Passover, Slavery and Counting the Omer

I remember asking a group of KI kids one year, “What is your favorite thing
to eat on Passover?” “Matzah!” they cried almost in unison. And then the
voices of clarification began to appear: “Actually, it’s Matzah with peanut
butter and jelly that I take to school for lunch,” one child said. “Matzah brei
for breakfast” another child countered. “French toast is out, Matzah brei is
in” he proclaimed. “I love chocolate covered Matzah the best,” another
responded (and of course I had to agree with that brilliant child).

What makes Passover so special? Why is it the one holiday of the year
when, according to sociologists, more Jews participate in some way then in
any other holiday? Yes, it’s because it is so family centered – but so are
most holidays. Yes, it is because the Seder ritual is so exotic and unusual
and interactive. But mostly it’s because of the food. That strange and
wonderful, exotic and unique Passover food that only arrives once a year to
grace our seder tables and stimulate our palates to ask challenging questions
and remind ourselves that we are, indeed part of an ancient and ever-
surviving people.

Matzah and maror, haroset and parsley, hard boiled eggs and sweet kosher
wine, the bitter and the sweet, the slavery and the liberation – Passover is
impossible to forget for it is (as the sacred scripture says about all the
mitzvot and ideas of Judaism) as close to us as our very mouths. We eat
Passover and drink Passover and its various flavors linger on our palates and
in our memories all year.

Jews and food are an inevitable combination. The idea that something that
isn’t “kosher” is just not right has even slipped seamlessly into the English
language. So it’s no surprise really that from thousands of years ago our
Torah laid out for us specific rules of what was permitted and what was
forbidden for the Children of Israel to eat. The Torah teaches, for example,
that for an animal to be Kosher (meaning “fit” in Hebrew), it must have a
cloven hoof and chew its cud and for a fish to be kosher it must have fins
and scales.

In many ways it was these very laws concerning the food we eat, whether
laws of Kashrut that govern our everyday meals or the special laws and
customs concerning foods that grew up around every Jewish holiday and
festival of the year that declared we are a people apart dedicated to holiness
and bringing God’s spiritual challenges into the world. Our ancestors knew
that if they wanted us to remain whole and together and unique as a minority
community in the midst of an overwhelmingly larger majority culture no
matter where in the world we might be, the single most powerful way to
accomplish that goal was to establish dietary laws that prevented us from
freely mingling with the rest of the world.

Simply put, if I can’t sit down and eat with you, there is little chance I will
marry you and disappear into your culture or religious civilization either.
Food is in many ways the essence of who we are – and on this festival of
freedom and liberation from enslavements of all kinds we are reminded that
not only what we eat but how we eat and the way in which our food is
produced, created, slaughtered and sold is a reflection of the holiness we
seek to bring into the world. At our seder this year we added foods that
specifically reminded us of the on-going nightmare of slavery around the
world – estimated at between 21-60 million human beings still enslaved this
very day, even here, in our own “land of the free.” We had free trade
chocolate reminding us of our own consumer power to demand that our
markets purchase free trade goods and stop financially supporting child and
slave labor around the world. We read testimonies from immigrant women
across America who have been enslaved as domestic workers or in cottage
industries in our own communities, and were reminded why Jewish tradition
commands us to remember the heart of the stranger year after year.

Now that we are in the midst of the “counting of the Omer,” we are counting
down the days from our liberation from slavery in Egypt to the revelation at
Sinai. We anticipate that transformational moment in history when the
Jewish people declared through the giving of the Ten Commandments that
what we do and what we say matters to God. Our ancestors were wise
enough to teach us through the ethical expectations that Moses taught in the
name of God that as a people we need to be distinguished not only by what
we put into our mouths, but even more importantly by what comes out of our
mouths. The words we say to one another create the reality and very
foundation of all our relationships and therefore of society itself.

Perhaps we can use this time of counting the days to Sinai to find one
opportunity each day to say something that moves the world closer to
becoming the loving, compassionate and caring community it was meant to
be and to end the many forms of slavery that still exist even in our own time.