Uniquely Universal
by Rabbi Ron Stern
It’s been a long year. My favorite analogy for our experience of the year is the film Groundhog Day. Even if each day’s routine differs by degrees, the days certainly rhyme with each other (to paraphrase Mark Twain). Who could have imagined a year like the one we’ve all just endured? A year of forced routine, a year of tragic deaths, a year that upended the patterns of our lives. Maybe that kind of forced monotony is what the Torah speaks to when it asserts that the Israelites endured 400 years of enslavement. That’s an impossibly long amount of time and yet for a slave, each day is a decade, because each day is defined by servitude, each day is characterized by the inability to make the very basic decisions that reflect the choices of free people.
The coronavirus is a cruel master. It has enslaved the globe. Its cruelty is capricious and relentless. I’m struck by the images of masks on faces, closed public venues, economies upended, school years lost in every region of the planet. We have surrendered a most basic human dignity: the ability to exercise choice. Of course, we are always limited by so many factors, each unique to the individual, however, this past year, the overriding limitation is one shared by 7.5 billion people. That, in and of itself, is astounding!
So, what I have learned from this year, and what I hope to carry with me throughout my life is the extent to which our fates are intertwined. We speak different languages, observe different religions, embrace a variety of cultures, hail from a broad range of socio-economic groups, and yet the coronavirus has equalized us in ways that were unimaginable until 2020. The story of our lives may reflect our own uniqueness but our lives are ultimately sustained and restricted by the choices of others in distant lands. Our enmeshed existence obliges overlapping responsibilities.
The truth about the Passover story is that it is both universal and particular. It is our story—and the imperative to know the heart of the stranger because we were strangers remains powerful. Yet it is also a universal story because universally, we will all face the oppression of disease, financial challenges, business failures, marital stress, child-rearing difficulties, fraught decisions…the list goes on. Once we get to the other side of our trials, the Passover message is that we can be transformed. “Once we were slaves, now we are free” is a universal metaphor that captures the human condition. Freedom, as Passover teaches, requires the realization of new responsibilities.
So it is with our post-COVID freedom; among its many lessons is that we truly are our brother’s and sister’s keepers.
Read more from the Wise clergy and congregants in What We Carry Forward, Wise’s 2021 Haggadah supplement.