Our Passover Message

Our Passover Message

Micaiah Ben Malachi

Makedah Bat Leah

 

Most non-Jews and some Jews think of Moses played by Charleston Hesston in Ceil B. DeMills's The Ten Commandments when thinking of the Passover story.  Some Jews think of the horrific suffering and deaths of the Holocaust era 1930 to 1946.  Both are correct and both are wrong.  It is true we suffered four hundred and thirty years before we were permitted to leave Egypt.  We left in the middle of the night.  So fast did our ancestors leave the Land of the Pharaohs, their bread did not have time to rise and to this day for seven days and nights we are commanded to have no leaven. We are descendents of disgruntle, distrusting and ungrateful people.  A loosely disorganized people of all skin colors and nationalities who took their first steps into freedom in the darkness, following one man and he was following a cloud that pointed their way.  Moses lead them to Mount Sinai and they became a people named the Israelites ancestors of the modern era Jews. 

 

World Jewry has continually suffered and habitually been murdered in mass killings called "pogroms" by non-Jews.  The world only knew of European Jewry's murders because of the invention of printing press and populations that learn how to read the printed word. This invention and the education was denied largely to non-Europeans therefore, the assumption all Jews are either Ashkenazim or Sephardim are held as fact.  The real fact is Jews were dispersed to every known and unknown land in the world. The most documented and best known of the pogroms is what is called the Holocaust.  Know one can know the number of Jews and non-Jews who perished in this fit of societal hatred.  German and Gestapo soldiers killed Jews, Gypsies, Mentally ill, African-German offspring, captured Jewish Allied soldiers and Black soldiers. Many of these people were killed on the spot and so no records were kept.  We only know of the mass bodies in the camps, those that were so malnourished they died in the camps and those murdered when they attempted to return to their places of origin.

 

Even today the Nation of Israel is in a constant state of war with the Palestinians.  Jews have been killed defending the only place left on earth for Jews to flee persecution.   But Passover is not about the numbers of Jews killed.  It is not about the rituals we are commanded to perform each year at this season.  It is about character.  It is about why we were chosen from all the world's people to be those whom G*d made a covenant with.  We were chosen because of the promise G*d made with Abraham.  We were told to put lamb's blood over our doorposts so the Angel Of Death would "Passover" our home the night in which the first born of Egypt was slaughtered.  The mere act of marking our doorposts set us apart from the Egyptians.  Why? Why were we to remain separate?  We were to do so in that G*d would know his/her and their children from those of the evil ones that rule the hearts and minds of mankind. 

 

The Jews of Europe and Eastern Europe became so intermixed with Europeans, they began to think, act and believe they were Europeans.  They practiced the same racial prejudices, elitism, idolatries, bigotry and religious intolerance their European host nations did in order to fit in.  Every land the Europeans and European Jews as well stepped upon, they enslaved, dehumanized and cause those populations to because just as idolatrous as they were.  Instead of leading non-Jews to the G*d of Abraham, they caused them to despised the "white-skinned" G*d.

Passover is about Jews individually and Jews as a people. Do we have the courage to stand out apart from this world individually and as a people and proclaim the truth and message of the one and only true G*d? We all are made in their image. Do we have the will to reach out to other Jews who do not look like us, whose custom may not mirror our own but are equally valid?  Are we willing to open wide the doors to our congregations and community centers and welcome all who seek to be apart of our Jewish community and families, both in the communal sense and also literally.

.  Passover is not only remembering the past but the hundreds and millions of people who suffer in this world now.  It is about the countless generations that pass never knowing freedom but hoping their children may one day have what they never had. When we as an individual and as a people proclaim our inheritance this Passover, let us not only remember those who died a physical death because they were identified as Jews, but also realize and accept not every Jew willingly step up to the axe man's chopping block and die because they were Jews. There were many then, as is the case today, who would betray their own Jewish mother, father, brothers and sisters if it meant saving their life or that of a lover.  We should recall also the million of other Jews seeking inclusion and non-Jews seeking sincere conversion but who were turned away to wonder as strangers because they did not look like Jews do or they did not have the income and education most European and Euro-American Jews were fortunate to possess.  Lastly, let us not forget those seekers who pedigree did not have Jewish sounding names but were probably more a Jew than those standing in judgment of who shall be allowed in the door and those who will be turned away.

 

Passover is about life, living, hoping and blind faith in that which we cannot prove.  Passover is about the millions who have died but the millions left alive to tell the story.

Passover is about You and Me