The key moment of the night of the Exodus-- commemorated by Jews wed eve-- involved doing *the very opposite* of what we're all trying to do right now:

Touching a stranger who could contaminate them

& therein a age-old lessons.

A Passover/sociological/biblical THREAD

As I discuss in this @The_Lehrhaus essay last year ( https://bit.ly/2V9IE6z ), it's hard to answer the Passover Haggadah's call "to see oneself as if one had left Egypt" without reckoning with the seemingly troubling actions taken by Israel as it was leaving:

to ask the plague-stricken Egyptians ("no house without death") to "share" their valuable clothes & utensils even though Israel planned not to return? To "strip" them of such valuables?

How can such a seemingly unethical act be at the heart of this inspiring story of liberation?

The essay's key idea:

This sharing* is a powerful symbolic correction of a deep moral problem in (the biblical account of) Egyptian culture: a rigid caste hierarchy with "abomination" of the "stranger" ("Hebrew") as inferior & subhuman.

*See R. Samet on why "share" vs "borrow"

Here's how sharing accomplishes this:

Put differently, if Egyptian society had myths about the inferiority of the Hebrew in Joseph's time, imagine those myths after centuries of justifying human bondage? (sound familiar?)

Think of the risk that an Egyptian was taking in offering to wear/use what a Hebrew wore/used!

OK but if willingness to share dismantles the myth of stranger as inferior, what about the seemingly bad-faith
*request* to share?

One idea is that it was indeed problematic, leading to the crisis of "survival guilt" that Israel experienced a month later: https://bit.ly/2UPdh28 

But over this past weekend, our pandemic experience made me realize that the *request to share* was also a powerful, symbolic attack on a destructive social myth that keeps people apart: the stranger as contaminator.

This idea should come out in a @The_Lehrhaus essay next week

A quick summary for now.

The key is consider the following scene based on a close reading of Exodus 12 ( https://bit.ly/3e5QaHZ ) & ponder how you would have felt, informed by your pandemic experience:

There's a vicious plague afoot in the land
You can hear the wails of the plague-stricken households around you
You're sheltering in place
You're doorway is keeping the plague at bay

Why? Well beyond the reasons this is true for us, here it's slathered with sacrificial blood. Must have felt like a magical talisman

But so far nothing has happened to you

Your bags are packed as you wait- anxious, terrified- for the planned morning signal to depart

But then there's a terrifyingly loud knock on the door:

The new message from Moses is that you must go
Right now
In the middle of the night
With the screams of suffering & anguish all around

Think about it:

That doorway has been your protection

You were't supposed to leave till morning- do you trust these orders to head out into the plague? Does your spouse? Can you agree suddenly, without a fight?

& here's the kicker:
It's one thing to go out of your house.

Many of us are doing that nowadays.

But the change in plans also includes this:

You are to go to one of the plague-stricken houses!

You are to interact with someone who has been struck!

You are to touch & wear the clothing they've worn
You are to touch & use utensils they've used

Who would do THAT?

Throughout history, you didn't need the germ theory of disease to know that this is a very very bad idea-- the Talmud cites this very story to support that!

So who would dare leave the protection of their home?

Who would go into someone else's & touch their things?

It has to be someone who is convinced that this is no ordinary plague-- that it was highly targeted (first-born Egyptian), such that not only am I at risk but also this-- one has to act on this thought:

"I have nothing to fear from the stranger just because he's not family"

The upshot is a moral lesson that's so relevant today.

Just as the "social distancing" we're doing today seems like it's erecting social barriers is actually meant to help one another across them, this climactic moment of the Exodus is a powerfully productive pro-social act.

It at once explodes two age-old social myths:

The stranger as inferior
The stranger as contaminator

In fact, we're all equal -"stripped" naked before God & each other- & we need our families but also to transcend inter-familial boundaries.

Happy Passover חג כשר ושמח
Stay safe