Don't Settle for the Simple Story... or Seder

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay from our Saturday morning service on April 20th. Rabbi Lizzi delivered a sermon imploring us to retell not only the triumphal tale of liberation in the Passover story, but also the nuanced, disturbing, and thought-provokingly complicated parts of the story as well.

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

One story jumped out at me this week,

the beginning of the Talmud, which is maybe the most important collection of Jewish thinking. The story is about a guy named Rebbi Mayer, who is actually on the wall right behind me to read, you can read about him. But he was he was considered a great sage and teacher, and some local hooligans were making his life miserable. We don't know exactly what they did. Maybe they were making fun of his funny side locks or his seat seat hanging from his belt maybe had nothing to do with him being physically Jewish. Maybe they were just some impolite, disrespectful teenagers. You know, it's hard to imagine giving this scholar a hard time. But he came home and he exasperates out loud, he explains out loud in pain.

A verse from Psalms and Tombow. hi to me how hard is bearish I even own a noun may centers disappear from the earth and the windy Beto more, which is to say, maybe as a rule against die, or just disappear.

So of course, like like a good sage, he's quoting scripture to justify his rage and desire for retribution. The only problem is his wife, Maria is also a scholar. And she hears this and exclaims, monta, Tao. When are you thinking? How dare you misquote songs.

And she says, it doesn't say like sinners, quote, Team disappear from the earth.

It sounds like sins have been disappear from the earth and wickedness be no more you should pray for them to disappear, you should be praying for them to change their ways, and then they'll no longer be sinners. But more than that, you should be praying for whatever has led them to make such poor decisions, we'll let that change too. And then there won't be any more sitters produced from the poverty or lack of education or fear, or whatever it was that resulted in that behavior of the fruit in the first place. My husband, you should be changed shape praying for is changed that addresses the symptoms of not the this change that addresses not the symptoms, which is the behavior but the root of the problem. And Rabbi bear listens to his wife, and he is brewing his words, and he prays for the hooligans not to disappear, but to change their ways. And lo, they do.

They do. That's the end of that piece of the story.

And I wonder, who's the hero in this story?

Who's the hero? Is it Rebby Mayer, who does one of the hardest things a person can do, which is changed their mind, especially about somebody who is giving you a hard time is persecuting you?

Is it his wife, Maria, who invites her husband and lovingly to adjust his perspective so that he might live with less vindictiveness and more love and inspire others thereby to be more kind as well is the hero, maybe the hooligans, because we are introduced to them. We are we know the least about them. But we were introduced to them as they are creating a problem for the character that we are supposed to sympathize with in the story. Yet they are the ones who do the hard work of actually changing their lives making chuva.

Or maybe the heroes are the unnamed, unstated forces that make that Chuba possible. The educators or therapists or the age group or a loving partner, who helps facilitate and help them stick with whatever it is that they changed in their life, we will never know. On the surface, the story seems to be about good guys and bad guys. And then we scratched the surface just a little. And we see that it's really just a bunch of people who have lessons to learn about life.

And things they could each do differently, personally, to bring about better outcomes for all involved in the story started with changing a paradigm.

And so now I'm thinking about the holiday of Passover and how it hinges on the way that we imagined changing the world around us for the better. And for us Jews these lessons of Better World making or tikun olam if you will. They're embedded, not exactly in the 10 commandments, or even in the 613 commandments, although those are of course very important. But they're communicated in a story

in the story, and a story like our story of revenue here. They appear simple on its surface yet is anything but simple. And its complexity and depth is what makes up the quintessential tikun olam story and the story of our people. And I want to explore some of that complexity together today as we prepare for Passover on Monday night, lest we sit at the table and think it's supposed to be easy or simple.

So it's the athletes writing the story of our enslavement and liberation from the bondage of Egypt is our people central

Record narrative. We mentioned it every time we prayed the Como Hall we sang and danced to that narrative just this morning, we do it twice a day, we mentioned in the sing the words as part of the kiddish, every single week on Friday nights, and we do it for kiddish on every major holiday. And finally, we have this week long holiday coming up to recall, no really relive the Exodus story.

But what lessons we're supposed to take from it are not exactly obvious. And I know that because I've had at least kind of five conversations this week with people who each describe the essential lesson of the Exodus story differently. And let's be clear, what one thinks is the essential lesson of the Exodus story is what one thinks is the essential point of Judaism. The entire purpose of this tradition, there's a reason why this is the most celebrated Jewish holiday on the calendar. And I don't think the reason is good.

There's something that feels essentially Jewish about this holiday, both its method and its methodology. So just take a second and picture the holiday, whether you've been at many Seder tables, or this upcoming Passover might be your first time celebrating. You don't know anything about this holiday, you can just take a moment and listen. But from what you know, from what you understand from what you've experienced. What for you, in a sentence is the essential message of this holiday.

Any brave soul,

want to lay some wisdom on us?

peace in the Middle East. That's the essential message of the holidays from the time of the writing of the Torah forward.

Or at least this year.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, and we got can move us from bondage to freedom. God can move us from bondage to freedom.

Yes, maybe.

We should never forget what it felt like to be slaves, and therefore we should be helping anyone who finds himself in the right forms of slavery.

Yes, yes. And yes. And yes. I'll tell you some other things I've heard this year. This holiday teaches us that God loves freedom. So the lesson is to do everything in our power to free our people's captives at all cost and all captives. Or the lesson is that God loves freedoms so much that it must not just apply to us, but to all people. Or the lesson is to march toward Israel physically, spiritually, politically, or the lesson is for us to feed all who are hungry. Or the lesson is to stand with the migrants showing up on our streets.

Because we were migrants wants to the lesson is to stand with Palestinians fighting oppression, occupation, siege and starvation. And the justification for all of this wherever you land, is the idea of how you knew we were slaves. Gary Payton, you were strangers, the air teams are hanging in the land of Egypt.

And so the Haggadah, as you will be reminded on Monday night is epic and circuitous, and it jumps back and forth in time and it takes us from our dining room tables to the bricklayers in the hot sun of Egypt, back to our dining room tables to the ancient Israelites in Roman occupied Palestine, who forbade the Jews from doing Seder. So in their secret places, staying up until dawn, to tell the Exodus story that will take us to Genesis, and then back again to the present moment. And it kind of defies a linear progression, and takes us down many non obvious tangents that cannot help but to complicate the basic dramatic narrative from slavery to freedom, the basic identity of victimhood, our victimhood against their villainy.

This will give you an example of how it does. As you get into the market section. Right after the four children, you'll encounter the line that meets the lap of de apoyo Dasara. In the beginning, we were idol worshipers.

First of all, what does that have to do with anything? I thought this was a story about slavery, not about theology. But second of all, I don't worshiping is not thought of, well, in our tradition, it's kind of like against the second commandment in the Torah. So why is our haggadah going out of its way to remind us that that's what we were that's who we were. Right. And usually our narrative goes in contrast to the other ancient people who worshipped cows and sheeps and kings. We worship the one God Shiva Shamaya artists of the heaven and earth.

Well, yeah, we eventually got there, but we didn't start there, which is important.

Because like violin pointed out, and like the story of Rebby Mayer, everyone has a moral journey. Everyone has the ability to grow and change. And this is something our haggadah and our tradition wants us to center to remember, before we write off others as being hopeless read on the possibility of Chuba, we look back, and we remember when we ourselves learn something the hard way, and it changed us. And it made us better people, maybe a better partner, or friend or co worker, I can only imagine that Rebbi Mayer could have made the paradigm shift that he made, because he remembered in that moment that he too, once wasn't punished, or God forbid, killed for making the wrong choice, but given a second chance, and give them the tools in which to change.

And so the inclusion of this little tangents and the Haggadah, and it is really little, you could just skip right over it. But it opens up the way for a conversation around your table, for example, about what beliefs or ideas you may have held in the past that you've outgrown, or that became impediments to your integrity, means he lied. In the beginning, I used to think this. But now, I think about it differently.

And you share. Why did you think what you thought before? Was there positive reinforcement? You know, for thinking that way coming from your pack? How did you change your mind? Did it happen inside of yourself before you felt brave enough to share it with other people? What was the result? Were you shocked? Were you locked in? Did anyone care as much as you thought that they would? Who stood by them no matter what. How did you feel coming out as it were offended itself and beliefs. And so I've been at tables where we had this conversation where this is what emerged from the Haggadah, and it's a very vulnerable kind of conversation to emerge around the Seder table.

And not every table would it be possible to but I want to put out there that you can accept the invitation from the page into the heart, because we would one person shared was in a way that they have grown, grown and changed gives me permission to others at the table to imagine that the same might be possible for them.

And right, then you're really going to Passover Seder, when people are talking about personal liberation, how liberating would it be to have a read the mayor or a former hooligan at your table, for that matter, share their story of paradigm shift, give people permission to complicate the simple story of always being right or always being the victim, and instead have a more personal conversation about how we might admit the ways that you were wrong about something and to see it more clearly, or see someone else or a whole issue through a new life that created new possibilities for directions, a new relationship, or friendship or career or political involvement or spiritual involvement could take in your life to actually change you.

What is different about this night from all other nights, is that we give each other permission to ask questions. The four questions are like a practice round their basic observations, they basically say, I see that we're eating matzah. Why I see that we're dipping parsley in salt water, why? I see that there are objects on the cedar table that are in view, maybe an olive, maybe a pine cone, maybe an orange, maybe a tomato, maybe an empty chair. Why? By the way, those are all symbols that are used, at least in the United States that I have come across that symbolizes different movements for freedom. Go read about them after Shabbat. And by giving this job of asking questions to children, we are letting the adults off easy because kids have no problem asking provocative questions, as you know,

but we adults, we like to know the answers or at least seem like we know the answers. And so as we get older, we stop asking, so it won't seem like we don't know. And so the singer says, be more like a kid. Ask. Invite curiosity invite complexity. The Rabbi's are described in Nevada, as sitting around discussing the Exodus story until dawn. I just imagine them saying Rabbi may or will you say more about that? Rabbi Akiva, can you go a little bit deeper into that? I'm not sure I get it. Right. And if we're really hearing something new, that might be a question we would want to ask instead of throwing your plate across the table and marching out of the room. How hard would that be? But how satisfied would that be?

And the singer recognizes that a good story

is a prompt for discussion and debate that could last 1000s of years. And maybe that's why it's the quintessential Jewish holiday.

I want to give one more kind of frame for this complexity. And this is from Rabbi italiana and Muhammad

AR, she looks at the Exodus story through what she calls a double exposure. And this double exposure is that every symbol in the story has a dual meaning, both of which are important for understanding the totality of the story. And the purpose of the story, which is transformation and liberation. And so fair warning, this is gonna get dark.

For the Jews who dwelt in Egypt,

beautiful houses were places of servitude,

and cool painting spots in the Nile River, were places where baby boys were grounded.

And well, the Israelites could see that dual meaning every single day, the first two plagues, make that double exposure visible to the rest of the population as well to the Egyptians as well. The first plate blood in the water makes it clear that the Nile, which is the source of life, and purity and cleanliness, for the Egyptian people is actually the site of mass murder.

And all of Egypt is suddenly confronted with the truth that the life giving sustaining thing for them is the locus of unbearable suffering for another people. They might have known it before on some level, but now they really confront the true terror of what they've allowed to happen on their watch. In that very first player. second play of frogs exposes a new level of horror, she writes the frogs we were told, emerge from the Nile.

Perhaps while the Nile is still filled with blood, and so these tiny, slimy little creatures emerging from the river, it's easy to imagine that the people thought that what they were seeing with 1000s of little ghosts emerging from their watery grave.

And so the first two plays are reminders to the Egyptians of their crimes, making explicit and raw, what denial and callousness may have disguised for a fairly long time,

and plagues our way of bringing the Egyptians out of their day to day understanding of their country and making the other blurry side of that double exposure unbearably clear.

And I wonder how many of us have had the unsettling experience of having a double exposure come into focus, where we suddenly experience something that we thought we understood one way our whole life, through the lens of the other.

And Rabbi and Tom, the other says, That's the lesson of the Exodus story.

She writes,

We are readers and inheritors of the narrative of slavery, and we are forced into the dizziness of double exposure. Because the other thing is,

Moses wouldn't have existed, the word hit not for the Nile of which he was drawn. And for Pharaoh whose daughter saved him, we're not for the two symbols of oppression in Egypt, Moses, our Savior, wouldn't be here. And so she writes, In this moment, we are forced to learn that the multi valence of places does not allow us to neatly cordon off the beautiful and the ugly. Rather, we are touched by the meanings of other people in groups. It's impossible in this reading to fully separate the memory of the nightmarish tragedy, from the Miraculous safety.

And this man shows up in our commandments, the appreciation or double exposure, the necessity of complexity, and empathy shows up not in a story but in a commandments. In the book of Deuteronomy, we are commanded not to hate the Egyptian because you are a stranger in his land.

Helping us remember that even though our people endured terrible suffering in Egypt, Egypt is not only a paradigm for persecution. Remember back to Genesis, Egypt also fed us and housed us during a time of dire need. Our sixth graders just watched Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, where the entire story is the story of Egypt, absorbing the Jewish people and Jewish family and being incredibly generous to us. We prospered through grading numbers there. And so despite the subsequent years of persecution, we are commanded to let the memory of our treatment of the Egyptians in the future be guided by the way that taught us not in the second story, but in the first story. So even as the victim in the story that we tell about the past and the Exodus, the Torah is aware that one day we will be in a position of power, in which we could act from a place of resentment and vengeance, don't the Torah says.

Torah resists the temptation to tell a story about Egypt, one of exclusively persecution and suffering. And so where we are, we are reminded that our time in Egypt is mixed pain, gratitude, resentment, beauty. We are commanded to give room for both and to treat our stories with the integrity and the nuance they deserve. We are commanded to remember the moments of beauty and kindness even as we remember suffering persecution and darkness.

Which is to say, we're commanded to tell the story, honestly, and not leave out the parts that don't conveniently fit the narrative that we have become most comfortable with. And so, we're going to sit down to Seder. And we're going to read the oldest liberation story being told one that has transformed millions of lives over 1000s of years.

And I want to invite us to avoid the simple and obvious binaries on the surface. Israelites versus Egyptians good guys versus bad guys, where of course we identify with the good guys. We have an opportunity this year, not just to open the door for Elijah, but to open the door for Berea the voice of conscience, the voice of the double exposure, and reminds us to take the perspective that is not native to us.

But who says Are you sure you're really seeing everything that's there? Because maybe just maybe there's a way to read these words in a way that yields not confirmation of the story we already know.

But instead of brave story of transformation for ourselves, for our families, for our neighborhoods, for our broken systems and for our world, and I want us to be brave enough and loving enough to ask those questions and to see where the conversation takes us. And I want to wish you all have to share with Savannah, a happy and kosher but mostly meaningful and transformational Passover holiday