Bernard Avishai, a Canadian-Israeli scholar and journalist who splits his time nowadays between New Hampshire and Israel, comments on the tension portrayed in the Passover Haggadah between Jewish nationalism and universalist values, noting the . . .
tension in the traditional Haggadah—between valorizing what must be done to liberate all people in need and valorizing what must be done to liberate Jews as a particular people—this hardly mattered in the diaspora, where the Haggadah was composed… . … Jews were the outsiders—so that doing what prevented their persecution, or advanced their civic interests, also advanced social tolerance and the formation of civil society more generally. This is not the way the Haggadah reads today, however: the tension is more palpable and vexing for Israelis—and, increasingly, for American Jews. When you have the military or police power to act against others, or the political power to oppose others, you don’t have the arguable luxury of assuming Jewish interests to be coincident with those of every oppressed person. (As if to prove this point as grotesquely as possible, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government—of all weeks, just before Passover—began the forced expulsion of many hundreds of the forty thousand of Eritrean and Sudanese refugees who had crossed the Sinai to find asylum in Israel.)
Today, the land of Israel is not something poetic and hypothetical, nor is the survival imperative inherently free of bigotry or the hunger for revenge harmless. The last point seems particularly urgent this day of the Seder, the day after the announcement of the great power agreement with Iran; Israelis and American Jews will find it impossible to read the Haggadah tonight without thinking about the deal’s implications. It is worth observing that, already, Netanyahu is denouncing the deal as “threaten[ing] the survival of the state of Israel.” And his view is widely echoed in Israel, including by otherwise balanced observers like Ari Shavit, who argued yesterday in Haaretz that the Lausanne talks were something like Munich all over again; that economic sanctions on Iran should rather have been intensified until “Iran’s nuclear capability was entirely sterilized.”
Hyperbole of this kind is safely conformist in today’s Israel—also among Jews supporting AIPAC in America. Its champions view themselves as stiffening spines against foes who, the Haggadah didn’t need to remind us, are real. Yet it is hard to hear the talk without thinking tonight of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Akiva, cowering and in mourning, defaulting to a frame of mind in which the only response to Jew-hatred is multiplied plagues. If this is Munich, then the alternative, as President Obama justly observed, is “another Mideast war.” But would war, or even the threat of war, really force Iran’s most authoritarian leaders to back down—or would it entrench them? Would increased sanctions really weaken Iranian hardliners as much as the integration of the country’s isolated, restless entrepreneurs and professionals into the global system? Rabbi Akiva, the Haggadah doesn’t bother reminding us, also inspired, early in the second century, the catastrophic Bar Kochba wars. . . .
The entire post can be read at Avishai’s blog, “The Deal–And Haggadah’s Repressed Anger” or under an alternative title at The New Yorker’s website: “A Nuclear Deal on the Eve of Passover.”
Leave A Comment