Teachings

Aaron: Tonight is the beginning of the celebration of Passover. I want to speak to you a bit about the meaning of that holiday, which I have enjoyed as a human of the Jew-ish faith, and as some of you also have…

I find this a beautiful holiday. Barbara used to have some difficulties with it because the meaning had never been properly explained. She understood it as a celebration of freedom, but it seemed to her to be a celebration at the cost of others who had been enslaving the Jews. This is not to condone their keeping of slaves, but it had seemed to Barbara that the suffering of the Egyptians was ignored.

Let me offer some background for those of you who are unfamiliar with this holiday. The Jewish people were slaves in Egypt, suffering the fate of slaves everywhere: beat-en, coerced, families separated. They were simply “owned,” and not considered people but animals. The leader of these people said to the Pharaoh of Egypt, so the story goes, “Let my people go!”—in other words, end the slavery. I’m not saying that’s exactly how it happened. We have a myth here, and we’re more concerned with symbols than with history. The Pharaoh would not end the policy of slavery. This was both a human plea—“My brother is suffering, my child is suffering, my parent is suffering— let us go!” and it was a plea on a higher level: come to that level of understanding where you acknowledge that you may not harm any sentient being, regardless of whether you consider us human as yourself or animal. What right have you to rape, to beat, to sepa-rate parent and child? What right have you to create pain for another sentient being?