Excerpt:
“Let all who are needy, come and celebrate Passover. Let all who are hungry, come and eat.” The Bible reminds us, over and over, that we must use our degrading experience in the land of Egypt to sensitize us to the suffering of others. The idea being that the suffering of our ancestors, which we should imagine as our own, is to be seen as an ennobling experience. We are instructed to care for the wanting because we were once wanting in Egypt.
Notice that the text refers to “all” who are needy and hungry. It does not refer to all Jews who are needy and hungry, but to all people. It is true that the text was written by Jews and for Jews, but I want to suggest that the inclusive language is deliberate. As mentioned above, the ethics of Passover, in actuality the ethics of Judaism, revolve around the concept of radical sympathy and empathy for those who are suffering. This call for identification and compassion is not reserved for Jews alone. The universalism of Jewish ethics resulted in the Torah instructing us only once to love our neighbor (who surely was Jewish), while commanding us in no less than thirty-six places to care for stranger (who surely was not Jewish) “because you yourself know how it feels to be a stranger — you were strangers in Egypt.” [Exodus 23:9]
To love the stranger is a revolutionary concept — revolutionary in the ancient world with its ethics of tribalism, and revolutionary today with the scourges of violent ethnic, religious, and national divisions. Of course, for these words not ring hollow, for them not to be an exercise in self-indulgence, we need to ask ourselves what does it mean to be a stranger? Who is today’s stranger? And am I, as a Jew, acting with empathy, compassion, and love toward those who are deemed to be strangers?
