Monday night, the worldwide Jewish community welcomes Passover, the great feast celebrating our deliverance from servitude and our journey to liberation in the promised land. Given the horrors that have unfolded in the wake of Hamas’ terrorist attacks, and in that same land meant to be of promise, our annual ritual of the Passover Seder arrives under clouded circumstances. Our joy will be diminished by tears.
The Hagadda is our ritual retelling of our redemption. It has long been Jewish tradition at our Seder tables that, when recalling the 10 plagues that befell the people of Egypt, we remove 10 drops of wine from our festive glasses in order to recall the suffering of others. The Hagadda used in my family home added a story right before reciting each of the 10 plagues; that story has been formative for my Jewish worldview and comes from the Babylonian Talmud:
Our rabbis taught: When the Egyptian armies were drowning in the sea, the angels broke out in songs of jubilation. God silenced them and said, “My creatures are perishing, and you sing praises?”
Every human being is one of God’s creatures, created, according to Jewish tradition, in the form of the divine. Any loss of life — even of one we call our enemy — is a tragedy.
We are, this Passover, surrounded by tragedy: the tragedy continually unfolding in Israel since Oct. 7, when Hamas launched a brutal terror campaign of rape, murder and hostage-taking, and the tragedy continually unfolding in Gaza since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government unleashed a devastating military campaign leading to the death of more than 30,000 civilians and widespread famine.
Here in America, farther from the front lines of the conflict, we experience a different tragedy. We witness not only a hardening of positions but also a hardening of hearts. In place of communal conversations about nuanced topics, public shouting matches and clearing council chambers have become the norm. Our emotions run so intense that we have little space to appreciate the suffering of others. When we cannot share or hear difficult truths, when we make no space to appreciate that others are also experiencing loss, a different tragedy sets in: the tragedy of failing to see the humanity in others.
There are precious few who are not guilty of failing to see the humanity of all who suffer in Gaza and Israel. By last November, it was clear two choices lay before the mainstream Jewish and Muslim/Palestinian communities: We could come together in shared grief at the dismal and sustained failure of our leaders to work toward peace or we could retreat into our own corners and import the divisions of Israel and Gaza to America. Instead of forging a human narrative of shared tragedy, we chose the latter.
I would like to believe that decision is not permanent. I would like to believe that — despite those Israelis who want to transfer all Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, and knowing there are Palestinians who want to erase the state of Israel from the face of the Earth — that most Americans recognize that every human being in Israel and Gaza deserves fundamental human rights and the dignity of their own political autonomy.
I would like to believe that there is still time for this generation to unite around such a humanity-affirming consensus, one I believe is agreed upon by most Jews, Muslims, Palestinians and Americans. It will not be easy. It will take considerable — and so far absent — leadership from foreign governments and national institutions. But I fear that unless we come together now to work for peace, we will remain in a state of toxic polarization for another generation.
This choice is real. We will either come together, or we will continue to be radicalized. Both sides of this issue are becoming radicalized, focused only on their own harms, less sensitive to the humanity of the other. For months, many Jews took the mention of cease-fire as an offense; still, there is little call at pro-Palestinian rallies for the release of teenagers and the elderly held by Hamas as hostages.
Seeing as we have already moved past dialogue to shouting, we know the next step in our polarization will surely be violence.
Perhaps the saddest outcome of entrenching ourselves our own “side” is that this is precisely the outcome warmongers want us to choose. As psychologists Clark McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko taught in their book “Friction“: “Radicalization in response to threat is so reliable that terrorists count on it as strategy.”
The deepening American divide on Palestine and Israel is precisely the desired outcome of those parties who oppose peace.
Pooling communal resources of thought, partnership and advocacy would be a better way to solve the common problem of 70-plus years of war and tension in the Middle East. As demonstrated in the famous “Robbers Cave” experiment, common goals are effective in reducing intergroup hostility and finding mutually agreeable outcomes. I believe such a path of working mutually toward a common goal is the only constructive choice for those who care about the humanity of all residents of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
As the Rev. Adam Russell Taylor wrote of another divided land: “Unless we can unite around a shared moral vision for our future, we will continue to retreat into partisan and cultural camps; we will fail to forge common ground that bridges our differences and advances the common good.” Unless we unite around a shared moral vision for the Middle East, we run the risk of singing praises while God’s creatures perish.
This Passover, we all have a choice. We can continue being enslaved in our own particular narratives or identity, or we can liberate ourselves to work with the other toward a better future. As philosopher Martin Buber taught, “In every interaction we have a choice to view others as fellow humans, with whom we share the basic essence, or as things.”
In this season of liberation, may we always choose to see others as fellow human beings. And then, may we work together with those human beings to create a world of peace for all humanity.
Rabbi Seth M. Limmer is the founder of Open Judaism.
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