Remembrance in the Midst of Plague

A Passover Seder in Germany, shortly after World War II. Jews observed Passover throughout dire circumstances in history. During the Holocaust, they observed in ghettos, concentration camps and forests.Credit...Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

As we've approached Pesach, or Passover, I've thought about the vivid story in the book of Exodus about the plagues sent by God to beset the Egyptians so that they would be convinced to free the enslaved people of Israel. 

You may recall that the tenth and final plague was a great equalizer illness which killed first-born sons of the Egyptians, regardless of status, as well as their first-born animals. The Israelites are given specific instructions about putting blood on the lintels of their doors and eating a meal described in detail in order to avoid the same fate. In some versions it is the Angel of Death which passes over the homes, while scholar Robert Alter uses the term Destroyer. 

This Passover observance has continued for millennia, although it will be curtailed for many Jews this year  Pesach begins tomorrow at sundown and as with Christians observing Holy Week that is a lot of bewilderment about how to participate in our powerful rituals in a time of physical distancing when another sort of plague forces us to be apart. In an opinion piece for the New York Times called The Power of Passover During a Plague 

The Passover Seder centers on the experience of being thrust out of our homes, but these days we feel trapped inside of them. The story involves miraculous plagues that saved us; today we pray for the end of one. There’s the commandment to clean our homes of all non-Passover food, which we just spent innumerable hours and dollars hoarding.Then there’s the real heartbreaker: The Seder is when we traditionally gather with family, friends and even strangers. “Let all who are hungry come and eat,” we say. 

These days, many of us can’t even be in the same house as our own parents or children. We don’t come within six feet of strangers.And yet, there will still be Passover. Indeed, I’ve come to think of Passover as the stem cell of the Jewish people, a reserve of core source material with the proven ability to generate new meaning and solace in circumstances even more extreme than what we are living through now...

Last week, a group of major Orthodox rabbis in Israel announced that they would permit people to use Zoom videoconferencing for their Seders — a previously unimaginable accommodation to stringent Jewish law. But that’s the point. We may be away from loved ones, or shut out of communal spaces. We may not be preparing with the same vigor or shopping with the same zeal. But we will do what millions of Jews have done before us: manifest our hope for liberation.

That is our obligation, and our privilege. All the more so in moments when the taste of freedom — from oppression, from want, from disease — is not yet ours.

I appreciate these thoughtful observations and hope that I can take them to heart as a Christian regarding what it means to be hospitable, how to live in hopeful community while in a form of exile, and how we celebrate in the midst of loss.