This Passover, several friends and I organized a Seder of the Mixed Multitudes. Seated on the floor of an apartment in Amman, Jordan, reclining on pillows (traditional Middle Eastern style), a group of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and atheist Americans, Jordanians, Palestinians, and Indians ate matzah, dipped greens in saltwater, and told stories of marginalization, liberation, exile, redemption and the Israelite exodus from Egypt.
These Passover narratives have always been central to my Jewish identity and practice. I was raised with the challenge of feeling that I personally have gone out from Egypt, and the corollary commandment, “not to oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” While I have no illusions of imagined personal oppression, I have inherited and continued to choose a faith that prioritizes and privileges the critical perspective of the stranger, that demands an alliance with the outsider.
It was largely these core values that led me to engage with social justice issues of citizenship, both in Israel/Palestine and in an immigrant rights organization in New York. In turn, that work brought me to spend the past six months traveling, studying, researching, and working with human rights organizations in Amman, Jerusalem, and Cairo. Throughout this journey, I was exploring Jewish relationships with exile, ultimately finding a partial redemption through claiming the identity of the sojourner.
In Jordan, our seder itself highlighted some radically unorthodox inflections of the legacy of the stranger, particularly as we struggled with issues of homeland and exile. Among our guests were Palestinians for whom the Haggadah’s formulaic conclusion, “Next year in Jerusalem,” was by no means metaphorical or messianic, but rather expressed a painful and heartfelt desire to return to their parents’ physical home. Living in Jordan, where the majority of the population identifies as Palestinian, I was exposed to Jerusalem’s contemporary Diaspora at a very basic and human level. I was surrounded by people who orient their lives towards Jerusalem, a striking parallel to Jewish Diaspora life since the destruction of the Second Temple. The pull of the Holy City is glaringly obvious in Amman, from direct political repercussions of the second Intifada in Jordanian politics, to such local establishments as the Jerusalem Hotel, Jerusalem Hospital, Jerusalem Restaurant and Jerusalem Pharmacy.
Behind the general symbolic and spiritual nostalgia, though, are individual stories that begin to communicate the full weight of exile from one’s homeland. One seder guest talked about seeing recent pictures of his family’s home in the holy city converted to a municipal building. Another guest just finished the arduous task of procuring travel permits after her father’s sudden death. Lacking citizenship, her international travel was severely restricted. And being among the economically privileged, their stories only begin to reflect the economic, social, political, and emotional challenges faced by those living in refugee camps, passing down keys to homes in Jerusalem from one generation to the next, continuing to hope for return.
“B’shanah Haba’a b’Yerushalayim,” the seder’s eternal yearning for a future in Jerusalem, voices both the age-old Jewish dream of return and the contemporary Palestinian desire for return.* Furthermore, it provides part of the groundwork for Zionism’s justification for the Jewish return that, through various channels of cause and effect, resulted in Palestinian exile. Some who claim to speak for Israel present Judaism as justifying Jewish return to the land at any cost, but Palestinians have been the ones who paid the price – through discrimination and second-class Israeli citizenship since 1948, occupation since 1967, and through multiple generations born into exile. In Amman, it was disturbingly clear how Jewish visions of return, enshrined in the story of our Exodus, have been converted to a rationalization for expulsion under the flag of the Jewish Star.
My own “return” to Israel came several weeks later. I took a bus to the Jordanian border, and another bus through the West Bank to Jerusalem. The Israeli border police let me pass with relative ease, compared to their treatment of Palestinians wishing to return home. Nevertheless, I was stopped for intensive questioning. The fact that I told the border police (truthfully) in Hebrew that I was going to Jerusalem for my cousin’s Bar Mitzvah only seemed to raise more suspicion, especially once they saw I had also traveled in Syria. Though frustrating, this delay at the border seemed appropriate; my identity had been indelibly stamped by my experiences in Israel’s neighboring countries; as a result—far from being a homecoming—my entry to Israel felt like a deep estrangement.
In Jerusalem, I found that the religion of the sojourner was being mortally threatened by the illusion of homecoming. Centuries of Diaspora, millennia of peoplehood rooted in memories of exile, and the corollary commitment to the stranger and to the critical perspective of the outsider, were being undermined by an interest in preserving the status quo of occupation and inequality. The underlying (if unvoiced) assumption of much of the conservative political discourse was that since Jews have now “returned home,” our obligations are no longer to the stranger and the powerless, but rather to protecting our newfound power. Bluntly articulating this point, orange posters across Jerusalem declared, “A Jew does not expel a Jew.” Jewish Jerusalem seemed saturated with this orange mentality. Jewishness, rather than expulsion, is the defining moral issue. This kind of anti-disengagement rhetoric not only implicitly legitimates Jews actively expelling non-Jews, but it also cuts Jews off from the general experience of the expelled and the exiled. Rather than empathizing with the stranger because of our shared experiences, this logic draws on memories of Jewish suffering to fuel a narrow, tribal nationalism that is blind to the anguish of the minorities living under our rule.
Such logic not only ignores the tragedy of the Palestinian exile that I witnessed in Amman, it also fosters a profound ideological exile from an important element of historical Jewish morality and spirituality. The myth that we have arrived home uses liturgical yearnings for Jerusalem to legitimize itself, but it ignores the flip side of the seder’s dreams of return to Jerusalem—namely, the acknowledgment that we are not yet redeemed. Even if we were celebrating the seder meal in the Knesset of the State of Israel, we would still be obligated by tradition to say, “This year, here; next year in the Land of Israel. This year slaves, next year free people.” The seder provides us with a vision of a future return, but it insists that, even in the physical city of Jerusalem, we will remain strangers until the coming of the messianic age. Yet today, it is precisely in that city that Jewish tradition is most divorced from its commitment to the stranger.
Forty-nine days later, when the Jewish calendar marks the Torah’s revelation at Mount Sinai on the festival of Shavuot, I had just left Jerusalem and was starting to make my way westward through the Sinai peninsula. This reverse Exodus brought me “home” to exile. I felt a sense of integrity and a level of comfort as I left the country that proclaims itself my homeland, and returned to an environment where there was no ambiguity that I was alien. By reclaiming my identity as a stranger and a sojourner, I felt one step closer to spiritual homecoming.
Once settled in Egypt, I studied at the Center for Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University of Cairo, where I learned as much
from my classmates as from the lecturers. The Center waives tuition for refugees living in Cairo, and about half of the students were people who had been forced to flee from their homes in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, or other African countries, and who were currently attempting to make a life in Egypt. The other half of the students were mainly professionals doing various applied human rights work. From all over the world, these individuals came to learn together, either because they had literally been driven from their homes, or because they were internally driven by the injustices of persecution. This radically diverse community of outsiders and sojourners felt like home for me, because of my inherited and imagined exilic memory and my chosen allegiance to solidarity with the stranger.
Walking along the Nile, feeling familiarly foreign, I realized that my Judaism, like that of so many of my ancestors, is a religion of the sojourner. In Jordan, I felt the duplicity of justifying the expulsion of another people in the name of our own ingathering. In Jerusalem, I experienced the heresy of claiming redemption while the world remains broken. But in Cairo, living “again” as a stranger in Egypt, I found a home among exiles and sojourners who were engaged in the work of liberation, of pursuing justice, of journeying towards homecoming, of building redemption.
