Marror (The Bitter Herbs)

by Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun Magazine

One of the most radical messages of the Torah is that cruelty is not destiny. Though we tend to treat others the way that we ourselves were treated, the message of Torah is that the chain of pain can be brokenthat we do not have to pass on to others what was done to us. One of the most frequently repeated injunctions in Torah are variants on the command: "When you come into your land, do not oppress 'the Other' (the stranger), remember that you were 'the Other' in the land of Egypt." In fact, the Torah goes further and makes it an absolute categorical command: "Thou shalt love 'the Other.'" Jewish people today are systematically violating this command. We celebrate this Seder at a moment when the Jewish people are acting as oppressors to another peoplethe Palestinians.

For all intents and purposes, we are the Pharaoh facing Palestinians today. Israel has occupied and dominated the lives of over two million people for the past thirty-six years. We totally oppose the violence used by the Palestinians in their struggle for liberationjust as we would critique the violence used by Jews like former Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir in the days when they led the terrorist Irgun organization against British rule. But we can't pretend not to notice that Moses himself killed an Egyptian taskmaster who was beating a Jew or that our own people has resorted to violence when we've felt that that was our only option to achieve our own independencefrom the Maccabees to the Zionists. In fact, the traditional Seder projects a vision of God as using violence to defeat the oppressive Egyptian taskmasters. Israel is not more secure but less secure because of the Occupation. The daily realities of Occupation are not only cruel to Palestinians, but also distorting to the Jewish soul. The torture of civilians, the targeted assassinations, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes, the uprooting of their trees, the seizing of Palestinian lands by Jewish settlers, the murder and maiming of Palestinian civilians, and the systematic refusal to learn about these things and our furor at those who document it allthis is a pattern of life that destroys the very foundations of our Jewishness.

We need to change the whole dynamic in the Jewish world from a narrow chauvinism and ethos of "goyim-bashing" to a recognition that we are one part of the human race, that our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone on the planet, and that if this generation of Jews merely seeks to align itself with American power and contemptuously ignore the needs of the Palestinian people, that future generations will face the wrath of the world. We are setting up future generations of Jews so that they will face global outrage at the insensitivity our generation of Jews manifested when we had power over others. Our task is not to condemn Jews, but to heal the fear that has led so many Jews to shut their eyes to the pain we are causing others. Jews are fundamentally good, and our distortions are not a manifestation of an underlying evil but of an unhealed trauma at thousands of years in which we were the victims and others acted with outrageous insensitivity to us. Yet that healing also requires genuine repentance at the ways we've abandoned the com-passionate gentleness that was the hallmark of the Jewish soul for thousands of years.