Why did the Egyptians hate the Jews so much? Take a look at Genesis, Chapter 47. Was it because Joseph enslaved the Egyptians and kicked them out of their homes when they had no food to eat (sentences 20 & 21) though he did so on behalf of Pharaoh? Moreover, in sentence 1 he gave his family “achuzah” – a permanent possession – in Egypt. See it again in verse 27. So the Jews had it better than the Egyptians (who were dispossessed) and indeed the Bible says they had the best of the land of Egypt. Meanwhile, later Pharaohs worried that this landowning class would be a Fifth Column so he made sure to kick them out of their homes too. And later enslave and even kill them.

Notice the dehumanization of the Jews ...Exodus 1: verse 19: kee chayat hena (they are like beasts – not like us). Or sentence 7: Vayeeshritzu (they multiplied like insects); or sentence 12 (again insectlike growth). After the first sentences of Exodus, you never hear any of the Jews referred to by name again except Moses and Aaron; it is always “A Hebrew” or something impersonal. After all, it was a Pharaoh who “knew not Joseph. (Exodus 1:8)” 

Notice that even in Genesis 43:32, Joseph sits by himself, the brothers are by themselves and the Egyptians are by themselves, all eating. Because even though Joseph is second to Pharaoh, it is still an abomination to the Egyptians to eat with a Jew.

Notice also that in Genesis 46:34 it is an abomination for an Egyptian to be a shepherd, so Joseph tells his brothers to tell the Egyptians that they are shepherds so that everyone will leave them alone. 

The point here is that once you dehumanize people and make them different, it is easy to go and kill them and feel nothing at all. You can run your concentration camp during the day and listen to your classical music at night and the commandant of Auschwitz can keep a guest book in which his visitors wrote that the weekend they spent at the camp was “the best weekend of their lives.” The story of Egypt is akin to the story of the Holocaust. The Germans and the Egyptians both were cultured for their times, but saw themselves as superior and, in times of economic crisis, turned their wrath upon those they resented for their wealth and made them into “abominations.”

Remember also that the flood came upon the world when Man looked at other men as things they could do with as they pleased...Man’s dehumanization of Man brought about “Chamas” (corruption and violence) and brought about the conditions for the Flood. “The people of God looked down upon the People of Man and did with them as they wished” (Genesis Chapter 6) – meaning that some people thought that others were godless people and therefore not deserving of their dignity. In the end, they destroyed each other and God destroyed them all.

It is an important lesson not to dehumanize others because what goes around comes around. It is not for nothing that the Bible tells us 43 times to be kind to the stranger in our Land because we were strangers in Egypt. The story of the Jews and Ancient Egypt is a story for our day as well.
 

II. How can we realistically relive the Passover story so that we feel “in the story?”

Every year, the child starts the Seder asking: Why is this night different from all other nights? Funny, but the Haggadah (book containing the ritual service) never answers the question. The answer is that on this very night on the calendar we were taken out of Egypt but the Haggadah never actually says so. It says lots of things but not exactly that.

Hmm..and the essence of the commandment to have a Seder is that you should feel as if you yourself went out of Egypt. So, if you don’t feel like this, then you haven’t really fulfilled the Seder. It is hard in 2002 to feel like you just left Egypt after being enslaved there for 400 years.

The paragraph that recites this commandment leads right into one of the central parts of the Haggadah which is the Hallel Service which we say without a blessing and, according to the rabbinic sources, one who says Hallel without a blessing should be a person from a generation who personally experienced a fantastic deliverance from God.

So what is going on here? All this ritual predicated upon a state of profound meaning while many of us sit around here wondering how any of this is relevant in the year 2002...

Try turning the tables upside down. Tonight is NOT different from any other night and we are not supposed to feel as if we just came out of Egypt.  Then what?

In Deuteronomy, when the commandment to relay the story of Passover is given, it says nothing about the narrative of Egypt with all the plagues, miracles, crossing of the Red Sea, etc. It says “My ancestors were wandering Aramites, they went to Egypt, became prosperous, were persecuted and God took care of them.” That’s the narrative given in Deuteronomy. You could substitute Egypt with almost any other place or time in Jewish history. Spain, Germany, Iraq, Iran, as examples. Even today, there is prosperity amid a resurgence of anti-semitism. This past year there was the conference on racism in Durban which was hijacked into the most anti-semitic global event in the past 50 years.

So the story of Passover is not to imagine you were in the past, but to imagine that you are in the present – or rather, to remind one of reality. Every year and every generation has had it no different, sometimes better and sometimes worse – never perfect, never hopeless. It is said that Moses was born because his sister who had hope convinced his parents to have another kid even when the Egyptians were killing the children. Every part of the Seder has a mixture of elements of slavery and freedom – we eat the bitter herbs with a bit of haroseth, for example. Last year at Tisha B’Av, people in America couldn’t find anything to mourn about; this year they will. Israel has big problems, but the world for Jews is infinitely better today than it was 50 years ago.

Every year we lift our glasses right in the middle of telling the story of Passover and say that in every generation people rise up to finish us off but God sustains us (hard to believe that we still actually have this situation in 2002, over a thousand years after these words were written). If you believe that every generation experiences antisemitism and the fulfillment of God’s promise in some form (ie: little Israel surviving and even kicking butt in the Middle East), then we know why we don’t answer our kids when they ask us why tonight is different – they are not asking us, they are telling us the obvious. And we now know how we felt when we left Egypt, because nothing has changed. We only hope for the day when we will not have to constantly take the good with the bad or the bad with the good, but will only have good in our lives.

END OF SERMONETTE. Adapted from sermons given this year by Rabbi Ari Berman of the Jewish Center, New York.
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P.S. Some inconvenient thoughts, for readers of Globalthoughts.com: I keep contemporary politics out of sermonettes, but there is obviously some guidance for Israel in this Biblical narrative, although just what it is isn't clear. Rabbis calling Arabs "snakes" and "vermin" and the continued dispossession of Palestinians of land and rights (even in the face of increasing terror) and rationalizing it by saying that they are "animals" and not quite as human or civilized as we are -- these are clearly danger signs with clear historical precedents. If the Bible tells you 43 times to be kind to the Arab in Israel with constant reminders of the Jewish experience in Egypt, it is not a subtle message. It is clearly more explicit than anything relied upon by those committed to Eretz Israel from hints in Biblical texts. We cannot have it both ways -- to condemn the Ancient Egyptians and to rationalize similar behavior when we do it. Blaming it on terrorism begs the question -- should we be occupiers in the first place and are we acting the way we should be, or are we just becoming thugs in order to continue to occupy because they force us to do so as the price to be paid?

Or, you could seize on Part II of the Sermonette for an opposite conclusion. The world hasn't changed in 3,000 years, our enemies will always want to destroy us no matter what we do, we should just rely on God's promise and continue to do what we do best, and be content to remind us of the reality that we will always be in an ambiguous state, with good and evil around us till Messiah comes.

You can distinguish the sermonette by saying that Parts I and II deal with life in the Diaspora, and therefore life in Israel is different. You can do lots of things to explain problems away. But I think there are some important points here in this Biblical narrative that transcend ancient history and that require careful thinking and a greater willingness for self-criticism and revision of our objectives, particularly when our distress is appreciably higher and the impulse for revenge and retaliation is most tolerable. God does not make life easy for us by telling us what to do in the year 2002. We have our Part I'ers and Part II'ers among us, and we shall have to try and resolve the conflict for ourselves. No matter how you slice it, there is no question that this year's Sermonette shows the Passover story to be at the crux of Judaism and its place in the world in 2002.