Politicians and Pesach

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 15 April 2024

I want to begin this morning with the story of Jan Karski, a Catholic Pole who was smuggled out of Nazi occupied Europe by the Jewish Bund, tasked with bringing the news of the Holocaust to Western governments and to push them to do more about it. When he eventually gained an audience with President Roosevelt in Washington, he clams up – awed by the fact that he was in the presence of such mighty power – and is unable to make his point, remaining silent while the president laments the treatment of horses in war-torn Poland, but asks nothing about the fate of the Jews.

I was reminded of the story of Jan Karski this week,  because you may have seen on social media that this week Alyth had a special visitor – we were visited by Keir Starmer,  who was filming his Pesach message. As part of his visit, he wanted to chat to our rabbis and professional team about Pesach (or Passover, as we kept calling it in order to make sense to those who would be watching the video who don’t do Hebrew).

Now, this was not Alyth as an institution nailing our political colours to the mast. If Rishi Sunak had asked to visit us, we would have welcomed him too.

In our conversation with Keir, we spoke about the importance of Pesach in bringing the family together; in remembering those who are no longer there to celebrate with us. Lynette, our Head of Community Care, spoke about the way in which the community will provide the opportunity for people to come together at this time.

We spoke about the fact that every family have their own unique traditions for their seders, and how they develop over time, so that each year it is a little bit different. We told him about the way in which we as Progressive Jews have added other elements to our seder plate to represent modern forms of slavery and oppression. This was particularly important because this visit to Alyth was the first visit Keir had made to a Progressive synagogue since the 7 October attacks over six months ago.

Keir spoke about the fact that he and his wife have a Pesach seder every year – to keep their children in connection with their grandfather’s Judaism. He was genuinely interested in connecting with us about this thing that our families shared.

It is not every day that you get to speak to the person who is currently the bookies’ favourite to become the next prime minister, and I certainly felt a great deal of pressure to say the right thing. I was keen that this not be an opportunity missed to bring home the important messages of Pesach, not simply to let him hear what he wanted, or what he was expecting.

Often when politicians speak to particular groups in society, and when they ask us what is important to us, the impulse can be to be inward-looking, to think about what we as a community want for ourselves. It is not always about being outward-looking, thinking about how we as a community might contribute to society as a whole, the ways in which we might help others.

In their book about the 2012 US Presidential election, sociologists Jeffrey Alexander and Bernadette Jaworsky argue that one of the reasons that Barack Obama won the election was that his opponent, Mitt Romney, when speaking to the African-American community, or the Latino community, would emphasise what his presidency would do to benefit them.

Obama focused not so much on what he could do for them, as much as he focused their attention on the good they did for American society – how much they were valued as a community – how much they should be proud of what they had contributed – the place that they occupied in American history.

So, I really wanted to make us think about how the message of Pesach was one that reached beyond our community, and really spoke to the idea that we as a Jewish people are commanded to be a light and a blessing to the entire world. That we are commanded to contribute and give of ourselves to the civic realm in which we live.

Yes, we as a Jewish community need to feel secure in the UK. We need to know that we have a future, and that we do not have to continually think about how we escape from anti-Semitism. We live in a time in which figure after figure project Germany in the 1930s onto our horizon.

And yet, as Rabbi Josh warned in his sermon last week, there is the risk that we turn in on ourselves – that we stop seeing our Jewish communities in relationship and in dialogue and in friendship with other communities in the UK.

We are made more secure when other groups in society are offered protection too. Security for minorities has to be core general principle in a liberal democracy like ours in the UK – otherwise protection is simply something that is the gift of the government of the day – much like in medieval times the protection of the realm was extended and retracted on the whim of a king or prince.

How could Pesach be of help to me here?

On Seder Night we will recite the plagues that befell the Egyptian population when Pharaoh refused to let the Israelites go from slavery. But we do so without glee and without parody. We do so somberly, removing some of our sweet wine with our fingertips as we recite each of the ten plagues. Our Seder loses at least some of its sweetness when we commemorate the suffering of others. In this way, Pesach makes us cognizant and conscious of the suffering of others. It teaches us that ours is not the only bitterness – ours is not the only suffering.

How important for us to remember that this year. As we sit down to our seders, in Israel and in the UK – in homes in our own community here at Alyth, there will be empty chairs – chairs that would have filled our loved ones, who were killed either in the 7 October attacks, or in the subsequent fighting in Gaza.

Our seder reminds us that others should be on our minds as well – the thousands of Palestinians who have lost their lives in Gaza, the many, many more who are left to grieve, their homes destroyed, wondering where their next meal will come from. Our seder says to us that the suffering of those Gazans is real, unavoidable perhaps, yet not to be forgotten or diminished.

B’chol dor vador – Rabbi Golan has been teaching this over the last few weeks about thi line from the Mishnah that is also at the heart of our Seder – in every generation, we should see ourselves as though we came out of Egypt. This is another call for empathy – not simply to tell the story about something that happened to other people thousands of years ago, but to see ourselves there with them.

For me this is not just a leap of imagination, it is a reminder that we so easily could be in that position again. And also: that in each new generation there are still those who are born into chains – human beings who are owned and oppressed by others. And so it is a reminder to practice justice – to fight for the freedom of all, because we may enjoy our freedom, but there are others who do not – yet.

Again, how important for us in a week in which the UK government continues to plan for the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, despite the rulings of the courts in the UK and in the Europe. Whether or not we agree with the policy, Pesach is a reminder that, literally but for the grace of God go us – if we were in the situation of fleeing the place we were born in search of a better life, is this how we would want to be treated?

Halachma anya – In our conversation, Student Rabbi Nicola reminded us of the prayer that accompanies the holding up of the matzah – the one that begins speaking about the bread of our affliction, and which ends with an injunction for us to create a world in which no one will go hungry.

If he becomes Prime Minister later this year, Keir Starmer will inherit a country in which over 2 million people have had to use foodbanks consistently over the last three years. That number is three times higher than the number ten years ago. And while access to food might not be a issue for the majority of our community, we would be arrogant and foolish to believe that there are not those in the Jewish community who struggle in this way.

There might be supporters of Keir Starmer (and indeed of all politicians!) who will assure us that these are all things they have a plan for. Well, that is wonderful, but the fact is that generation after generation we have celebrated Pesach – and yet we continue to need it. Surely after a couple of generations the world should have got the message!?

This is not exactly what I said to Keir Starmer, but it is in essence what I tried to communicate about the message of Pesach – why Pesach is not just a celebration, but a reminder of some imperatives of justice – Imperatives that are directed to us as Jews, but which are not just about us. Pesach, of all the festivals in our calendar, is the one that pushes us to use our history and our shared narrative of liberation from slavery to ensure that the suffering and the bitterness of oppression is something that might some day be abolished from the world.