Reflections on Passover and the Yale regime.
Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, Conn. (Credit: Buckley Institute)
Ari Shtein
Opinions Editor, The Buckley Beacon
Passover is upon us, the Jewish holiday which celebrates the Exodus narrative. As flowers burst forth from their buds, and throngs of Yalies pour out of the library onto Cross Campus in celebration of the muggy 65° overcast afternoons, we Jews spend a week remembering that only through the grace of God did we go free from slavery in Egypt 3,000 years ago.
Indeed, we are told to remember that we went free — us, personally, not our ancestors. Why is this?
The first answer I ever heard was a simple counterfactual: if not for God’s intervention, we would still today be slaves in Egypt. The point, then, is to drive home just how great God is for rescuing me personally from that fate; it’s meant to arouse an emotional appreciation for the story beyond a historical one.
Another teaching proceeds along similar lines: “Memory is normative,” writes Rachel Adler, a Reform Jewish theologian. After Passover, “all year, my internalized memory haunts me whenever I see injustice and suffering — because I was a slave in Egypt.” The emotion of the memory ought to express itself as an ethic. It’s meant to inspire a disposition against “slaveries” of all kinds, even to inspire action against them.
And one more interpretation, the newest to me, turns inside. It admits that only a short time after the Israelites were freed from Pharaoh, they became enslaved again — to God, and to His Law. Indeed, soon after freeing the Israelites, Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, and he and the Israelites became servants of God.
Jews today are still servants of God — are still bound by the Law and enslaved to His will. And at times, this can be hard— orthodox Judaism is intensive in time and spirit (enough so that I myself don’t do it) — but, every year on Passover, we are reminded that it’s better than slavery in Egypt. When God freed us from Pharoah, He freed us to pursue all of the most important things in life — family, dignified work, and a connection with the divine — but only within His constraints. On Passover, we remember and we realize that serving God, irritating and difficult as it may be, is strictly better than enslavement by Pharaoh.
I think there is something beautiful in this idea, even if it fails to convince me that eating a plate of bacon is a horrible sin. It’s necessary to recognize that our lives are going to be ruled by something — that to complain about what rules us now is, in effect, to stake out a position in favor of some other ruling principle.
This is an idea deserving of concrete application, and some recent trends at Yale provide an opportunity. In particular, it would appear that complaining when the rulers of Yale cut back on summer vacation support or summer storage funding misses the bigger picture. It is better still to be ruled by an austere welfare regime at Yale than by the cold economic reality which reigns outside our Ivy-covered walls.
In fact, to be a Yale student at all is a privilege rivaling that of being a freed Israelite. To be peeved about midterm stress or an unexpected expense in the hundreds of dollars, but mere moments away from a Yale degree, is to be in a near-infinitely better position than almost everyone who has ever lived. The opportunities we have here, the knowledge we are exposed to, and the doors our degrees will open are goods simply incommensurate with the small unpleasantnesses which lie along the way. (If we knew for a fact that the Jewish God was real and waiting to grant us eternal divine bliss, would we still reject Him because it was too costly and inconvenient to buy turkey bacon instead?)
The lesson of Passover is that to remember all this, and to truly deeply believe in it, is a non-trivial task. It requires us to come together in community, every year, to retell the same story and make ourselves the main characters in it. It requires a deep psychological commitment to the idea that our present situation could just as well be otherwise — it requires us to look at the enslaved and suffering while thinking, and really believing, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Or, as the case may be, it requires us to look at the many tens of thousands whose desperate pleas to be ruled by our cruel and indifferent administrators went unanswered, and realize, in our heart of hearts, that there but for the grace of Pericles go we.
I don’t mean to suggest that rule-by-Yale shouldn’t be better. To point out imperfections in our school’s administration is fine — but it should be accompanied by a kind of humble reverence, a shared and explicit understanding that even if it’s hard or non-ideal at times, what we’ve got here is good. It’s really wonderful to be ruled by Yale; much better than it was to be a slave in Egypt.