Passover: The festival of freedom and the ambivalence of exile

• The Jewish holiday cycle is, to a large extent, an exploration and commemoration of the experience of exile.
• The fall festival of Sukkot, for example, is celebrated in small booths, temporary shelters that recall the Israelites’ experience sheltering in tents while wandering in the desert for 40 years after fleeing slavery in Egypt.
• The story of Purim, a springtime festival, takes place when ancient Jews lived in exile in the Persian Empire – and illustrates the precariousness of life as a minority.

Into the unknown

• In her 1983 novella “The Miracle Hater,” the late Israeli novelist Shulamit Hareven depicts the Hebrews in their passage from Egypt and their first taste of freedom.
• Writing a modern “midrash” – a rabbinic genre that elaborates on a biblical text – she reimagines the story of Exodus.

• They have fled oppression, but that means leaving everything familiar to wander, seemingly endlessly, in the great unknown of the desert.
• Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom weaves family lore, history and some alternative history into “An Egyptian Novel,” published in 2015.
• Those who remained in Babylon became the root of the diaspora and established the oldest continuous Jewish community in the world.

‘Out of Egypt’

• While those in Iraq could claim a history of hundreds of years, those in Egypt were more likely to have moved there within the last few generations.
• The Egypt of the Exodus story seemed far from the Egypt of Aciman’s childhood, the one he loved.

• “The fault lines of exile and diaspora always run deep, and we are always from elsewhere, and from elsewhere before that,” he noted.
• In “Out of Egypt,” the irony of the family preparing to leave on Passover is not lost on the author, the reader or, one suspects, the characters themselves.
• After a rather dismal attempt at a Seder, the narrator wandered through the streets of Alexandria, mourning a place that had become home.

It is a poignant account of the very personal nature of exile. And yet it is an experience potentially shared by everyone in the Jewish community. Exile is a place unknown, over the edge of the precipice.

Into Iraq

• The Passover holiday is also at the center of British journalist Tim Judah’s visit to Iraq to cover the 2003 American invasion.
• His father’s family had left Iraq in the 19th century for India in the wake of persecutions during Dawud Pasha’s reign.

• By 2003, the few Jews Judah found lived in trepidation and ramshackle homes.
• “I tried to picture my forebears, in the fields or perhaps in the shops or the market, but I couldn’t,” Judah wrote in Granta magazine.
• I will never need to do it again.” Judah’s pilgrimage leads not to a renewed sense of belonging but a break.
• Yet at the same time, families around the Seder table can remember those who are not yet free, and those still suffering from being uprooted.

Nancy E. Berg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.