On Passover, Defining Affliction

Although I haven’t yet written about this at all, my friend Rebecca and I have been traveling in Nepal for the past week or so.  While it took a good few weeks to begin to appreciate India, we were surprised at how much we loved Nepal, even on our first day. (Maybe it had something to do with being able to get a visa for $26 at the airport, as compared to negotiating four weeks of Indian bureaucratic nightmare plus over $200. Just saying.)

We found ourselves at the Kathmandu Chabad for lunch on Saturday afternoon, surrounded by an overwhelming number of Israeli travelers, and we experienced the joy of finally hearing a foreign language that we actually understand. The rabbi made some rounds asking for volunteers to give a short talk in honor of the upcoming Passover holiday, and somehow he zeroed in on Rebecca and me. So, here is an expounded-upon version of the mini speech I gave:

Passover is coming up in about a week, which means that we will be limiting the foods we eat in order to “afflict” ourselves, in honor of the biblical Children of Israel fleeing Egypt with nary a loaf of bread. But when you have celiac disease, Passover is actually just an extension of your regularly scheduled diet, and in fact, it is an easier time of year to eat gluten-free. Every kind of product comes out gluten-free on Passover, from cake to matzo balls to marshmallows. So far from feeling more afflicted than usual, I’m actually thrilled when Passover rolls around.

While I’m not the kind of person who looks for extra opportunities to deprive myself, I still think that reflections around affliction during Passover are an important part of the Jewish calendar. For the past few years, I’ve been thinking harder about how I can still capture this essence, given that food-wise, I’m not any more limited than usual. Even beyond my personal situation, I think we’d be hard pressed to find a person in this room who is actually truly afflicted by the Passover diet. While the loss of pizza for a week may seem tragic… cry me a river.

Earlier this week, Rebecca and I spent a few days in Chitwan National Park near Kathmandu, where we watched baby elephants play and took in a beautiful sunset, before deciding to splurge the equivalent of $10 on a massage. At the massage studio, we met P, who is twenty years old and one of ten children. He is about to finish his bachelor’s degree in business, and he’s working at the studio part time in order to pay his tuition and rent in Chitwan, as his family of sixteen lives in a one bedroom dwelling in a village a few hours away.

In the middle of the massage, the power went out. While Nepal has the natural resources to generate plenty of hydro-electric power, the existing grid isn’t robust enough to support the amount of electricity it could be generating. Consequently, even modest demand exceeds supply, and the grid “load-sheds”, which causes power outages for anywhere between eight and fourteen hours a day. P and I got to talking about the power situation, and I thought of the flooding in Manhattan during Hurricaine Sandy, how uptown shop owners opened up for stranded New Yorkers to charge their phones, how my sister didn’t have power for six days and everything in her refrigerator went bad as she bounced between her friends’ apartments. P informed me that his family doesn’t have a refrigerator, and that they grow their food and cook everything as needed. Smart-phones are useless in his village, as they can barely hold charge.

We talked about his plans after finishing school, but it wasn’t a very long conversation: jobs are scarce, and he figures he’ll keep working at the massage studio. He needs to pay rent in Chitwan, and in order to open up his own business, he would need a lot of money up front, which he doesn’t have. He’s considered going abroad to do any kind of work, service, labor, anything, and I pondered that idea. Given minimum wage, he wouldn’t be making a whole lot if he were to somehow come to the US. But even if he could scrape pennies together month by month, it would sum up to more than he’d save if he stayed in Nepal. The next day I read a few articles about Nepali men and women leaving for Gulf States to make a little more money for a few years, and how many of them come back physically and emotionally broken. Damned if they stay, damned if they go.

The plight of the kids I taught in Mumbai was hard for me to witness, but meeting P touched me in a new way. I hadn’t yet spent time with someone close to my age who was both so driven to make something of himself, and at the same time, so stuck in an impossible system. The government here is still barely on its feet after years of regime change, and the electricity problem is only one of many challenges. It took us five hours to drive from Kathmandu to Chitwan, a distance of one hundred ten miles. Infrastructure is something I completely take for granted, but the lack of these basic services is crippling a nation of men and women burning to make something of themselves.

This is affliction. It is being limited in a way that is beyond one’s control, that all of the willpower in the world won’t be able to change. My students, P, and people all over the world have obstacles that have nothing to do with the intelligence they possess, their work ethic, or their desire to succeed, and without any intervention, these limitations will necessarily keep them from reaching their aspirations and from ending the cycle of poverty.

The Children of Israel did eventually make it out of Egypt, but there were several pieces that had to fall into place in order for that to happen. They needed Moses, Aaron, Miriam, and Nachshon to inspire them and lead them into redemption, and they needed an opening, a path to follow. If God had provided a path and no leaders had been ready to take those first steps, nothing would have changed. If the community had been ready but there were no openings, no hint of what might lie beyond the world they knew, nothing would have changed.

Here is how I think about what still needs to be done.  If we were created in God’s image, then we are meant to do God’s work as well. If there are people who are ready and willing to follow a path to a better life, then they deserve for that path to be available. My obligation is not to drag people by the nape of the neck into the life that I think is best for them, but to create as many opportunities as possible to whatever extent I can, just as doors were opened for me by my parents, my teachers, and my greater community. Especially today, when we depend on people from around the world to help us achieve the quality of life we desire, we are even more obligated to ensure that everyone in our global community has a fair shot at living a life of hope and dignity.

My Passover wish for myself and for you is that we strive to create opportunities of all kinds for the people around us, so that one day, every afflicted person, if he wishes, can leave his Egypt behind.