This Night - Part One
Photo courtesy of Robert Couse-Baker
“Why is this night different from all other nights?”
You will, perhaps, recognize this as the first question the youngest child asks at a Seder, the traditional meal that marks the Jewish celebration of Passover.
Over three thousand years ago, my very distant forbears escaped from bondage in ancient Egypt by passing through the Red Sea, only to wander in the desert for forty years before settling in Canaan — what we now call, more or less, the Holy Land or Israel and the Palestinian territories. It was a time long before Christianity or Islam were so much as a faint whisper in anybody’s fevered imagination. Not that there weren’t other gods and idols in the world, as the Ten Commandments pointedly remind us.
Second Commandment: You shall have no other gods besides Me. You shall not make for yourself any graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them, nor serve them, for I, the Lord Your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.
This year, the first night of the annual celebration will start at sundown on April 22nd. Unlike every other Passover that I remember from my past, a past that stretches back over 80 years, this one will be different, at least for me. For the first time as an adult and as an American, I am being challenged to ask myself, “What does being Jewish mean to me?”
Since I’m not religious (and never have been), the question has always seemed simple, one easily answered. Being Jewish primarily meant belonging to a specific family — my own or, more particularly, my mother’s. It was and still is a family that I am proud to be a part of, a family with a rich tradition of artistic and intellectual interest, ambition, and achievement. It was also a family that had a strong sense of ethics, of civic obligation to both the Jewish and larger community, and the importance of equality before the law and of opportunity for all regardless of their religion, ethnicity, national origin, or gender. It was a family that encouraged everyone to be all they could be. My impression is that everyone in the family I have known over the past eighty years has embraced those values with greater or less success. That’s been true for me as well. It’s not that I always succeeded. I didn’t. It’s not that I always manifested those values. I didn’t. But I’ve always known what mattered, even if I never talked about it, gave any evidence that I was aware of it, or struggled with knowing why I, this particular individual, was on this planet other than by biological happenstance.
So why is this night different from all other nights? Why am I asking myself what being Jewish means to me at this time in my life?
There is, of course, the easiest answer — the war between Israel and Hamas — a not-so-simple answer after all. I know of American Jews who are entirely sympathetic with Hamas and have decided to no longer consider themselves to be Jews. That is not me. I understand the Israeli desire for revenge because of the October 7th gross massacre of Israelis, just as I understood the American desire for revenge after 9/11. More than the equivalence to 9/11, I think many Jews in Israel (and outside it as well) see this as an existential moment, a defining moment regarding Israel’s ability to survive as a nation, the last safe refuge available to Jews wherever they may live.
But the nature of the conduct of Israel’s war seems as ill-advised and unthought-out or unplanned as America’s invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq. And, for the most part, most Israelis don’t really seem to care. Simultaneously, I have no idea what would constitute a better way for Israel to achieve its objectives. Clearly, many, if not most Israelis, care about the callousness of Bibi Netanyahu when it comes to the hostages. They certainly care about the government's move to politicize the judiciary. They care about the billions spent to support the ultra-orthodox or Haredi community at the expense of everyone else. And they care about the degree to which the Haredi are insistent that the rest of the Jewish population should do the fighting in this war while their young men sit in a yeshiva or in schul studying Torah. If the extreme right-wing government cares how many Palestinians they kill in trying to wipe out Hamas, they give little evidence of it.
The rest of the world is fast losing patience with Israel. However, one thing is rarely mentioned. This comes as no surprise to Israel, or at least it shouldn’t. Call it fatalism or cynicism, but in the seventy-five-year history of contemporary Israel, sooner or later, the world's sympathies always turn against Israel. The world’s major powers, including America, Russia, and their various allies, have always intervened in these wars, usually on opposite sides, but always forcing Israel to accept only partial victories. Currently, the Netanyahu government is resisting increasing pressure to find a way out of the war before destroying Hamas. I have no idea how long they can keep that up.
If I think of a biblical parallel to the Netanyahu government, it is the story of Samson, who pulls down the Temple of Dagon, causing both his death and that of the Philistines. Or I think of Masada, where Jews supposedly committed suicide rather than surrender.
With the war ever seeming to incrementally escalate — it now involves Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and Iran indirectly in Syria and everywhere else — how long will it be before things get really out of control? It isn’t hard to imagine a Gotterdammerung in the Middle East, the collapse of the entire region in a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel (I would never bet that Iran doesn’t have access to a bomb or two).
And what of Hamas? What are its objectives other than the elimination of Israel as a state and of all Jews, at least those currently in Israel? Was their post-October 7th planning as poor as Israel’s? I can imagine a few different scenarios.
1) They are willing to see every Palestinian civilian die before they surrender and, even then, no true surrender as long as their leadership can find a safe haven in other countries.
2) They think the rest of the world will force Israel to stop the war, leaving Hamas damaged but intact and still in control of Gaza.
3) That eventually, the number of Palestinian deaths will become so great that the war escalates, engulfing the entire Middle East.
For me, personally, the Israel I once knew of (but have never been particularly interested in visiting) — the Israel of its Zionist founders, the Israel of Leon Uris’s “Exodus,” of Abba Eban at the UN, the Israel of friends of my parents who were born in Israel long before it became a state or who were active in smuggling Jews out from behind the Iron Curtain and into Israel — that Israel no longer exists. Perhaps it was snuffed out in the wake of the failure of the Camp David peace talks in July 2000, the influx of Russian Jews following the Soviet Union’s collapse, and the resettlement in Israel (forced or voluntary) of some 750,000 Jews from all over the Muslim Middle East. No matter. Israel never seemed to me to be “my” country in absentia, the last refuge for a Jew. Nothing about that has changed. But I still think Israel needs to exist because Jews need that last refuge, a place where it is entirely acceptable to be Jewish, where you will never be thrown out of the country because you are Jewish or discriminated against because you are Jewish. It is tragic that is still necessary in this world.
So, why is this Passover night different from all other nights for me? You already know part of the answer. But there’s more to follow in Part Two when someone asks, “Are you an American, or are you a Jew?”