A Message for Pesach in the Pandemic: Healing a world in lockdown

Rabbi Joe Wolfson:
Rabbi Sacks is known for many things. He’s known for his erudition, his oratory, his Jewish leadership. His themes are Jewish peoplehood and community, and what it is that Hashem asks of us in a broken world. But what do peoplehood and community and tikkun olam look like in a world where we cannot leave our apartments? If anybody can help us figure it out, it’s going to be Rabbi Sacks.

Rabbi Sacks:
Rabbi Joe, thank you. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you for arranging this. Thank every one of you from NYU, old friends, and maybe some of you I haven’t met yet, and welcome to the J across the country.

I do hope you can hear me, and I just want to share with you a few thoughts about what it feels like, and I’m going to be very personal here, what it feels like to me to be coming up to Pesach at this really, really unprecedented time of a pandemic that is affecting every country on earth and really bringing humanity to its knees.

Let me share with you three very simple thoughts.

Number one: I’m going to begin where I began, because when this started, I was just about to launch my new book called Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, just out in Britain. It’ll be out in the States in September. In this book, I argue that contemporary society has had too much “I” and too little “we,” too much self-interest and too little common good, too much “me” and too little “us.”

We actually need to restore the balance. It was Hillel who taught us that you need both: Im ein ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be? But k’she’ani l’atzmi, mah ani? If I’m only for myself, what am I?

So we need to balance the individual and the collective, because without that, we do not have a fully functioning free society.

Now what has that to do with Pesach? On the face of it, nothing. But actually, it turns out to go right to the very heart of the name of the festival itself. Pesach is the festival of freedom. And if I were to ask you just to think in your mind, what is the Torah’s word for freedom, you would almost certainly say zman cheiruteinu, the festival of our freedom.

But actually, it isn’t. The word cheirut, or the root chet–resh–tav, appears only once in the entire Tanach. That is the point at which Moshe Rabbeinu brings down the Tablets of Stone from Mount Sinai. It says the Tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, charut al haluchot, engraved on the Tablets.

That’s the only time the word appears in the whole of Tanach, and it doesn’t mean freedom, it means engraved. What is the Torah’s word for freedom? The answer is chofesh, when a slave goes free. What, therefore, is the difference between chofesh and cheirut? The answer is that chofesh is individual freedom, and cheirut is collective freedom.

Chofesh is the freedom I have as an “I,” but cheirut is the freedom we collectively have as a “we.” These are very, very different things. The clearest example of this was given a couple of weeks ago by a woman in Russia. Alla Ilyina was her name, suffering from coronavirus and in quarantine. She actually escaped from quarantine and very proudly told her story on Instagram, and said, “I have the right to my freedom.” That was a perfect example of chofesh and not cheirut.

She was concerned only about herself, and she wasn’t at all concerned about the freedom or even the safety of others. Now that kind of freedom the Tanach describes in the following sentence: Bayamim hahem ein melech b’Yisrael; ish hayashar b’einav ya’aseh. In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in their own eyes. (Shoftim 21:25)

That’s individual freedom, but that is not a free society. That’s a recipe for chaos, for anarchy. In a society in which everyone is free to do what they like, the strong prevail at the cost of the weak, and the powerful prevail at the cost of the powerless. A few gain, many lose, and the end result is a society of injustice and inequality.

That is not a free society. It is not collective freedom. So to restate the book in terms of Pesach, I was arguing, and I am arguing, that we have too much chofesh and too little cheirut.

What the coronavirus has done is remind us of the “we,” not just the “I.” The whole of humanity has been affected, and therefore we feel what we call in Judaism the brit b’nei adam, what I call the covenant of human solidarity. Every one of us is connected.

A few weeks ago we could say that the coronavirus was happening somewhere else, to someone else, on the other side of the world, in China. Today, it’s affecting every one of us. We suddenly feel the “we.” We also feel the “we” of community, as many of us find ourselves confined to our homes. We feel the loss of that community, and we hunger for it back again.

And we feel the “we” of humility, suddenly realizing that for all our wealth and technological power, one microscopic virus has brought humanity to its knees.

So the first element I want to emphasize is Pesach as the festival of “we,” of collective freedom, not of individual freedom. And that means being concerned not only for our safety, but for the safety of others.

The second thing is very simply this: the Jewish people are the people who give the world a message of hope.

Some time back, in 1995, twenty-five years ago, the BBC asked me to make a television program from Auschwitz, just to explain the Holocaust to people. I really did not want to do it, but in the end I agreed to do it with one proviso: that I could tell the story the Jewish way.

The BBC asked me, “What is the Jewish way of telling a story?” And I replied, “Jewish way of telling a story is to be honest about the bad stuff at the beginning, but always to end with a message of hope.”

The place that we find this principle set out is in the Mishnah, in the last chapter of Pesachim, which says in four words how we are to tell the story at the Seder night: matchil b’gnut, you begin with the bad news, but you end with the good news. You end with a note of hope.

This is the Jewish way of telling a story, and it’s quite distinctive. There was a Greek way of telling a story, and it was masterly, mastered by the great Greek dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles. The Greek way of telling a story was to tell a story of tragedy, because the Greeks believed in inexorable, blind fate, which meant that however fine you are, somehow or other there is a fault within you that’s going to end your life very badly. That is the Greek way of telling a story. It’s a bleak way of telling a story.

Our way of telling a story is to always end on a note of hope. That, I think, was never more important than right now, when so many people are so depressed. Number one, the risk to life of the virus. Number two, the complete disruption of businesses and many people forced to stay at home. Number three, the feeling that there is an economic catastrophe looming.

All of these things are making people very, very depressed. And I have always said that Judaism is the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind. It is our job to be agents of hope, to be able to say to the world: Gam ki eilech b’gei tzalmavet, lo ira ra, ki Atah imadi — even if I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.

That is the Jewish way. And I can’t think of any more profound way of doing so than by living the experience of the Seder night. Because we know that even though we begin with lachma anya, the bread of affliction, and the bitter herbs of slavery, and the salt water of tears, nonetheless we end with the wine of freedom.

We even end, and what a brilliant stroke this was, by doing it through a children’s song (Chad Gadya), with the most profound consolation of all: that God will come one day and put an end to the Angel of Death.

At a time in human history where the Angel of Death is stalking the world, that is an extraordinary note of hope. We do indeed believe that this will pass, that somehow or other good will come of this. We will feel a new sense of solidarity and responsibility. We will, just by staying at home, think of the good things in life: our family, our friends, whom we are in touch with by phone or by electronic media.

And the truth is that something very deep in Jewish consciousness will emerge. They say about China that the Chinese ideogram for crisis also means opportunity. That is a remarkable way of looking at crisis.

There’s only one language I know that goes one better, and that’s Hebrew, because the Hebrew for crisis is mashber, and mashber also means a birthing stool. In other words, all the pain that we are feeling is chevlei leidah. Something new is being born.

What that new thing will be, when all the virus is gone, when we’ve developed our immunities and our vaccines, will be something new and very special. We will become a more caring world, perhaps a little more humble world, and certainly a more responsible one.

In the meanwhile, let us carry the Pesach message of hope to ourselves and to humankind. Chag kasher v’sameach.