Politics at the Seder table |
Our lovely hosts, on the second night of Passover, were troubled at the thought of once again lamenting the historic saga of Jewish deliverance from Egyptian oppression in the light of Israel’s oppression of its neighbouring Palestinians (I’m quoting).
They thought that fetishising Egyptian inhumanity and Jewish victimhood gave the appearance that we were indifferent—not just to the suffering of others but to the fact that our kith and kin may have been causing it. That we deserved, in other words, to be taken down a peg or two from our paschal self-righteousness.
Their response was to suggest that we either discard the Haggadah for the evening and conduct an open discussion of the dilemma before us, or use it to pivot from the conventional religious narrative to a more contemporary political appraisal.
That was how the evening began. It quickly led to a listing of grievances against (a) settler violence, the toleration of it by the police, and the encouragement of it by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s current Minister of National Security, and others; and (b) the implied complicity of the mainstream Jewish community—in Israel, in the diaspora, and perhaps even around our Seder table. The tone was simultaneously accusatory and breast-beating.
After the complaints had been restated several times, I tried to pin our hosts down. Where did they want the conversation to lead? If it was more than just a rehearsing of their anguish at supposed Jewish collusion, what should the takeaway be? Did they want us to write to our MP? Or to a Member of the Knesset? Or agree then and there to join a political party opposing the settler movement? Or donate to a charity supporting the Palestinians—Amnesty or Oxfam, perhaps?
But nothing concrete was proposed. Nothing was asked of us—just, apparently, that we wallow in guilt and denunciation of ourselves.
That left me confused: did they only want us to unload our political discomfort? Was it that the more we wallowed, the more meritorious we would be? The Haggadah encourages this in our........