A Prophetic Pesach Message

'So why did you decide to become a Rabbi?' The traditional response to this oft-posed question is 'for the power' - an answer laced with irony, since it is well-known that the opinions and voices of religious leaders in general are rarely sought, even less attended to. Rabbis are said to be invisible for six days of the week and incomprehensible on the seventh.

But the approach of the festival of Passover provides Rabbis with an opportunity to exercise more power than is the case for most of the rest of the year. For this is the annual occasion when the Bible demands that 'no leaven shall be found within your homes or within your borders.' And in our sophisticated world of processed foods and additives, the question of what is and is not permitted to cross Jewish thresholds and lips for the week of Passover assumes staggering proportions. Rabbis all over the world, it would seem, busy themselves inspecting the contents of local supermarket shelves and producing for their congregants lists of foods which meet the biblical requirement. At last, a time when a Rabbi has power.

But this annual opportunity to exercise this power over my congregants' eating habits is one which I greet with increased alarm and concern, often leading me to wonder if I am a real Rabbi. Of course, in the eyes of many members of the Jewish community, I am not: not only do I reject this Passover predilection to examine the potential guilt of food products which are deemed innocent for the rest of the year, I have also spoken out against the policies of the Israeli government which seem inhumane and have occasionally been heard to suggest that the accuracy of religious ritual is less important than the spirit in which it is carried out.

All of which sometimes causes me to question whether or not I really am a Rabbi. But if being a Rabbi requires me to defend policies which seem to contradict the very essence of the religion in whose name I speak, if being a Rabbi means that I am expected to spend this time of the year - and indeed all year - policing other people's eating habits, then I’m not altogether sure that I want to be one anyway. None of this bears any relation to the reasons I entered the Rabbinate more than a decade ago and if this is the locus of the Rabbi's power, then I want nothing to do with it, nor with a Jewish religion which seems to define itself by ritual accuracy and apparent purity, assuring itself that the main significance of the coming festival of Passover is to ensure that we don't have the wrong food in our homes and our stomachs.

This is nonsense. The significance of the festival of Passover is that the events which it commemorates represent one of the most powerful human messages the world has ever heard. This was the moment when the ancestors of the Jewish faith discovered freedom and, as a result of this, founded a religion which was based on the belief that freedom and justice should be enjoyed by all humanity and that no one group of people had the right to oppress or enslave another. All the symbols of the seder meal with which the Passover is welcomed, all the requirements about particular food are meant to focus the minds of Jews on their history, their heritage and their responsibility. And frankly, if they don't, then the whole exercise will have been a complete waste of time.

I don't want to be a Rabbi, speaking in the voice of legal detail and ritual requirement. I don't want to be a Rabbi, concerning myself with the fulfilment of someone else's interpretation of an ancient text, speaking with the voice of generations of legal debate and decision in which I have no say and which do not speak to me or to the world in which I and my congregants live. I want to speak with the voices of those who first made me realise what was the true purpose of Judaism, of this religious venture which humans seem determined to bury under the weight of petty ritual requirement.
Thousands of years ago, there were those who raised their voices against the hypocrisy and injustice of their time. Men like Isaiah, Amos and Jeremiah would stand outside centres of worship to which the wealthy Israelites would bring their offerings, believing that making grand sacrificial gestures would be sufficient in the eyes of God to permit them to return to their luxurious homes and continue to make gain from the poor. They would cry out that God was not interested in their hollow ritual, that God was weary of the spectacle of sacrifice, watching people grandiosely carrying out what they regarded as their religious duty while living in and exploiting a society which was riddled with injustice, poverty and suffering:
‘That you come to appear before Me – who asked that of you? Trample My courts no more;
Bringing offerings is futile, incense is offensive to Me.

New Moon and Sabbath, proclaiming of solemnities, assemblies with iniquity
I cannot abide.
Your new moons and fixed seasons fill Me with loathing;
They are become a burden to Me, I cannot endure them.
And when you lift up your hands, I will turn My eyes away from you;
Though you pray at length, I will not listen.
Your hand are stained with crime – wash yourselves clean;
Put away your evil deeds from my sight.
Cease to do evil, learn to do good.
Devote yourselves to justice: aid the wronged.
Uphold the rights of the orphan; defend the cause of the widow.’
(Isaiah 1:12-17)'I loathe, I spurn your festivals, I am not appeased by your solemn assemblies.
If you offer Me burnt offerings, or your meal offerings, I will not accept them;
I will pay no heed to your gifts of fatlings.
Spare me the sound of your hymns,
And let me not hear the music of your lutes.
But let justice roll down like water,
Righteousness like an everflowing stream.’
(Amos 5:21-24)

These are the words I wish to utter and have heard as we approach the festival of Passover. This is the message I want to resound around the Passover celebrations in Jewish homes. Words which speak of the duty to seek righteousness and justice in our lives and in the lives of our community, our society, our world. I have no interest in words which tell of permitted or forbidden foods, only in the message that must be learned from them: that we, as descendants of those who celebrated the first Passover over three thousand years ago, have a responsibility to them and to the tradition which grew from their experiences to ensure that the message of Passover is heard and implemented all over the world. If this can be achieved by the selecting and eating of particular foods, then all well and good. But if the selecting and eating of these particular foods is the sole focus of our Passover concerns, then we will have failed in our observance of the festival and will be worthy of the scorn which Isaiah, Amos and others poured upon their contemporaries.

This is my Passover message. It is not a rabbinic message, it is a prophetic message. The spirit at the heart of Judaism which first inspired me to become a Rabbi comes not from the pages of generations of legal debate and ritual decision but from the insight and the courage of the prophets who understood a simple and powerful religious truth. That truth has nothing to do with lists of permitted and forbidden foods, it is to remind us that ritual is worthless unless it reminds those practising it of their real religious duty to do everything possible in their lives to rid the world of injustice and oppression so that one day all the world will be able to celebrate the freedom which is the focus and the challenge of the festival of Passover.
Rabbi Pete Tobias
Pesach 5762/April 2002