"Crossing The Street"

Rabbi's Notes - May 2008

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

As I write here, it's the afternoon of the day before Pesach begins -- a Friday afternoon, as it happens. So I've had to get ready a bit earlier than my usual mad, last-minute scramble. My mom is in the kitchen making two kinds of charoset. The hametz is out, out, out of the house, to the best of my ability. There is new shelf paper in, well, most of the kitchen cabinets. Everything, well almost everything, sparkles. Yesterday a bunch of us baked matzah in a new "crouching beaver" adobe oven, this one at the Mendocino Community School, and I have a basket of it trying to stay crisp in the living room. I can hardly wait to taste my first matzah of 5768!

In the haggadah, matzah is called "the bread of affliction," and it is also called "the bread of redemption." It is one of a lot of elements of the seder that has a double meaning. There is also haroset -- symbol of slavery, but so sweet and tasty. There is the dipping of parsley -- spring, new life -- into salt water tears. This year it has struck me that so much of the seder has these kinds of contradictions built in. New life. Old tears. We are slaves. We are free. We are in the desert and at the same time in the Promised Land. As I've been preparing and contemplating, I've been thinking that maybe the reason for all these doubled-up symbols in the seder is because it is illusory to think that the journey from slavery to freedom is linear. Instead, it seems to me -- in the haggadah and in life too -- if we're going to find freedom, it is going to be right in the middle of our slavery, not somewhere across the river.

I was discussing this with Ella Russell the other day, and, as she lives into this new phase of life with her brain tumor, she got it right away. Oh yes, she said, "In the worst of times there is always someone with human compassion."

By the time you read these Megillah thoughts, my kitchen, and probably yours too, will be back in the breadcrumbs and Passover's liberation will be behind us. The month of May corresponds almost identically with the Hebrew month of Iyyar, in the middle of the omer period. The omer, a forty-nine-day interval from Passover to Shavuot, marks the journey from crossing the Red Sea to receiving Torah at Mount Sinai. One might think that this would be a time of ritual exuberance as we celebrate our liberation. But instead, oddly and perceptively, the omer is considered to be a time of "semi-mourning." Another double symbol: we have just escaped from the misery of slavery; but the desert has its difficulties too. Just crossing the Red Sea doesn't end our troubles. Liberation has to be found and found again, in the desert or wherever we find ourselves.

I'm thinking about all of this as I look ahead to Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel's day of independence, this year the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the State. It falls on the third day of Iyyar, the eighth day of May, the eighteenth day of the omer, in the middle of that desert time.

People in our community and everywhere have many strong feelings and thoughts and experiences about Israel. If there were ever a symbol with multiple meanings! There might be only one notion upon which we would all agree: even after an exciting beginning (at least for the Israelis) it has not been an easy road.

As many of you know, I went on a short but impactful trip to Israel in 2002, with Rabbis for Human Rights. While there I played hookie one afternoon (doing something else pretty amazing, but that's another story. Ask me…) That day I missed what was, by all accounts, a remarkable talk. So I am reporting this second-hand. The speaker that afternoon was Rami Elchanan. He is a Jerusalem businessman whose teenage daughter, Smadar, was killed in a terrorist bombing in the late 1990's. He said of himself that before her death he was a regular guy who went to his office every day like everyone. But her murder catapulted him into a new world. He became part of a newly-forming circle of parents like himself, who had lost children to suicide bombings. These bereaved parents provided comfort to each other. And at some point they "crossed the street" (my phrase, not Rami Elchanan's) and began to reach out to their Palestinian counterparts, parents whose children had died at the hands of Israeli soldiers enforcing the occupation. Eventually this now-mixed circle of parents began to make the hardest contact: with parents of children who were the bombers. Extraordinary, powerful and controversial, as you might imagine. Apparently Rami Elchanan said something like the following to our group of visiting rabbis: 'I would give anything to have my daughter back, of course. But since she is gone, and I have embarked upon this path, now my life has meaning…"

I've thought about that comment a million times since: "Now my life has meaning." On that trip in 2002, and on my longer stay in Israel and the West Bank in 2007, and when I was in South Africa, and here at home, I have met many courageous, visionary people who in some way or another have "crossed the street" under dreadful circumstances to make human contact with their adversaries. Over the years I have known many such peacemakers, as I hope you do as well. Many are tired, burnt-out, under-funded, overextended, embroiled in controversies. Some are under physical threat. Their families may suffer. Their health may be precarious. But I have never heard such a person say, "My life has no meaning."

When I think of that web of peace activists, in Israel and Palestine in particular, though I'd say the same of anywhere I've been, I imagine a web of meaning being formed through their acts of compassion and understanding. Like a spider web, it may be nearly invisible and easily torn. There may be much louder realities up on the surface that drown out the small acts of peace and connection down below. But that web is always there, being woven, repaired and extended by that brave species of peacemakers -- those who will extend themselves to their supposed enemies in friendship. Those people who do this are rewarded with a meaningful life. What more can you ask in a difficult world than the possibility of meaning through connection, right in the midst of it all?

At the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, life in that piece of desert looks difficult indeed, for everyone connected there. But, as Rav Ella reminds us, "In the worst of times, there is always someone with human compassion." I don't know when, or if, the newspaper headlines will announce peace in the Middle East. I always hope it will be tomorrow morning. But, whatever the headlines say on any given day, I take hope from the web of human compassion that I know is there, in which people find meaning -- and, I would assume, freedom of a kind as well -- in opening their hearts beyond enmity. In fact as I get ready for Passover, and I think about what freedom from slavery might mean, this comes close: any of us can be free, regardless of the external situation, if we extend compassion, particularly to those we are told are our enemies. Therefore no one else can give us our freedom or take it away. The decision is always our own whether to stay enslaved or to cross the street.

Wishing us all lives of meaning and connection, to Israel, to each other, whatever this new decade brings to the world.

- Rabbi Margaret Holub

© 2008 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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