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Passover
My dear Congregants: Once again in the swift march of time, this great symbolical festival well nigh o'er is upon us, this festival which recalls to our mind, the long pilgramges of our ancestors to the city of Jerusalem. Men, women & children in their thousands could be seen travelling along the innumerable dusty roads, beneath the scorching rays of the tropical sun, all looking with wistful eyes in the same direction, all bending forward with eagerness to reach that wonderful city of past memories, the very thought of which aroused them to the greatest heat of expectation & enthusiasm, all animated by the same motive, & all united in the one common object of paying a tribute of veneration & love to their God. ( It was not by accident that the feast of Passover was ordained to be celebrated in the Early Spring. The birthday of a nation was appropriately fixed in the youth of the year & it thus became crowned as it were, with a garland of new green leaves. It is naturally a joyous season. The smiles of the ascending Sun disperse the clouds of dreary winter & melt the icy fetters which have lain heavily upon the Earth. Vegetation awakes from its tarpor & puts forth its millions of bright shoots. But to the Israelite the advent of Spring, & with
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it, of the Passover is peculiarly grateful. It suggests to him a comparison between the fate of his people & of the earth. As winter bound the earth with chains of frost, restrained all her powers & bared her of all her beauty; so Egypt imposed upon Israel, the bonds of slavery, curbed his energies, & deprives him of all the loveliness of Patriarchal faith. ) To the Israelite, then, the season of Passover has more than ordinary interest. Ires Irrespective of sharing the universal gratitude, he is impressed with sentiments all his own. Amidst the song of praise that rises to Heaven from the millions of the Earth, his voice is heard hymning mercy exercised on his behalf only. Among the myraids of human beings who, through countless ages, have trodden the road to eternity, he finds himself alone singled out as the object of a declared special Providence. And in what a Cause! Not for the individual merits of the suffering laborers in hard bondage, not for the infliction of vengeance on the tyrannic oppressors; For it meant for him but for the vindication of the sacred rights of conscience, for the maintenance of the inalienable principle of religious liberty. Since the slavery of Eg. man has invented a thousand ways for violating religious rights:
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but in Eg. might first proclaimed its will to persecute, man first announced his determination to oppress his fellow creatures of a different faith, & justified his oppression on the score of policy; In Eg. God first declared himself the champion of the holy cause involved, He first showed that when all human means failed to right the wronger, He could interfere to avenge the cries of the martyred innocents "The Lord shall fight for you ye shall hold your peace." Since then, wild beasts have fed on Jewish flesh, the block & the axe have been dyed with Jewish blood, living Jewish victums have been impaled quivering in unutterable agony, the rack & the wheel have croaked a hoarse echo to groans wrung from Jewish heart-strings; many a charred Jewish corpse has been blown in the ashes from the smouldering stake, many a Jewish limb has gladdened the heart of an infuriated Zealot; Jewish maidens have been dishonoured before the eyes of their expiring mothers; Jewish youths have been maimed in the presence of their dying sires: Jewish Spirits have been degraded to the dust & almost all that was human has been crushed out of them; Everything that extortion and avarice could extract from Jewish coffers has been exacted even at the price of mutilation & torture; to Jewish
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possession there had been left little but the dear faith which upheld them in sorrow & comforted them in misfortune; and yet as year followed year & brought no external eonsolation; as season succeeded season & showed no diminution of hatred & oppression; as era closed upon era & proved too well that, while refinement & civilization softened all else, the fate of the Jew knew no change yet in these depths the Jew has hailed the advent of Passover as a proof that Providence having once pronounced sacred the rights of conscience, all man's efforts must prove ineffectual to prevent the ultimate recognition of an inviolable principle. And now that we breathe a milder atmosphere, now that we enjoy a more congenial climate, now that the Sun of toleration warms us to vigorous existence, we love the Passover still more dearly because we hail our present boons as a type of the good to come. So that this may indeed be called the great festival of Hope. There are however many moral phases in connection with the Passover upon which we could expatiate, but the most important of these in this connection is the glowing possibilities of woman's gentle ministry. The Talmud informs us by way of homily that it was the means of the virtuous women that redeemed Israel from Eg.