Dan Fishback: Peace at Passover

We watched a clip of Deep Impact in my Geology recitation last Wednesday. We saw an asteroid wipe out the entire eastern seaboard, which struck me as particularly unfortunate, because it was a really lovely day. It was lovely the previous day too, but the Undergraduate Assembly had taken over College Green, so it was hardly possible to enjoy the most beautiful spot on campus. Loud, shirtless student government boys are, oddly enough, not my cup of tea, so I had to miss a day of gorgeous Greenliness.

Wednesday was different. No cotton candy machine. No stack of empty pizza boxes. Nobody campaigning for anything on a platform of "school spirit" or "fun." Just people, lying around everywhere, reading books, playing frisbee, talking.

Early in the morning, the grass itself was a sight, and the Green was very specifically green. Later on, you could barely see it anymore, there were so many people. And they all smiled.

I must say, I couldn't have asked for a better place to do school work. The buzz of good cheer made humanity look rather honorable, which made reading easier somehow.

What made reading difficult, and what frequently pierced the hum of friendly chatter, were the periodic flashbacks to the day's headlines: "Israelis Move Into 2 West Bank Towns," "Wounded Go Unrescued in Bethlehem," "From Across the Globe, Protests Assail Israel."

The violence had escalated so much over Passover, just as my family had gathered together to recount our people's history and mythology, and on Wednesday, two stories couldn't stop clashing in my head: one, a narrative of bondage and emancipation, the other, a continuing flow of headlines and death tolls.

In my family, Passover has always been a time to express solidarity with oppressed peoples all over the world. When I think of seders from my childhood, the name "Cesar Chavez" always pops up.

This year, the people I thought of immediately were not migrant workers -- they were Palestinians: the ones who aren't terrorists, and the ones who find more and more reason to sympathize with anti-Israel violence as their human rights are so consistently disregarded. I thought of the Palestinian children who are coming to consciousness just as their fathers are being shot in the street -- the children who will not care that the violence is "retaliatory." The children who will grow up to fashion their own "retaliatory" violence with the same sense of justification that fuels Israeli militants.

I thought of the very idea of "terrorism": violence against a civilian population to effect its government's policies. It immediately conjured the story of the 10 plagues and how our God is said to have slain every first born Egyptian son to secure our freedom. I wondered if the God of the Passover story wasn't a terrorist himself. It didn't make me sympathize with terrorism -- rather it made me question this deity's tactics, which made me question the validity of tradition in general.

Ironic, though, that tradition itself brought me to those questions. My family's seder made international politics feel personal. It made me feel a connection, not just with other Jews, but with people in general -- with suffering in general.

It highlighted a common humanity that, oddly enough, came back into relief on Wednesday, because it was warm enough to leave my jacket at home, and a mother was playing with her infant on the grass, and kids just weren't wearing sunglasses to look cool: everything shone, and everyone squinted with delight. Here were a bunch of people getting along, sharing a spot of grass. And they didn't seem all that different from ancient Israelites, or the first-born sons of the ancient Egyptians, or the Israelis, or the Palestinians.

War, it seemed, was not a necessary human condition. Peace anywhere, it seemed, was reason enough to hope for peace everywhere.

And if a Jewish ceremony can make me feel solidarity with Palestinian children, then differences of perceived race or religion cannot be so fundamental. If anyone can catch a glimpse of human universality through an ultimate act of group specificity, then divisions can be transcended. If one can even find hope for widespread ceasefires in the frisbee-playing of privileged young Americans, then there is a loophole in all spirals of hate. Either that, or Deep Impact just made me awfully sentimental. After all, some things will never discriminate, like asteroids.

Or sunshine.

Dan Fishback is a junior American Identities major from Olney, Md.

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