The Seder Table, the Empty Chair for Elijah, and the Identity Choices we are ‘Forced’ to Make
It is true that we set aside a seat for the Prophet Elijah at our Passover Table . . . but why?
Perhaps he helps us to discern between choices that are forced upon us and the choices we must make for ourselves (and in doing so, helping us to remember who we are).
In our gathering this evening, let’s take a second look at Elijah’s take on Passover in 1st Kings 18:1-46
We’ve seen choices like this many times before, some especially painful — such as the choices we were to confront about faith and identity, not so long ago, at a time of the Spanish Inquisition: First, you give up your faith, then your people, your very identity – and then we will seek your burning.
Now, along comes a new American Style of Antisemitism: a new and improved demand of the Jews to choose.
Here, is an excerpted quote from the context below: “In this sense, critics of Israel who claim that American Jews must choose between Zionism and liberalism have it backward.”
Brett Stevens NYT April 2nd / The Appalling Tactics of the ‘Free Palestine’ Movement
Last week, Susanne DeWitt, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor who later became a molecular biologist, spoke before the Berkeley, Calif., City Council to request a Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation. After taking note of a “horrendous surge in antisemitism,” she was then heckled and shouted down by protesters at the meeting when she mentioned the massacre and rapes in Israel of Oct. 7.
At the same meeting, a woman testified that her 7-year-old Jewish son heard “a group of kids at his school say, ‘Jews are stupid.’” She, too, was heckled: “Zionists are stupider,” a protester said. At the same meeting, others yelled, “cowards, go chase the money, you money suckers” and “you are traitors to this country, you are spies for Israel.”
And not too much of what passes for a pro-Palestinian movement but is really pro-Hamas, with its calls to get rid of the Jewish state in its entirety (“from the river to the sea …”), its open celebration of the murder of its people (“resistance is justified …”) and its efforts to mock, minimize or deny the suffering of Israelis, which so quickly descend into the antisemitism on naked display in Berkeley.
How did this happen?
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In this sense, critics of Israel who claim that American Jews must choose between Zionism and liberalism have it backward. The illiberals (essentially Jew-hating antisemites who demand thaat the Jews to join them in self hatred) aren’t the people defending the right of an imperfect but embattled democracy (The Jewish State) to defend its territory and save its hostages.
Nor is it a matter of seeking a Palestinian state — another fact the demonstrators openly avow. Among the popular chants at many protests is “We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” — all of what had been Mandatory Palestine before the creation of Israel. Israeli soldiers and settlers vacated Gaza almost 20 years ago. The towns and kibbutzim that Hamas invaded on Oct. 7 are only “occupied” if one believes that all of Israel, in any kind of border, is a form of occupation.
A brief list of examples: In other words, the central, animating sentiment behind much of the protest movement is neither humanitarian nor liberationist. It’s eliminationist. And it expresses itself routinely in the tactics adopted by so many of its leading activists and followers.
Tactics like the grotesque and routine removal or defacement of posters of Israelis kidnapped to Gaza. Or holding a loud and aggressive demonstration outside of New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer hospital (“Make sure they hear you, they’re in the windows,” said one of the protest leaders), apparently because the hospital has collaborated with Israeli medical institutions. Or forcing a Jewish teacher at a public school in Queens to flee her classroom for safety as hundreds of teenagers rioted through the school, some waving Palestinian flags. Or shouting down Representative Jamie Raskin at the University of Maryland for being “complicit in genocide” when he came to the campus to give a talk on democracy and “the threat to reason in the 21st century.” Or surrounding a theater at the University of California at Berkeley that was supposed to host a talk by an Israeli lawyer, smashing windows, breaking through locked doors, spitting on and grabbing at least one student by the neck and forcing Jewish students to flee through an underground exit.
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Looking forward to seeing everyone this afternoon, today at 7:00 PM
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