I have been reflecting this Passover on how it commemorates my people marking our doors so that God’s avenging angels would pass over our homes. Passover commemorates both the hardship of the Egyptian slavery but also the fortitude in fighting for freedom and celebrating our liberation.
This year I have been considering the darker aspects to Passover. Moses called down death on every first born Egyptian of every generation (male or female) of all ages in their homes. This included the first born of the Pharoah, who was a child. It was the final and most brutal of the plagues Moses called down on the Egyptians as a desperate bid to gain freedom for the Israelites. Earlier plagues involved famine (locusts), poisoning the water supply, disease… but it was the overnight murder of his child and every first born in Egypt that finally convinced Pharoah to let the Israelites go free.
I know the Torah isn’t 100% historical, but there must be a foundational truth. I think it reflects a bloody struggle for liberation that included killing innocents, even Egyptian children. But that’s ok, we are taught as kids, because the Egyptians were the bad guys. I no longer think in such childish terms. I think it’s very dark and bloody, and that Moses terrorised the Egyptians to gain our freedom. No wonder Pharoah pursued us, he likely saw the freedom he was forced to grant as an unjust reward for terrorism and felt that his attempt at vengeful genocide on the lonely desert road north out of Egypt was justice.
Hamas murdered thousands of innocent Israelis in a bid for freedom for their people, they terrorised the entire country and have done so for decades. Oct 7th was the bloodiest massacre. In response, I feel like Nethanyu is attempting to do to the Palestinians the genocide that Pharoah tried to do to us thousands of years ago.
For me, this Passover is one of prayer for the death and destruction to end. To understand that terrorism is what a desperate and oppressed people do to try and gain freedom. That freedom is a right, and can never be a reward.
I believe that the land needs to be shared. Just as Israel deserves to exist, so does a modern Palestinian State.
In Antiquity, Judea was an autonomous Jewish kingdom living peacefully alongside Palestine. Gaza, within Palestine, was the premier centre of science and learning for the Eastern Mediterranean. It was a hub of commerce as the trade routes from India and the far east to the west went through Gaza, as did the ancient roads north and south between Egypt and the Near East. That era was one of great prosperity and peace for all the inhabitants of all religions and ethnicities (a lot more pagans then) and it can be so again.
But we cannot do any of this, until we all stop the war machine. A war machine that is threatening to engulf the entire region and dismantle the international laws put in place by the survivors of WWII to prevent what we are seeing unfold with increasing momentum from happening again.