A Passover Message from Robert Garber
Robert Garber shares his thoughts and inspiration for Passover this year.
We were a stiff-necked people.
I’m reminded of that every year, as we read the Haggadah, and in the weeks and months before, as we remember the escape from Egypt, in our weekly parashot. We kvetched the entire way. Every time Moses thought he had sated us, we had a brand new thing to complain about. The child in the backseat of the car crying “are we there yet?” for the hundredth time could only aspire to the level of obstinacy of the ancient Israelites. Whether we were right, or, as was more often the case, rock-strikingly wrong, we were completely intractable – but also unabashedly unafraid to share what was on our minds.
This is something that has been lingering in my mind lately. I returned to writing for the AJT early last year, to a job where I got to hear from and share the perspectives of others – something I’ve always loved to do – but have been, at best, hesitant to share my own. This is a difficult thing for a writer, especially one whose focus in the year or so previous had been personal essays with the occasional smattering of poetry. But in the realm of article-writing, silencing yourself for the sake of someone else’s story becomes something of a necessity.
Again, it’s not that I don’t enjoy it – it is a rare opportunity that gives you the ability and responsibility to organize the words of others into a collage that simultaneously preserves the meanings of the speakers and builds to a larger picture. It’s just that I wonder if there’s a place between a self-portrait and a landscape from which the artist is excluded.
When we tell the Pesach story, we engage in a tradition of several hundred generations speaking of a thing that they themselves did not witness, but finding within it something that relates to them. We’re just as much telling our own story – both as a people, and as individuals – as we are telling each of theirs, generation after generation, all the way down the line.
I think there are discussions this year, as there have been perhaps every year, that we do not want to have. But they are conversations, also, which we would feel lesser for not having – allowing our voices to be excluded from a several thousand-year-old story. My hope for this year, both sitting around the Pesach table, and in my writing, and in my life, is to not forget the legacy of the Israelites – a people with a stiff neck, yes, but unafraid, right or wrong, to speak their mind.
Robert Garber is the Online Content Coordinator for Atlanta Jewish Times.
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