and even strangers. “Let all who are hungry come and eat,” we say. These days, many of us can’t even be in the same house as our own parents or children. We don’t come within six feet of strangers.

And yet, there will still be Passover. Indeed, I’ve come to think of Passover as the stem cell of the Jewish people, a reserve of core source material with the proven ability to generate new meaning and solace in circumstances even more extreme than what we are living through now.

Perhaps you’re disappointed because you can’t celebrate the way we’re used to. But do you also remember matzo, the unleavened cracker we eat because Jews rushed out of their homes before their bread could rise? The entire holiday is rooted in glorifying a moment when life unfolded in very unexpected ways — and human beings found meaning, even liberation, in it.

The Bible includes various relevant mentions of Passover: One, in Exodus, of the Feast of the Passover, and several others (in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy) of the Feast of the Unleavened Bread. Historians believe these were originally maintained by two distinct segments of Israelite society, for whom spring meant slightly different things. For the seminomadic part of the community, it was a signal that it was time to start moving again; but before doing so they would sacrifice a lamb to ward off evil spirits that might block their path. For the settled folks, it was an agricultural holiday, a joyful welcoming of the incoming spring harvest.

Most Jews throughout history have not been free, whether from murderous regimes or famines or pandemics. What we have been is devoted to the idea that we deserve to be. “The Haggadah’s purpose is not, in fact, to present a narrative,” Rabbi Mendel Herson, associate dean of the Rabbinical College of America, explained to me. “It’s a how-to guide to finding our own personal liberation.”

The text of the Haggadah is not a retelling of the liberation story itself but a record of agreements and disagreements among its interpreters, because it is not the God-driven part of the story that we should be focused on but the human-driven one. God will come to help when God comes to help; the question is what we do between now and then.

This is why Jews observed Passover in the basement “cantinas” of righteous friends during the Inquisition; they kept it during the Crusades, even as evil people around them used it to manufacture the deadly, and enduring, libel about matzo baked with the blood of Christian children; and they kept it throughout the Holocaust — in ghettos and concentration camps and forests.

Last week, a group of major Orthodox rabbis in Israel announced that they would permit people to use Zoom videoconferencing for their Seders — a previously unimaginable accommodation to stringent Jewish law. But that’s the point. We may be away from loved ones, or shut out of communal spaces. We may not be preparing with the same vigor, or shopping with the same zeal. But we will do what millions of Jews have done before us: manifest our hope for liberation.

That is our obligation, and our privilege. All the more so in moments when the taste of freedom — from oppression, from want, from disease — is not yet ours.

haggadah Section: Introduction