MARCH 30• 2023 | 7

P

ikpa Refugee Camp, Lesvos, 
Greece. June, 2016. 
“No problem?” asks Sahar, 
pointing at my guitar. This is her favorite 
English phrase. She is 14 years old and 
has recently arrived from Afghanistan 
with her father and younger 
brother.
I am not sure why I’m 
in this camp. All I know 
is that one night I was 
home watching the PBS 
news, footage of flimsy 
overcrowded orange life-
rafts filling the screen, and 
something deep inside 
of me said, lech lecha. Go unto. So, I 
grabbed my guitar and went.
“No problem”, I answer, handing my 
guitar to Sahar. She has played it every day 
since I arrived. She asks me to teach her 
chords. “Sad one,” she says, smiling. On the 
fifth day, I ask her about her mother. She 
points her finger to her head and makes 
the sound of a gun going off. “Taliban,” she 
says. Her mother was a teacher, she says. 
Her mother played guitar.
Torah tells us, “and thou shalt love 
(the stranger) as thyself; for ye were 
strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 
19:34). And yet, our rabbis say that 
to love is not enough: “In every 
generation, a person is obligated to see 
themselves as though they came forth from 
Egypt.” (Mishnah Pesachim 10:5) These 
texts tell us not only to love each other, 
but to see ourselves as one another. 
This is why, on Passover, we do not 
hold up the bowl of matzoh ball soup 
or the brisket and say, “may all who are 
hungry, let them come eat.” Nope, we 
hold up a cracker: the bread of afflic-
tion, the meager food that marks our 
own release from bondage. Even as we 
offer to share it with others it reminds 
us that we are what we eat: Matzoh. 
Freedom. Come, we say. Let us ingest 
these together.
And suddenly, as I look at Sahar, I see 
every bit of my father — once a Holocaust 
survivor, a stranger in a strange land, wan-

dering through the world, hoping it will 
find him acceptable, worthy. I see every bit 
of myself. “Yes,” I hear my recently deceased 
father say, “we are all refugees.” 
The story of the Jewish people’s 
redemption from slavery is foundation-
al for good reason: it is the lived story 
of every human. Even those of us, like 
myself, who live in relative comfort and 
safety — do we not struggle to escape 
the shackles of our self-doubt, the tyran-
ny of our pride, the enslavement to our 
cell phones? We live it every day — and 
because we do, we love that story. And 
if we, as Jews, love that story, then we 
must love it for everyone.
“Do not set aside one life for another” 
the Mishnah tells us (Ohalot 7:6). 
On Passover, right after inviting the 
stranger in to eat, we say something 
even more important: “Whoever is 
in need, let them come and conduct 
the seder of Passover.” Let them come 
and conduct the seder of Passover. All 
humans have a right not only to tell, 
but to live out their own freedom 

story. Who are we to deny Sahar that? 
Indeed, we must not only confirm it, but 
because our becoming is bound up with 
hers, we must aid in it.
And now I know why I am here. I am 
here because I am a Jew. Fighting back 
tears I want to run out of the camp toward 
the sea that carried her here, the sea not 
unlike the one that delivered my ancestors 
to freedom, my father to Israel, the sea 
in which I can dive and scream and be 
washed of the world’s brokenness. Instead, 
I look in Sahar’s eyes — the ones that 
have seen too much, the ones that are 
inseparable from my own — and tell her 
how sorry I am. She looks down and begins 
to play my guitar. 
“No problem,” she says. 

(Note: This piece was originally published 
in Washington Jewish Week)

Robbie Schaefer is a singer-songwriter, theatre/film 

artist, and rabbinical student at Pluralistic Rabbinical 

Seminary. His first film, Burst the Silence, will be 

released by Rolling Pictures in 2023. Also, he likes 

olives. A lot.

Robbie 
Schaefer
The Times of 
Israel

opinion
No Problem: A Passover Story

Robbie and Sahar at the Pikpa Refugee Camp, Lesvos, Greece, June, 2016.

PIPPA SAMAYA

