Bring a Suitcase to Seder

I had no idea I would be attending a seder the other day when I went to The Jewish Federation building to hear Rabbi Ed Feinstein talk about “The Ethics of Exodus.”

But attend a seder I did, only one that was free of food, rituals or prayers.

This seder only served meaning.

Feinstein, the senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, started by revealing the “empty page” of the haggadah — the fact that it doesn’t answer this critical question: Why is the Exodus the Jewish people’s “master story”? Why pick a story that reminds us how pathetically weak we once were?

For the next hour, the rabbi made the case that pretty much every Jewish ethic is connected to our demeaning and humiliating experience as slaves in Egypt.

The rabbi asked: Why do good? Plato said that if you know good, you will do good. Kant talked about doing good as one’s “duty.” But Judaism, the rabbi explained, is wary of human nature, so it takes a more prudent route to ethical living. You must understand and feel the lessons of goodness in your bones.

And there are no deeper lessons than what’s in the master story of the Exodus that we relive at the seder table — all of them connected in some way to slavery.

Feinstein led with a well-known commandment from Exodus: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan.”

Our Torah focuses on strangers, widows and orphans because they are especially vulnerable. Unlike the successful and the powerful who attract attention, the vulnerable only get indifference.

They suffer the worst part of slavery — the sense of being “socially invisible.” That’s why the fundamental Jewish ethic, the rabbi said, is empathy: We are not allowed to relegate any human being to “social invisibility.” We were there, and we should know better.

The rabbi then touched on the human instinct to get revenge. He quoted Exodus: “When you see your enemy’s mule lying under its burden and would refrain from raising it, you must nevertheless raise it with him. You shall not subvert the rights of your needy in their disputes.”

He gave us an example. You have a neighbor who annoys you because he plays his music too loud. One day, you see that his car broke down, and he needs your help. Your first instinct is payback. So why help him? Two obvious reasons: empathy and setting a good example.

But there is another, less obvious reason: to free yourself from being a slave to your primal instincts. The story of the Exodus compels us to ask ourselves: Are we using our freedom to shape our characters, or are we slaves to our worst instincts? By resisting the temptation to take revenge, we free ourselves from our deepest inner slavery.

The rabbi and his seder were on a roll. Next, he shared what he called a “beautiful piece of Jewish music” from Deuteronomy: “You shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn.” A desperate, starving widow might offer you her garments so she can buy food, but you are not allowed to accept them. We are not permitted to strip any human being of their dignity, because we were slaves in Egypt, and we should know better.

We were now ready for the pièce de résistance, which can be boiled down to this: We human beings do not own anything.

That lesson was “unpacked” from another section of Deuteronomy: “When you reap the harvest in your field and overlook a sheaf in the field, do not turn back to get it … always remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.”

The rabbi, who once lived in Texas, did his best imitation of a macho Texas rancher who tells you that everything he owns is his: “This is my ranch, my tools, my cattle, my pickup, doggone it, it’s all mine!”

Well, not if the rancher is a Jew reliving the story of his Exodus and internalizing its message. Ever since Pharaoh “owned” us, the rabbi said, Jews have been extra sensitive to the whole notion of ownership.

The Torah worries that “if a human being can own everything, he can own anything.” After you own the field, the tools and the beast, what’s next? Your wife? Another human?

So you get one pass at “your” field, and anything left is for the “other.” This gives the other the dignity of work, but more importantly, it frees you from the slavery of obsessive ownership — fretting over that last piece of field that you missed and never being happy with your lot.

You can even be a slave to slavery itself. Just look at the greatest salesman of all, Moses, who could only convince 20 percent of his enslaved people to follow him to freedom. It’s the one virtue of being a slave, the rabbi said: You know that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday. As he put it: “Even if a person is broken, it’s the brokenness they know.”

Slavery lurks everywhere.

As our pre-Passover seder of meaning came to a close, one message rose above all: You can’t truly understand the ethics of the Exodus until you first see yourself as one of the slaves in Egypt. Of course, there is one problem with all this: If our actual seders overflow with food and festivities, how are we supposed to feel like slaves?

The rabbi, ever helpful, gave us an idea to add a little Exodus to our seders. Instead of sitting comfortably on a chair, sit on a suitcase — and put everything in that suitcase that you would take if it were “your last night in the desert.”

This is what our ancestors did in their own way. After 40 years of wandering as powerless humans, on their last night of slavery, they gathered their valuables and prepared for the unknown and treacherous world of freedom.

As Rabbi Feinstein brought home in his seder, it’s a world of freedom that is as treacherous today as it ever was.

David Suissa, an advertising executive, is founder of OLAM magazine, Meals4Israel.com and Ads4Israel.com. He can be reached at dsuissa@olam.org.