Living the Passover story this year in North Carolina

Wishing you a Happy Passover!  Chag Pesach Sameach!

            I want to wish you a wonderful Passover filled with meaning and may all your matzah be tasty.  As we gather with friends or family for our Passover Seders this year, let us all be reminded of the messages of this holiday. 

            We retell the Exodus story of our ancestors from their enslavement in Egypt, and we are taught that each one of us is to use our imagination as if we were the ones toiling hopelessly in Egypt, watching the plagues shift all of our paradigms, trekking through the desert with a mixture of trepidation and jubilation on our backs right alongside the matzah we were cooking.  Each step away from Egypt brought us closer to freedom and yet had the opposite effect of gravity, making us feel more and more pulled back from whence we came.  And upon reaching freedom, we too feel the exaltation and relief and inspiration that the injustices of Egypt are behind us and that we can work to create a better, more fair society.

Our Passover narrative still rings true today, as we recognize that the Hebrew word for Egypt, mitzrayim, literally means, “narrow places.” One of these narrow places might just be the ballot box in just under a month.  The proposed Amendment One to the state constitution threatens to plague North Carolina with injustice.  Not only does this amendment strip our gay and lesbian friends and family, some of whom may be sitting at our own seders this year, of access to the rights of domestic partnership, but it threatens any loving couple who chooses not to marry for any number of reasons from being able to fully share in one another’s lives. Widowed couples who live together in unmarried partnership might no longer be able to advocate for one another’s health directives. Children raised by two loving partners might be stripped from the only parent they have left, in the case in which their biological parent was to die.  No matter how far away from Egypt we believe ourselves to be, society is constantly challenged by the gravitational pull of our narrower views. 

In the Passover story we see that if it had not been for external help – from an inspirational power like God, from a great leader like Moses, from the faith of Nachshon ben Amindadav (according to a Rabbinic Midrash, the Red Sea only parted after he stepped into it, believing that something could happen), we might still be stuck in the narrow spaces of Egypt.  Let us be inspired to do something about our modern narrow spaces:

o      Volunteer with Equality NC

o      Talk about the core of the issues with family or friends or coworkers or neighbors or grocery counter checkout people.

o      Be sure to vote on or before May 8^th (for Early Voting information click here)

o      Come to our Temple Beth Or phone bank, April 15^th – 10AM-1PM.  Contact Cindy Schneider, caschneider2000@aol.com, or Eileen Schwartz, eyeschwartz@nc.rr.com, for more details.

Current polling shows that although public sentiment does not agree with the outcome of this amendment, too many North Carolinians remain uninformed as to the potential consequences of this Amendment for it to be defeated. This will not change unless each of us steps forward to be a Moses or a Nachshon or an inspiration to others.

This year, let us each add a symbol to our seder plate, one that represents our contemporary Egypts, our own narrow spaces, our struggle against the injustices of Amendment One.  And when someone asks what it is doing on our seder plates, we can not only retell the story of Passover but relive it, as well. 

Rabbi Ari N. Margolis