Pesach 2024 - Leil Shimmurim

History is filled with Rubicon moments, moments at which the course of history is altered by an event so widely understood to be of colossal importance that everything that follows feels related to that specific juncture in time, to that specific event. Pearl Harbor was that kind of moment in history. 9/11, too. So must have been also July 4, 1776. And the original Rubicon moment—when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River into Italy in January of 49 BCE and thus initiated the insurrection that led to the end of the Roman Republic and, eventually, to the reorganization of the nation as the Roman Empire with Caesar’s biological nephew and adopted son Augustus as its first emperor—that was (obviously) the first of them all. The famous words Caesar spoke aloud as he crossed the river into Italy, “the die is cast,” sums up the moment aptly: just as you can’t unroll dice, so did Caesar mean to say that his act of leading an army across the border into Italy could not be undone and would have to be allowed to lead wherever it went as the future unfolded in the wake of his decision. In the history of the Jewish people, Pesach itself is the original Rubicon moment. And it involved crossing a body of water as well!

Was October 7 such a moment for Israel? Was it one for Hamas? Or was it one for both, and also for diasporan Jews in all the various lands of our dispersion? I suppose those questions could conceivably all have different answers, but it doesn’t feel that way to me: as the months have passed since that horrific day last fall, things feel to me more and more as though the Simchat Torah pogrom permanently altered the course forward into the future for all directly and indirectly concerned parties. As Pesach approaches, this notion of a Rubicon moment has become the lens through which I feel myself called to think of the Simchat Torah pogrom.

The specific way in which the conflict in Gaza has poisoned the atmosphere not solely on our college campuses, but even in our nation’s high schools and elementary schools, is by now common knowledge, as is also the way that this conflict has opened the gates to the expression of overt anti-Semitism in the American work place and at other public events that feel totally unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict like the Christmas Tree lighting in Rockefeller Center last December. Nor are the halls of government immune: the fact, once unimaginable, that a member of Congress could formally decline to condemn people in her own district chanting “Death to America” at an anti-Israel rally and that that refusal be greeted by her colleagues with an almost universal shrug, is only this week’s example of how things have changed for Jewish Americans in the last half year. That people at the highest echelons of our American government could overtly—and without any sense of shame—suggest that American material support for Israel could, and possibly even should, be conditional on the elected leaders of Israel obeying the instructions of their American masters rather than those of their own constituents is just further proof that October 7 was a Rubicon movement for us all.

But history is not all Rubicon moments. Two weeks ago, I wrote to you about the slow deterioration of the Israelites’ status in ancient Egypt as year after year passed until their enslavement ensued almost naturally. Could slavery have been averted? Surely, it could have been: the Israelites had scores upon scores of years to pack up and go back to Canaan, but chose instead to remain permanently in Egypt on the assumption that their status would never change, that they would always be welcome, that no one would ever resent them as privileged foreigners living off the fat of somebody else’s land. I won’t repeat here what I wrote there, but the bottom line was (and is) that they could have saved themselves but, because there was no specific Rubicon moment, no pivot, no event that changed everything, they apparently chose to assume that nothing was changed at all. And then, just like that (or so it must have seemed), they were slaves possessed of no civil rights at all in a world in which midwives were charged not with assisting women in labor but with murdering the babies born to them.

I’ve written before about my relationship with Erna Neuhauser, my parents’ next-door neighbor. Born in 1898, Erna was in her 60s and early 70s when I was a teenager. But, long before that, she was a young married woman with a young daughter in Nazi Vienna, the city of her birth and the place in which she grew up. Some readers may recall that I’ve mentioned many times that Erna was a childhood friend of the woman later known as Miep Gies, the woman who risked her life years later to hide Anne Frank and her family in German-occupied Amsterdam. But the reason I mention her today is not related to Miep Gies’s story, but to her own. Erna was the first Shoah survivor I knew intimately. Of course, she never let anyone call her that because she was, she always insisted, not a survivor at all: she, her husband Ernst, and their daughter Liesel had been able to escape Vienna in 1938, first traveling to Sweden (where her brother had acquired residency earlier on and was able to sponsor them as refugees) and then to New York, where they settled and lived out their lives. But, also of course, she was a survivor—of the Nazification of Austria, of the intense anti-Semitism Anschluss brought in its terrible wake, of the degradation experienced daily, sometimes hourly, by the Jews of Vienna. And it was her story that framed my first effort to think seriously about the Shoah and to establish my own relationship to the events of those horrific years.

It was from Erna that I learned that the difference between Rubicon moments and non-Rubicon ones is not as clear as historians sometimes make it out to be. Yes, the moment Hitler annexed Austria—the event then as now known simply the Anschluss, the “Annexation”—was the Rubicon moment back across none could step. But it only seemed that way after the fact and what really happened was not one disastrous transformation from being welcome, respected citizens to despised Untermenschen, but the slow, step-by-step deprivation of the rights and privileges to which all had become accustomed. Jews couldn’t get their hair cut in non-Jewish barbershops. Jews could no longer ride the streetcars. Jewish children could no longer attend public schools. Some patriotic souls hung on, certain that things in their beloved homeland would soon improve. Others fled—some to America, others to the U.K. or to Sweden, still others to British Palestine. Many committed suicide in despair. I remember Erna saying that things somehow changed slowly and quickly at the same time. I’m feeling that right now in our nation, that sense that things are unfolding quickly and slowly somehow at the same time.

Wasn’t it just yesterday that Jewish parents would have been overjoyed to send a child to Harvard or to Stanford no matter what the cost? When did it feel reasonable not to wear a kippah on the subway or even on the LIRR? At what point did it feel wiser for Jewish teachers in New York City’s high schools not to mention their pro-Israeli sentiments for fear of being attacked by their own students? When did it start to feel normal for synagogues to hire armed guards to protect worshipers? When did I stop speaking in Hebrew on the phone in public places? I can’t even say that I don’t do that anymore—but I certainly don’t do it if I think someone might overhear me.

This isn’t the Weimar Republic we’re living in and it certainly isn’t Nazi Vienna. The center, at least so far, is definitely holding. Both presumed nominees in this fall’s presidential election self-present as allies of the Jewish community. The issue of anti-Semitism on campus is finally being addressed by people with the authority to effect real change. And, at least eventually, I still think reason will prevail, that people will come back to their senses and understand that Israel is not only our nation’s sole true friend in the Middle East, but also a fully reliable ally. But I am also sensitive to Pesach—now almost upon us—not solely being our annual celebration of freedom, but also our annual opportunity to obey the Haggadah’s famous injunction to think of ourselves not only as now-free people, but as once-enslaved ones…and to use that opportunity to consider how the Israelites ended up as slaves after having watched small micro-aggressive incidents become more and more overt, more difficult to endure, more suggestive of what was soon to come.

At Exodus 12:42, the Torah calls the eve of Pesach by the mysterious name leil shimmurim, a night of “keepings,” of “things kept or guarded.” What that means exactly has been a matter of debate for millennia. But for me it means: a night of holding on to history, of seeing time present through the lens of time past, of understanding our current situation as a function of what we’ve already experienced. Pesach is a hopeful holiday that celebrates the liberation of slaves from their bondage. But there is a monitory side to Pesach as well, one intended to make us think carefully about the present by focusing our gaze on stories from the past and in their light formulating our hopes for the future. Elijah comes to my seder table specifically with his intoxicating promise of redemption and survival. But Erna also comes, and her message is far more sobering than intoxicating…even after four cups of wine.