Dear Rodeph Sholom Family,
Profanity. When massacre is celebrated as liberation and rape as an act of redemptive resistance, we see a horrific mutation of our most precious values. When such vulgarities echo across the campuses of our most prestigious halls of higher learning, we witness a desecration beyond measure. Our children, who once approached college campuses as centers to challenge and expand understanding, to inspire visions of possibility and ignite courageous calls to shape a better world, now face encampments that call for death and destruction as the desirable paths towards a better future. As universities move classes online, as policies of free speech are used selectively in ways that leave Jewish students feeling abandoned, alarm rightly rises as the profane becomes mundane.
Against the backdrop of our Passover seders, we feel a fragility that echoes the fear of past generations, a reminder of narrowing spaces of safety even in this country that brought the greatest freedoms and securities in Jewish history. Most anguishing are the dwindling places where one can stand as proudly Jewish. How we respond – to our anger, to our fear, to our vilification – will be one of the vital determinants of this next chapter of American Judaism.
I am struck this year by the moral challenges embedded in our Passover story and our Haggadah. Our early rabbis imagine after crossing the Sea of Reeds, the heavenly angels witness the vanquished Egyptian army and start to sing in joy. God admonishes them, saying, “My creations are drowning, and you wish to sing?!” Many of us at our seder tables continue to reenact this same ethic by spilling out wine from our seder cups for each of the ten plagues, diminishing our own blessing to recognize the suffering they caused others. As our world spins into extremism, we center humanity, a desire to witness many competing moral needs, and a commitment towards building a better future. Ours is a tradition that urges the high cost of freedom never be ignored. In centering the loss of even those unintentionally harmed on the path to freedom, and in the same breath naming the responsibility entwined with such freedom, we remain focused on being builders rather than destroyers. With such a mindset, we can cry out for the release of 133 hostages still held in captivity by Hamas alongside heartbreak for tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed in this war, we can decry antisemitism and affirm Israel’s right to exist without devolving into the demonization of others, and we can call for the urgent needs of Jewish solidarity and also uphold our perpetual prayers for peace.
This is a bewildering moment. Many of us feel the lure of simplicity, to fall into the ease of certainty. We feel ourselves withdrawing from people and spaces. We find ourselves exhausted by perspectives and ideas that feel too complicated or too absurd. We notice that, in our desire to vanquish profanity, we don the very tools of such profanity – vilifying, abandoning, mutating values to apply only selectively. As we move into this Shabbat and deeper into Passover, may we hold fast to our humanity, naming the high costs of our freedom, feeling our obligation to be builders of what ought to be rather than justifiers of simply what is, and noticing that our most potent response to anger and fear is to join together. In community, we may see that we are not alone. In connection, we may see our own efficacy to cross even the most impossible of barriers. And in shared resolve, we may find the strength to reach together towards a better future. From our foundational Passover story, this has always been our purpose.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Ben Spratt
Senior Rabbi