Holy Radicalism
It’s the day before Passover in the Jewish world, with no time for a dive into the particulars of the holiday. Tables have to be set, dishes hauled from the basement, parts assigned for the recitation of the story—you name it. With the possible exception of the High Holidays in the fall, there is no event on the calendar with a greater concentration of demands. I love this festival, but it could wear you out.
The hard part is that business about the particulars. The central issue is contamination-by-leaven (?!), the peculiar notion that it is a radiator of impurity. Because the Israelites left Egypt in haste, without time to allow their dough to rise, we are required to set all leavened products aside. The cascade of restrictions that come from this standard is a surprising list of prohibited foodstuffs, from bread on the obvious end to obscure prohibitions in the innards of the food industry. Michael Pollan is (always) right. The less fiddling we do with unpronounceable chemicals, the better off we are as individuals and a society.
The danger here is that we will get lost in the particulars, that the holiday will become an inward-looking game of purging, cleansing, and decontamination. I believe that there is value in the annual exercise, that it helps to mark out this period for focus and attention. But I’ve lost patience with the Passover Industrial Complex, the demand that everything from dishwashing soap to apricots bear some mark of rabbinical supervision.
Because Passover is not about propylene glycol. It’s a radical demand to confront oppressive tyrants regardless of the consequences and damn the risks. There’s a would-be pharaoh in every nation, ready to serve the cause of his brutal avarice and feed the greed of his grasping cronies. He is ready to mount his golden throne and turn everything to dust with his jeweled scepter. In the last episode of “The Pitt” in Season II, a man almost dies because his rural hospital was shut down by DOGE to save money for ICE. We are five minutes away from that same thing everywhere. And so every one of us has to be a modern-day Moses and bring the minions of Pharoah to ruin in the midterms. Too much politics? I would say the opposite.
And we have to do this not just for ourselves, but for everyone. It’s easy to love my wife and children. It’s especially easy to love my grandchildren, who evoke the purest, least complicated love I have ever known. But the demand of Deuteronomy is to love the stranger (10:19). I’m commanded to love the child from Rohingya. I’m required to love the man under the overpass, nesting in a litter of tattered blankets. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are needy celebrate the Passover. Liberation is not something that should be rationed by the dropperful, but the natural entitlement of every human being. And there is no justice in waiting for the Messiah. We are the messiahs that we have been waiting for.