DENNIS DAVIS
The central passage of the seder as captured in the Haggadah, as translated into English reads as follows:
“In every generation, every individual should feel as if he or she had actually been redeemed from Egypt. As it is said you shall tell your children on that day saying, it is because of what G-d did for me when I went free out of Egypt. He redeemed not only our ancestors but us with them as it is said ‘G-d brought us out of there to bring us to the land promised our ancestors.”
The two nights that we spend around the seder table poring over a text which has been read in similar fashion throughout vicissitudes of our history, should not and indeed was not designed to be a simple ritual incantation, abstracted from current challenges.
After all, each of us must place ourselves existentially as if we were part of the Exodus and then ponder what that means for ourselves and contemporary society of which we are a part.
Sadly, the radical implications of the ritual at the seder, which are designed to trigger this kind of existential reflection among the participants at the seder table, have given way to ritual for its own sake, divorced from the reflective quality which lies at the heart of the passage which I have cited.
The critical lessons of history are then lost. Hence, do we even begin to ask whether the discussion of Rabbi Eliezer and his rabbinical colleagues was not about pilpul but rebellion against the Romans? The implications that should be prompted by the prescribed rituals are sadly forgotten. As a result, we continue in both the spiritual and political wilderness.
Within this context it is significant to think through the implications of the narrative that inhabits the Haggadah and the rituals attendant upon the seder for contemporary South Africa.
Twenty years ago we were liberated from the yoke of apartheid, racism, sexism and a totally oppressive society. We claimed to gain our freedom. But did we?
As did those who were fortunate to exit the oppression of the Egyptians but forgot to understand the moral implications of their delivery from oppression, so does contemporary South Africa suffer from a similar social amnesia.
In being delivered from the burdens of apartheid and its consequential racist and oppressive incrustations, we fail to understand what delivery to freedom really meant for us for the implications of our identities and thus for a newly-constructed society.
To recap those who benefited from the miracle of delivery from the Egyptians swiftly began to grumble about their fate, and they rapidly thereby eschewed the true challenges which freedom from exile posed. Thus, they wandered in the desert for 40 years until they had died out and a new generation, filled with the embrace of a fresh identity and a better grasp of freedom, took over the nation.
In South Africa today, there are many who look back with depressing fondness at the previous regime: “Not everything was that bad, some benefits flowed from 300 years of oppression; the record is ambiguous.”
These are statements which flood our discourse with all too depressing regularity. The core of this view fundamentally misunderstands that the gift of freedom from the yoke of exile impels us to meet the challenge of developing a fresh identity, unhindered from the prejudices of the past and able to grasp knowledge which is no longer saturated with the prejudice of the past and the effects of a truly egregious history.
The reason that a new generation had to be born subsequent to the Exodus, was that the people who exited were not up to the challenge of freedom. They hankered after the past and could not see the future. They were unable to embrace fresh perspectives unfettered from the restraints, intellectual, political and moral, which had been imposed on them, very often subconsciously.
A generation saturated with subconscious bias could not meet the challenge of a society which is designed to inherit G-d’s kingdom. That message is as applicable today in South Africa 2017, as it was all those generations ago.
Similarly, the new kingdom was not designed to reproduce awful habits and practices of previous oppressors. Corruption, lack of accountability and transparency, moral slippage, false news, the inability to think beyond the narrow confines of one’s self-interest, were hardly the stuff of a new society. It took 40 years to purge the people of those perspectives.
These lessons are luminously applicable to South Africa in 2017. Perhaps the only prayer that we might make as we sit down to embrace this spirit at the seder table, is to hope that it will not take another 20 years before South Africans learn the lessons which flow so clearly from the readings that we engage over during two pulsating nights of debate and reflection.
