Pesach: another meaningless Jewish ritual or a time to reignite our sense of social conscience?

By Ilan Solomons

I love Pesach it’s my favourite Festival, I enjoy everything about it I think it just oozes coolness. I mean you get to spend time with friends and family in an intimate setting around the Seder table, I know in my house we often invite people we don’t see too often so it’s really a special time.

Look I think the whole preparation for the festival isn’t always that great i.e. all the cleaning out and change over stuff but it all adds to the sanctity of the festival I guess. Rabbis have an absolute field day at this time of the year. Pesach is filled with symbolisms.

Take for instance the dry and unleavened bread we eat i.e. matzah. I’m sure we all know the teaching which says that Chometz (normal risen bread and bread based products) is a symbol of arrogance because it’s risen and filled out like the Yetzer Harah (Or Evil Inclination) which is bloated through its arrogance of joy when people do wrong. On the other hand matzah is lowly bread which symbolizes piety and simpleness. This lowly bread symbolizes the Jewish people when they left Egypt according to our Sages, and is called a bread of our affliction.

The broader understanding of this period is a time of national introspection and remembrance. We go into depth about our suffering and the miraculous redemption from bondage in Egypt. However as Jews we do not just kvetch about our suffering and pain, we also give praise for our redemption and also look forward to a final future redemption.

This being said I think that a fundamental part of this festival and especially the Seder part have become drowned in petty worrying about measurements and sizes of this thing or that.

Many Haggadah’s have pages on the fluid ounce requirements for the cups of wines, the amount of inches of matzah and maror that one requires. I am in no way saying these should be ignored or dismissed but I feel that the emphasis is being misplaced with ritual over meaning.

The Seder has the potential to be the most spiritually and emotionally up lifting experience not only for the little kids who get to sing the Manishitana section of the Seder but for the adults as well. I know in certain sects they dress up and put on plays to live up the Seder experience. This is fantastic but again it’s all symbolic for me the essence of Pesach is the concept of justice and dignity.

The Hebrew peoples who originally fled to Egypt due to the drought in Canaan and the difficult living conditions, were refugees seeking a better life for themselves and their families. They were in later generations oppressed and turned into slaves. Their dignity was undermined in many ways as the Haggadah says.

The essential message which I think we should gain from Pesach – besides the pounds from some of those measurements especially those of the Chazon Ish – is the central importance of human dignity and the fact that the Jewish people should be ultra-sensitive to the plight of others especially those who have become refugees due to circumstances in their own country.

South African Jews have an obligation to highlight the suffering of the oppressed people of Zimbabwe, Swaziland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the like who have fled despotic tyrannical regimes in some cases and others who have just fled to find a better life for themselves and their families.

It is no coincidence that soon after Pesach we will be Commemorating Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Memorial Day – we see that in the not too distant past the Jewish people suffered the most egregious systematic mass murdering in recorded history. We rightly ask where the world was. We are rightly given no definitive answer.

We however need to ask where our voices today when thousands of African Refugees are fleeing Darfur, Zimbabwe, Libya, Ivory Coast , Libya, and so on. It is not our task alone to raise these issues but I feel that South African Jews should be highlighting the plight of fellow Africans in any way we can.

I feel that Moroccan Jews although small should be highlighting the plight of the people of the Occupied Western Sahara which is illegally and brutally Occupied by the Moroccans for more than 30 years, Jews in Europe should be arguing strenuously for the rights of refugees that have fled to Europe especially those fleeing the crisis now that has engulfed large swathes of North Africa. We the children of the freed slaves of ancient Egypt and the children of those survived years of discrimination, anti-Semitism, pogroms and the Holocaust of Nazi Europe should be aware and vocal on ensuring the rights and dignities of others.

This for me is the real message which we should take out of Pesach and one which too often is overlooked or totally misunderstood by us and more so by many of our Rabbis!

I wish you all Chag Kasher VeSameich and meaningful Sedorim.

Ilan Solomons is a colourful and controversial character as all in involved in frum, Mizrachi and Zionist community organisations will know. He is a thought-leader, not something that always sits well with the more staid members of the community.

Ilan was an early adopter of MyShtetl and first wrote to this website back in 2009 when he and a fellow-young-Zionist were treated badly at a PSC event which they attended at Nsako House in Brixton. He submitted a warning to others which we published under the headline wrote a
TAKE NOTE… TAKE CARE with cartoons by our artist as well.

On 27 Feb this year Ilan filed a story we called EMOTIONAL REUNION OF UNLIKELY COMRADES about a get-together between anti-apartheid activist Rabbi Ben Isaacson and Palestinian Ambassador to SA Dr Ali Halimeh at the Palestinian Embassy in Pretoria.
This story spawned a MyShtetl Discussion Forum on WHETHER LAND FOR PEACE CAN EVER BE JUSTIFIED. These items have enjoyed a phenomenal 5,000+ reads and over 40,000 words of comment (continuing to this day).