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Editor's Note: Rabbi Shai Held is president and dean of the Hadar Institute, a traditional and egalitarian Jewish learning center in New York City. The opinions expressed in this comment are the author's own.
(CNN) - In just a few days, Jews from around the world will celebrate the Jewish Passover. In the Passover Seder they will remember, and recreate, the liberation of God from Israelite slaves from their Egyptian torturers.
The moment is painfully ironic. Easter, after all, is about the miraculous deliverance from misfortune, but this year we will mark it amid the coronavirus, a brutal plague whose end is nowhere in sight.
What makes it even more painful is that we will be forced to celebrate it separately. Easter is, by design, intergenerational. Many of us have been shaped by memories of multiple generations sitting around the same table, sharing songs, traditions, memories, melodies and food.
More than that, Easter is intended to welcome the stranger. "Let all those who are hungry come and eat," we proclaimed as the Seder got going. We are destined to open our homes to others, and in doing so, also open our hearts to them.
And yet this year we are forced to remain separate. There is something deeply sad about all this, and the sense of loss that many of us feel is palpable.
But perhaps there is something we can learn from all this.
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The feast this moment brings to mind is Sukkot, a time in the early fall when Jews traditionally leave their homes and spend a week living in huts made of cloth, wood, and / or bamboo. The festival, which serves as a reminder of the journey through the desert that followed the Exodus from Egypt, is a moment of profound joy. We celebrate the love between God and the Jewish people, and we delight in the mutual fidelity that has sustained our bond.
But Sukkot is also about something else. By dwelling in temporary structures, exposed to the elements, we are physically and tactfully reminded of our fragility and vulnerability. We are only flesh and blood; Structures that we may be tempted to imagine will always protect us, they can easily collapse and disappear. Vulnerability is a gross fact of human existence: there is no escape.
The Hebrew Bible does its best to remind the Israelites how vulnerable and dependent they are. The land of Egypt, which is watered, is not the promised land; The land of Canaan (today's Israel), which depends on the rain that does not always come, is the promised land.
From a farmer's perspective, this is quite strange. Wouldn't we prefer land that reliably and consistently has enough water? God is concerned that if the Israelites had everything they needed, they would feel complacent and self-satisfied. God wants them to know that they are dependent. Total autonomy and self-sufficiency are always illusions.
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Of course, the time we are in is not Sukkot, and not just because it is a different time of year. Sukkot is a ritual representation of vulnerability, but as powerful as it is, it is only a ritual. If it rains too much, Jewish tradition says that we are exempt from living in shacks and that we return to our permanent homes. There is nothing metaphorical about the Covid-19: the intense threat it represents is with us, stubborn and unrelenting, no matter where we are.
So it is important to understand that vulnerability is a double-edged sword. It can teach us compassion, but it can also make us heartless and hard-hearted. It can widen the circle of our concern to include others who are also vulnerable, but it can also lead us to tighten the circle around us and ignore or forget all but those closest to us. When we are reminded of how vulnerable we are, the fundamental moral test is not whether we keep our loved ones close, but whether we remember others, especially those without loved ones to keep them close.
The challenge of the moment is to let our shared vulnerability open our hearts to each other. Ideally, in Jewish thought, always being aware of our vulnerability produces a sense of gratitude and indebtedness to God, and also opens the door to genuine care and concern for others.
Recognizing our vulnerability allows us to go from grief to compassion. Pity is fueled by a sense of superiority: "What happened to you could never happen to me." But compassion is animated by a sense of shared humanity: "What happened to you could happen to any of us." While piety is vertical, compassion is horizontal. By showing compassion to another person, I approach them instead of looking at them.
At Easter, we remember that we were strangers, vulnerable outsiders, in the land of Egypt. That experience is intended to teach us to love and protect the vulnerable among us. This year we don't need to remember our vulnerability, but we must internalize the aspiration: let your vulnerability teach you love. This is hard work, but there is no ethical and spiritual mandate that matters more, in general, and even more now.
For most of us, this Easter will not be easy. We will be separated from the people we love, and we will be anxious for those we want to protect. But times of immense difficulty can also be times of profound growth. Let us try, in the face of real and legitimate fear and anxiety, to let our vulnerability help us to love more fully. Let's open our hearts, even if we can't open our doors.
Easter