Passover

thanks to John Pratt for the picture

The religious scholar Karen Armstrong on Start the Week today recounted a trip to Senegal in which she visited a slave house once used to store slaves before they were shipped to America and Europe. The building, she noted, was built in 1776, the same year that America's Declaration of Independence was signed.

"Very often freedom for some means slavery and suffering for others," Karen says, "and this is a conundrum of human history. This is what the Haggadah [the passover text], every year, makes one confront."

Passover recounts and re-enacts the time that Jews fled enslavement in Egypt, and brings to mind the experience of all oppressed people and peoples, according to Jonathan Saffran Foer who was also on the panel. Passover highlights in our hearts oppression as a thing to oppose, to avoid participating in, and to try to prevent.

We realise, perhaps, looking then at the clothes we wear and the technologies we use and the inequalities in the countries we inhabit that to avoid participating in oppressive systems is difficult. 


Which may be one of many reasons why we need these weekly spaces to reflect on and explore meaning, values, and how we are to live as ourselves, with each other, in the world.