Feeling Hopeful

Several different people have asked in the last few days what I’m hoping Pesach will bring us all this year. It’s an interesting question, more so than I thought at first blush. Passover, of course, is a highlight of the year for us all. Families come together. The weather is usually dramatically improved over what it had been just weeks earlier. As a result, the whole effort to clean out our kitchens takes on a barely-hidden second level of meaning: yes, we are acting in accordance with tradition and law to rid our homes of even the last consequential crumbs of bread or any other leavened product, but we are also—and at the very same time—cleaning out the past year and its musty, fusty residue and preparing ourselves for a new year. Like I suppose it must also be for other Jewish Americans, the lead-up to Pesach is also a time of reflection for me personally: as I slowly pack away my snow boots and start trying to remember where I stored my walking shorts last fall when it was finally too cold to wear them, I feel a year falling away and something new dawning on the horizon. What will it bring us? That, pace Hamlet, is the question!

It’s always the question. But how much the more so this year with its pandemical accouterments, with its facemasks and endless CDC guidelines, with the scramble for vaccination in full swing as the age-limit drops and more and more of us get in line for our shots. Although we are obviously not through the viral woods just quite yet, things are feeling hopeful in a way they weren’t just a couple of months back. And so, as Pesach dawns, I find myself—and here I answer the question I led off with—I feel myself suffused with a sense of hopefulness and unanticipated optimism. I suppose readers all know the joke about the difference between a Jewish optimist and a Jewish pessimist—the pessimist says, “Things couldn’t get any worse,” while the optimist responds, “Of course, they can!”—but even so, even despite our ethnic proclivity to expect disaster around every corner (which trait some would say we have elevated to an actual art form), I find myself hoping for the best, feeling buoyed by my hopeful sense that the worst really is behind us and normalcy will soon return to our beleaguered land.

The first Pesach had something of the same feel to it.

There’s more to that thought than you might at first think. Scripture—and this is particularly true of the Torah—is a literary work intended to present the story of Israel’s origins to an audience eager to learn the backstory to the great covenant that Jews in later centuries understood to bind them to God. As such, the laws that are the stuff of the covenant are interspersed with the narrative to create a kind of patchwork feel to the whole. To shul-Jews who hear the Torah read aloud weekly, this aspect of the text is so familiar as to be both unremarkable and almost unnoticeable. And yet it is also the case, at least here and there, that the juxtaposition of law and narrative creates a slightly misleading impression for those reading or listening only casually.  And a good example of that has to do precisely with the first Pesach, the experience in Egypt of which all subsequent Passovers have been the echo in history.

Set into the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt are all the rules that govern the paschal offering, the zevach pesach. The rules are somehow both complicated and simple: the Israelites are to procure a lamb or a kid on the tenth of the month, keep it safe it four days and then, on the fourteenth of the month they are to slaughter it, paint their doorposts and lintels with its blood, and eat it roasted with matzah and some bitter foodstuff. Scripture then quickly, almost imperceptibly, shifts into the future: this is not a one-time thing, it turns out, but the harbinger of a future holiday, one the observance of which will constitute a memorial, a festival, and a chukkat olam (i.e., a permanent statute). Furthermore, Passover—the holiday being heralded by this, its earlier iteration—is to be not simply “a” festival, but “the” festival of the Jewish year, the one that will, among other things, frame permanently the relationship of Israelites to their non-Israelite neighbors, to the citizenry of other nations, to the world itself: liberation from bondage will henceforth be the platform upon which the Israelite nation will stand for all time as the citizenry looks out at the world, the foundational story of which the rest of the nation’s history will be at least in some way derivative.

It’s a stirring passage, one known to most. But it obscures, at least slightly, the predicament of the actual Israelites to whom Moses is speaking. These are slaves who are being told to put their hiking boots on and get ready their walking sticks: departure, Moses tells them unambiguously, is imminent. Left undiscussed is how this must have played itself out among the Israelites themselves. Again and again, God has—speaking from their perspective—failed to get Pharaoh to grant them their freedom even for just a few days, let alone actually to free them from bondage. And this failure has repeated itself not once or twice, but on nine separate occasions. (The ancient Israelites had no reason to expect specifically ten plagues: they experienced them one by one—and each one was a failure: the wonders and signs may have been impressive, but they were still slaves, still not free to go, still being told to trust in the future without actually having been made free.)

What Moses tells them is, at best, unlikely: that God will bring yet another plague against the Egyptians and this one actually will work. And yet they do what Moses tells them to do: unsure as they must have been that this is going to work, having every reason to be suspicious, knowing they’ve been told before that Pharaoh will collapse under the weight of God’s imposing presence, they still do what they are told, painting their doorposts with blood, readying their walking sticks and their hiking boots, eating the meat according to their instructions…and waiting.

And then, finally, the midnight hour came. The tenth plague was the most awful imaginable and the nation and its hard-hearted leader could finally bear no more. The Israelites went free…but they must have been more surprised than impressed. For us, Pesach is the festival of freedom. But for the actual Israelites whose story rests just behind the narrative, Pesach—the first Pesach, the one undertaken in the shadow of all those many failed attempts to get Pharaoh to let the people go—for those people, it must have been a festival of hope, of faith, and of courage. They had every reason not to go along with the plan—they had, after all, been down that path nine times in the past—but they felt themselves able to hope, to dream, to look into the future and see freedom from the oppressive circumstances of the only life they had ever known.

I would like to suggest we adopt that line of thinking for this year’s celebration. I too am looking into the future this year, thinking carefully about what may yet come in the course of the next months. The numbers are going in the right direction. Although we are still reeling from the loss of well over half a million of our co-citizens to this horrific virus, including more than 3000 in Nassau County alone, the latest numbers seem encouraging. The vaccination program, despite its chaotic start, is working: as of this week more than a quarter of all American adults have been vaccinated at least one time and 14% of our co-citizens have been fully vaccinated. It’s tempting to see some light at the end of the tunnel, even though the flip side of those statistics—that 75% of Americans have yet to get their first shot and a full 86% have yet to receive both—is beyond sobering.

Still, Pesach is our festival of hope in the future, of national willingness to ignore the failures of the past and feel sanguine and optimistic about the future, of readiness to trust the leadership of our leaders and feel secure that, at least eventually, we will leave this state of viral bondage and become the fully free citizens of a fully immunized nation. Hopefulness is what’s called for…and Pesach is just the right context for the cultivation of hope. Therefore, I’m allowing myself to feel positive and hopeful…and I invite you all to join me in embracing both those emotions.