We Will Tell the Story
In 1997 Rabbis and American dignitaries hosted the Dalai Lama for a seder in Washington, D.C. in order to help the Tibetan leader explore “spiritual survival in exile”, which he hoped to bring back to his people living in exile since the 1959 Tibetan Uprising.
The Dalai Lama said of the event,
“In our dialogue with Rabbis and Jewish scholars, the Tibetan people have learned about the secrets of Jewish spiritual survival in exile: one secret is the Passover Seder.”
The Passover seder is certainly the obvious place to start a conversation about Jewish exile. However, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Saks poetically illustrates that this story is not just about exile but, perhaps even more significantly, about the power of Jewish story telling (The Story We Tell About Ourselves, Bo 5780).
Rabbi Saks quotes a Scottish journalist named Andrew Marr as writing: “The Jews have always had stories for the rest of us.” That story, Marr writes, ranges from the Bible to the genetic and cultural survival of the Jews in an uninhabitable Europe for much of Jewish history.
In other words, it’s the story we tell ourselves about who we are that enable us to maintain our identity. The Passover seder is our greatest expression of that.
When I first heard this idea on Rabbi Saks’s podcast in January I thought it was delightful and the perfect basis for this year’s Pesach Prep essay. However as I revisited the idea this week it took on new meeting.
I keep thinking, we will be responsible for crafting the story of the Coronavirus pandemic.
What will people know about the events of 2020 in ten, twenty, fifty years? How will our children remember this time? What will our teachers tell our students when they physically return back to school?
I don’t know the answer, but I am certain that the actions we take today will be at the foundation of those stories. In other words, we need to start telling that story now.
In fact, Rabbi Saks points out that in Exodus chapters 12–13 “on the brink of the Exodus, Moses three times tells the Israelites how they are to tell the story to their children in future generations…The Israelites had not yet left Egypt, and yet already Moses was telling them how to tell the story.”
Moses started crafting his story before the main event. The values and goals were developed at the outset, not in hindsight.
So how do we craft our story?
We have to show our children the role we are playing to help those who are unable to help themselves. We have to show them that we continue to be committed to our friends and community even though we aren’t able to connect with them in synagogue on a weekly basis.
As we come together, even in small groups, this Pesach we have an opportunity to hone our craft. We get to unearth our “secrets of Jewish spiritual survival”. We get to tell our story.
