Resonance of Passover and our nation
PASSOVER is one of the most significant dates in the Jewish calendar. It marks the exodus of the Jewish people under Moses’ leadership from the tyranny of Pharaoh in Egypt across the desert to ultimate freedom 3300 years ago.
Every year at this time, Jewish families gather to celebrate Passover; first the “passing over” of the angel of death who left the Jews untouched as they prepared to escape slavery, and then to remember the bitter and the sweet of the years of captivity and the wandering in the desert, before finally reaching the Promised Land.
The resonances between the Passover observances and our nation, South Africa, are profound.
On Monday, at Villa Arcadia in Johannesburg, in what was once the Jewish orphanage created by the same Morris Isaacson whose eponymous school in Soweto would be the crucible of the 1976 youth revolution, we had two modern-day South Africa’s Moses address the annual Freedom Seder.
We were privileged to have Mavuso Msimang, an ANC elder, and Albie Sachs, a former Constitutional Court judge, remind us of South Africa’s own journey from oppression into freedom 25 years later.
During the Seder (ritual) every year we hear the story of four children: the one child is wise, the one child is wicked, the one child is simple and the last child does not know how to ask.
This illustrates the diversity of our community, the very differences that create our rich and textured society and teaches us that if a society truly wishes to harness the best within it, it needs to embrace all these different and unique individuals.
Another part of the ritual is the commandment upon us to retell to our children each year the story of the exodus from slavery to freedom.
Both Msimang and Sachs did that in their own way, retelling our history – in Msimang’s case tracing it from before the Anglo-Boer War right to the present day – even though South Africa’s transition from oppression to liberation is only 25 years old.
As Sachs pointed out during the drafting of the Constitution, the architects were aware of problems other developing countries experienced, and were determined to avoid the same pitfalls. “The beautiful people are not yet born,” he said, borrowing from Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah. We are not free of temptation, we are not yet perfect, and so the Constitution was constructed to safeguard us from our own frailties; to aim for perfection while guarding against corruption.
He reminded us just how the Constitution – and the associated agencies created to protect it – had withstood the recent storms and explained the importance of placing our trust in process and principle rather than relying on individuals and personalities.
Even so, the Constitution did not save us from some of the awful things that have been done – much of which indeed has its foundations in the centuries of oppression that went before, but some of which are due to things that we ourselves have done wrong now. It is those things that we must account for and take responsibility for.
Let us appreciate our freedom by remembering our journeys, the bitter and the sweet, and in so doing build the best possible futures for ourselves.
On behalf of the South African Jewish community, I wish all South Africans a blessed Pesach.