DETROIT JEWISH CHRONICLE and The Legal Chronicle

4

April 7, 1944

A PASSOVER TRILOGY

By SIDNEY JACOBS

Editor's Note: Mr. Jacobs is a rabbinical student at the Jewish
Institute of Religion in New York City, and is a student-rabbi
of the Baisley Park Jewish Centre in Long Island. He is a
frequent contributor to the Anglo-Jewish press, and for a
number of years was the editor of "The Advocate" magazine
of Chicago.
swarthy "Mitzri," steeped in the
I. Slaves on the
Book of the Dead rather than in
the Tree of Life
Family Tree
Oh unhappy day for these
There are those among our al- troubled souls among us who
ways troubled intelligentsia— meditate on these things. Must,
those schizophrenic personalities then, the Passover be committed
whose hearts are always bleeding to the "geniza," the store-house,
for the other fellow and whose of things passe, antiquated and
fists are constantly smiting a contra-rational? It is not an easy
penitent tattoo on their own decision for this aristocratic stra-
breasts—who sit down, figura- tus among us, for of all the holi-
tively, perhaps, to the Seder table days, Passover is the easiest to
with heavy hearts. retain, since it conveniently em-
The late Sigmund Freud shook phasizes an Epicurean note in
their faith—the faith which they its egg matzoth, its soft-boiled
never avowed at best—when he eggs and its traditionally heavy
presented "evidence" to indicate Seder courses.
that Moses was not an Israelite at
Slaves as Ancestors
all, but a product of Egypt,
Allow us to ease the pained in
physically as well as spiritually. spirit on this matter. We are ill-
How can one sit down to the qualified to enter the arena of
Seder board, reclining as a prince, academic polemics on the authen-
dipping the prescribed number of ticity of Moses. We know, how-
times the bitter herbs into the ever, that there were Jews in
salt water, singing "Had-Gad-Yo," Egypt, and we know that at one
and chanting the Haggadah. when time in their history they were
one knows all the time that this slaves. If we cannot trust our
Moses, who was found in the Scriptures, then we can verify
bullrushes, who was raised by our contention from the contem-
the daughter of the Pharaoh, who porary Egyptian hieroglyphics of
smote the taskmaster, fled to the that early period.
wilderness, stood before the Burn-
We had ancestors who were
ing Bush, and finally returned to sieves. We had ancestors who
lead his brethren to the Prom- toiled from before dawn until
ised Land—was nothing but a the fading light of day called an
end to their labors—or perhaps
they labored by torchlight even
after. They built storehouses and
Sincerest Passover Greetings
pyramids. They steamed with the
sweat of their bodies, evn in the
dry climate of the Nile-land.
They were our ancestors, these
bent. crippled, grunting, heaving,
perspiring, half-naked slaves. For
400 years they bore the yoke,
and the children and the chil-
dren's children of those once
proud brethren of Joseph, the
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be free. Their minds, their na-
tional psychology, became warped
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and maladjusted, too, and they
ceased to long emphatically for
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They were freed. They were
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forced into freedom by a destiny
which they had decreed that they

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Passover Greetings and Best Wishes to the entire

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way of national self-annihilation free men!" *
and those who seek a revival of
the Jewish spirit is becoming
more pronounced; and there are II. The Seder—Bacchanale
many whose indecision has . or Blessing?
plunged them into the ever-with
The metropolitan newspaper s
ening chasm between the way of
life and the way of death for have a custom of long standing
our people. These are the tragic with relation to Jewish holidays
personalities who plunge into a and observances. The photographs
purgatory of frustration and dis• they carry on Rosh Ilashonah,
Yom Kippur, and Passover usu-
illusion and loneliness.
We may well repeat with add- ally portray elderly, bearded
ed fervor, "L'hsana ha-bah b' Jews reading the Law, blowing
Yerushalayim!"—"Next year in the Shofar, or presiding at the
Jerusalem"; next year returned Seder. A Seder photograph is
to the community of the self- very often at a Jewish old peo-
respecting, creative, positivist ple' s home where, from all indi-
cations, a patriarch who has al-
peoples of the world.
ready lived his biblical span is
In the words again of the Hag- qualified to ask the Four Ques-
Slavery in Freedom
gadah: "This year the sons of
See TRILOGY—Pag e 13
It .was Ahad Ha'am, great He- slaves; next year the children of
brew essayist and philosopher of
the last decades of the 19th cen-
tury, who, after examining close-
ly the psychology of Western
European Jewry, wrote in his
classic, "Slavery in Freedom":
"We, too, are slaves, and we,
also, will it not to be torn from
WE DESIRE TO EXTEND OUR SINCERE PASSOVER
our slavery."
He found slavishness in our
GREETINGS AT THIS HOLIDAY TIME TO OUR
representation to the Jewish
world. He found subservience in
MANY FRIENDS AND CUSTOMERS.
our inability to synthesize, with-
out sacrificing all that was ours,
our mores and our cultural con-
cepts with those of the rest of
the world, which we were sre
was all perfect, while we were
all imperfect. He found us ready
to sign away our very self-re-
1440 WASHINGTON BLVD.
spect to achieve a paper emanci-
pation. He found us feverishly
anxious to ingratiate ourselves
with the society in which we e,
lived, if necessary, by playing the
clown and the exhibitionist. He
found the title page of our con-
temporary history proclaiming
that we had solved the Jewish
problem, while the rest of the
vol consisted of instructions
so td conceal our identity
at the problem might not be
given an opportunity to evidence
itself.
The span of the last half-cen-
tury has not in the least altered
this situation. On every hand we
discover further manifestations
We wish to thank you all for your past patronage and
of our spiritual servitude to the
promise of Liberty, Equality and
hope to merit your confidence in the future.
Fraternity. In these Jews who
would insure themselves against
a Jewish future by strangling
Jewish education; and those who
fear democratic unity in Jewish
life; and those who spend their
fortunes upon secular aims while
turning a deaf ear to Jewish
needs; and those who fear to
admit our identity as a civiliza-
tion—on all of these and more
there is the unmistakable brand
of indenture.
Perhaps, however, the cycle is
complete. Six hundred thousand
Jews constituted the Exodus from
slavery in Egypt to freedom and
rebirth in Canaan. Approximately
600,000 Jews there are today in
Palestine, who fled the slavery
of the Diaspora to return to the
locus of the Jewish national
genius.
The great divide between those
who have chosen to pursue the

should not perish under the task-
master's truncheon. They fled
from the land of degradation and
they went into the wilderness
of Sinai.
They longed for the fleshpots of
Egypt, for the animal, vegetative
drudgery of existence which did
not impose upon them a moral
obligation, a Decalogue, which
did not make them the vanguard
of a spiritual process in a pagan
society.
These were our ancestors—and
who are we? In the words of
Israel Zangwill:
"Slaves in eternal Egypt, bak-
our strawless bricks,
At ease in successive Zions,
prattling our politics."

Best Wishes

Eiggitts Sc ifirank

PASSOVER
GREETINGS ..

and

Best Wishes to the
. .. Entire . . .
Jewish Community

/

DEPARTMENT OF MICHIGAN

Jewish War Veterans

OF THE UNITED STATES

Extend Cordial Greetings to all Michigan
Jewry on This Momentous Passover Season

S—
A-41:XL J. RHODES

Stat4 Commander

HARRY SHERMAN

*

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