Pesach 2022

We live in a dangerous world, we Americans. People bring guns to schools and to the workplace, to concerts and even to church services. And they use them too: there were over 690 mass shootings (defined as an incident in which more than four people were injured or killed by gunfire) in 2021, in the course of which 702 people died and another 2,844 people were wounded. As Jews, we take those statistics even more seriously as the number of attacks against synagogues and Jewish individuals climbs. Nor does there seem to be any obvious way to prevent these incidents entirely: which of us, myself surely included, would not have responded exactly as did the rabbi in Colleyville, Texas, if a haggard, disheveled looking man were to come to the front door of our synagogue on a cold, rainy day and ask if he could rest inside for a while and possibly use the washroom?

The question, therefore, is not whether the world is or isn’t dangerous, but how we are prepared to respond to that part of how things are—with courage or with nervousness, with faith or with paralyzing worry, with confidence in our own right to live as free citizens of a free land or with ill ease born of a basic uncertainty about our right to exercise freedoms that our co-citizens mostly take for granted.

Like all of you, I suppose, I think about these issues constantly. Different incidents requires different kinds of responses, obviously. But a basic attitude is embedded in one of our best Pesach rituals.

Once the meal ends, things move rather logically forward at most of our seder tables. We negotiate for the afikomen so we can formally conclude the meal, then distribute it among the seder guests. We recite Birkat Ha-mazon because the seder meal is, after all, a meal…and we always end a formal meal with the Grace after Meals. But then something odd happens, something unexpected. We rise in our places, someone (this was my personal job as a child) opens the front door, and we pray together that God stand up for Israel and deal justly with those nations—and no one at all is thinking about the Egyptians at this point, or not just about them—that have behaved barbarically, harshly, and cruelly towards the Jewish people throughout the millennia and, for many, in our own lifetimes or in our parents’ lifetimes as well.

This custom began in Ashkenaz—in the Rhineland—in the twelfth century or so when the memory was still fresh of the murderous Crusaders who rampaged through Jewish communities and left only misery, barbarism, and loss in their unholy wake. Those who survived their wrath apparently felt the need to respond to what had befallen them and this was what they came up with. The idea of responding, even just symbolically, to persecution hardly needs to be justified. But what’s the story with the door?

It feels, to say the least, like a bad idea: if the world really is filled with foes and potential foes, then how can opening the front door be a good plan? Why aren’t we afraid that some latter-day Crusader will barge in and wreak havoc with our families and our guests? We say that we are welcoming Elijah the Prophet, but his name is not mentioned—and this omission is so glaring that lots and lots of families (including my own) sing Eliyahu Ha-navi, the hymn from Havdalah, anyway at that juncture in the seder. More to the point, though, is that he never comes. Or at least so far he hasn’t. As a result, the seder wraps up with redemption still firmly in the future. But that door is opened wide year after year nonetheless…to whomever might pass by and want to make trouble. It makes no sense not to worry about that, even less to imagine that it’s somehow more likely that Elijah will appear at the door to redeem the world than a band of local hooligans will barge in and steal the silver.

And so the open door becomes a symbol, and a powerful one at that. Outside, darkness has fallen. Inside, though, our homes are filled with light. Logic dictates that we should shut out the darkness and keep the light inside. But we do precisely the opposite and open the door—and we do so precisely as we nod to the dangerousness of being openly Jewish in the world. And so is it, year after year, that the darkness is at least slightly dissipated by the warmth and the luminescence of our homes, of our seder tables, of our families. And that simple act of refusing to live in fear and of risking it all to live openly as Jews in an all-too-often hostile world—that act of courage undertaken precisely as we remember the horrors of the past—if anything ever will, that is what will bring redemption to the world…and inspire Elijah, its herald, to announce its imminent advent.

That open door prompts me to think of another one as well.

Emma Lazarus, in “The New Colossus” (the poem nailed to the base of the Statue of Liberty), imagined our own New York Harbor as a golden door. (Her final line, the one in which the Statue says, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door,” was once known by every schoolchild in America by heart and was memorized by myself, along with the rest of the poem, in fifth grade.) My people too came to this country through that harbor, as did so many millions of others. So when I open the front door of our home during the seder (still somehow my job!), I think of Lady Liberty opening that door through which my great-grandparents and grandparents passed and viewing “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” not with fear or with contempt, but with generosity born of the conviction that no one in this world can be truly free unless all are. And that it must fall to all of us who wish to be free citizens of a free world, therefore, not merely to acknowledge and enjoy our own freedoms, but to strive to make sure that all others in the world also live as free people without having to spend the days of their lives struggling, as the poet said, to breathe free.

Pesach is our national festival of freedom. Mostly, we think of that as having to do with the political freedom for which the Israelite slaves in Egypt yearned. But the open door at the seder points in some slightly different directions as well: towards the freedom to live out in the open according to our own lights and without fearing the hostility of others, towards the freedom to welcome strangers yearning to breathe free into our midst without falling prey to prejudice or fear, towards the freedom to live in a world of open doors and open windows through which the light generated by our efforts to live authentic lives as men and women of the House of Israel flows out into the street and from the street into the world…and in which light Elijah will surely be bathed when he proclaims the redemption of the world and its ultimate freedom.