Passover is a time to celebrate with family, laugh and tremble with Pharoah Yul Brenner and Charlton Heston as in his pre-NRA days. It is a time for remembrance and a challenge for us to address so many injustices that disfigure our world.
The power of this holiday hits home at odd moments. The other night before bed, I was talking with my wife and casually reading Abraham Pais's Inward Bound, a magisterial history of particle physics. Pais was a distinguished theorist who helped understand the properties of strange particles and kaons. No, I don't know what these are, either. To the lay public, Pais is best known for the prize-winning biography: Subtle is the lord: The science and the life of Albert Einstein.
Reading through some fairly impenetrable material regarding 1940s quantum field theory, my heart suddenly jumped when I reached page 448, when Pais matter-of-factly notes:
I gave an invited paper dealing with work done during the war, while I was living in hiding. I had often discussed my ideas with Kramers, the only physicist who knew where I was and who would visit me from time to time, in my room in an attic in Amsterdam.
Without sensationalism or gratuitous personal detail, Pais goes on to describe his various calculations conducted in that secret annex. Not that I really understand these, either.
Talk about your greatest generation. These were the generations of my parents and grandparents who survived and helped to defeat Hitler, who helped split the atom and cure polio, who crashed out of their urban slums to crack open and improve America's mediocre universities, who played such a disproportionate role in supporting the civil rights movement and other struggles for social justice, and, yes, who established a strong and vibrant Israel out of the ashes of the Holocaust. We have a lot to live up to celebrating our little seder in our cozy suburb nearly 70 years later.
We also have a lot to ponder this year, given our country's serious challenges and missteps at home and abroad. I don't envy our next president, whoever that turns out to be. This is a bad time, made doubly bad because the actions of our government have worsened the suffering of so many people.
In terms of American interests, the Iraq quagmire places us deep, deep into damage control. Yes, we removed a disgusting tyrant, but at staggering human cost. We mourn our American dead and wounded. We sometimes forget that Iraqis mourn perhaps fifty times that number. President Bush will leave office with a huge diaspora of Iraqi refugees strewn across the Middle East. Shamefully few will ever see our shores.
Under his watch, our nation has perpetrated shameful human rights violations against real or suspected terrorists, and against many others in our custody. Given a real whiff of fear, millions of us -- and not only conservative Republicans -- quickly abandoned cherished constitutional values, not to mention international treaty obligations. Torah admonishes us not to abandon or oppress desperate strangers. This year, as in few others, we are violating these injunctions. Real contrition is in order.
It is appropriate on Passover to note that President Bush will leave office having failed to constructively address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In many ways, both Israeli vulnerability and Palestinian suffering are markedly worse than they were seven years ago. There is no contradiction in expressing concern and sympathy for Israelis suffering under rocket fire in Sderot and expressing concern and sympathy for Palestinians facing bleak conditions in Gaza. By any reasonable measure, our policies are failing both parties.
Next Passover, we will have a new president. If President Obama, President Clinton, or President McCain is merely less disastrous than President Bush, Dayenu. It seems hard to believe that our next president will be able to do much more than that to create a safer and more humane world.
Lest we despair, we can draw on memories of people like Abraham Pais, who accomplished so much in bleaker circumstances. Whether you are liberal or conservative, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, atheist, or something else, this gives us us reasons to hope things can get better this sobering Passover season.