Sermon: The Empty Chair – Shabbat HaGadol 2015
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 28 March 2015
For many years when I was growing up we always had a missing person at our family Seder. This person was symbolised by an empty chair with the place in front of it fully laid out as if in hope that one Seder night they would come to join us. Each year the place would have a name at it and at a point in the Seder, just before the meal, we would hear about the person or the family the chair represented. This was a scene played out in Jewish homes all around the world and I expect that some people here had a similar ritual.
The name of that person or family who would occupy that empty chair was supplied to us by the 35’s group, the redoubtable women led by Margaret Rigal and Rita Eker who campaigned tirelessly on behalf of the Jews of the USSR who were not free to celebrate and participate in their Judaism until 1989. These names were real people, Jewish refuseniks, who had applied to leave the Soviet Union and whose applications had been refused and often resulted in their losing their jobs, and accusations resulting in imprisonment. Their cases became known abroad and they were adopted into the hearts and Sederim of Jewish families worldwide.
We would send letters to the refusniks who had joined us at Seder and very occasionally receive something back. Was this worthwhile? In 1990 I found out first hand just how worthwhile it had been.
As a young adult youth leader I led a mission of other young people to visit what we did not yet know were likely to be the last of the refusniks in Moscow and what was still known as Lenningrad. The six of us, slipping away from our Intourist Government Tour Guide would go from flat to flat at addresses that we had been given, visiting the families whose names Margaret and Rita had given us. We visited the first Chedarim and Jewish Youth Clubs that in this year just after Mikhael Gorbachev embraced a new policy of openness – glasnost, were beginning to open up in the cities. It was an amazing time of change.
One of the most impressive experiences for me was repeated in a number of these visits. When we went to the flat of a refusnik they would often show us the carefully and proudly kept letters which they had received from Jews around the world, at Pesach, as part of the twin Bar and Bat Mitzvah schemes. We videoed what we saw and bringing that video back to Synagogues in England made quite an impression. The empty chair at the Seder had truly been occupied. The care for a person far distant had not yet freed their bodies, but no doubt at all it had freed their spirit. The work done in Synagogues such as Alyth and by Jews all around the world to make sure that Soviet Jews were in our hearts was of huge value – as Natan Sharansky, now head of the Jewish Agency in Israel but once refusnik Anatoly Sharansky, jailed for nine years in the USSR has himself testified.
The idea of leaving an empty chair at your family Seder, laid up and ready, actually predates the campaign for the freedom of Jews in the USSR. It was started by American Jewish Federations as a way of remembering the victims of the Shoah, the Holocaust at our Sederim, then adapted for the Soviet Jewry Campaign. It is rooted in some of the first words of the Hagaddah – “Let all who are hungry come and eat” in the opening invocation “Ha lachma anya”. A seder without hospitality to the stranger is not complete.
Inviting those who physically cannot join you to your seder as well as those who can is then a really effective way of ensuring that all around the Seder Table are able to put into action another key phrase of the Hagaddah – “we must remember that we were once slaves in the land of Egypt.” So much in the Seder is, according to the Mishnah Pesachim, there to arouse curiosity, to encourage a child ask questions, not formalised in the Mah Nishtanah but also intended to be free questioning. Why do we eat Matzah tonight? Why do we lean when we eat? Why is there an empty chair here tonight?
But first why do we need to remember that we were once slave in Egypt? Is it so we can pass on to our future generations an abiding sense of victimhood? Surely not.
Is it so we can be forever vigilant as a people for the next oppressor who will rise up against us? Perhaps. Though we have to be careful that appropriate and necessary vigilance does not turn into paranoia.
The real purpose today of reminding ourselves year after year that we were once slaves in the land of Egypt is to help us to build empathy and be moved to action on behalf of those who still have that experience today. In the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy we are commanded to be sure that everyone whose employment we control has a weekly day of rest because we are to remember that we were slaves in Egypt and once denied that dignity. Remembering that we were slaves in Egypt means that Jews should always be educating themselves to know which people are being denied their liberty and asking ourselves whether or not this is just.
The empty chair at your Seder is an effective way of ensuring this begins to happen. Who might it represent? Perhaps a person who is currently one of the 30,000 held in indefinite detention here in the UK each year as a migrant whose case had not yet been concluded. Nearly a 1000 will be detained this year for more than six months. Maybe one of the over two hundred girls still held captive by Boko Haram in Nigeria having been abducted from their school in Chibok. Maybe one of the Jews and other Ukrainian families caught up in hopeless fighting in the East of Ukraine, pulling their world apart. Maybe on this Shabbat when we are visited by our friends from the Movemnt Juif Liberal De France Synagogue in Paris the empty chair could represent one of the victims of terror, in Paris, or Copenhagen as the world deals with the threat of Islamic extremism.
The empty chair is potentially a symbol of hope, like the cup for Elijah which sits there ready on the Seder table for the dawning of the Messianic Age. What it means is this – we remember you, we are with you in your struggle, you are not alone, you are not forgotten. What will yours be this year? Who will your family invite into your Seder to help them taste the spirt of freedom? What is the cause that remembering you were once slaves in Egypt inspires you to empathise with?
May your Pesach be full of meaning and hope just as it is full of the celebration of being together at this special time of the Jewish year.