March 30--As a kid, I'd make a face when it was announced that everyone at the Passover table was free to add a personal observation or commentary on the story of the holiday, which begins Friday evening.
Tradition provides that, except for a few bites of matzo and sips of wine or grape juice, nothing gets served until midway through the reading of the Haggada, the ritualized telling of our ancestors' escape from slavery in Egypt. That postponed the meal long enough without some uncle recalling a biblical verse that didn't seem to have much to do with the business at hand -- which from a child's perspective meant bringing forth plates of gefilte fish and brisket before I died of hunger.
By the time I had a family of my own, the idea of riffing on the Passover narrative made sense. The liberation movements of the 1960s made it a cinch to find analogies between now and then. The struggles for racial and gender equality played nicely against the Israelites longing for freedom.
But I still stumbled over one responsibility that came with sitting at the head of the table.
The Haggada says: "Each individual is bound to regard himself as if he had gone personally forth from Egypt." In other words, the story should not be told as something that happened to someone else, long ago. I had no idea how to do that -- until I went to Selma for the 50th anniversary of the historic march for voting rights.
Along with 80,000 others, my wife and I lined up to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where 600 civil rights activists confronted a phalanx of police and sheriff's deputies in 1965. Most were there to commemorate an event they hadn't witnessed, but a sprinkling of the original marchers were present.
"Make way for a real hero!" cried a young man pushing a wheelchair through the crowd. His passenger was 103-year-old Amelia Boynton Robinson, who had been beaten and gassed, like so many others, on "Bloody Sunday."
Such was the press of the crowd that I could only walk alongside Robinson for a few moments. Yet deep down in my kishkes -- my innards -- I had a sense this was what it would have felt like to be in the ranks of those Moses led out of Egypt.
Greeting us on the other side of the bridge -- the one the 1965 marchers couldn't reach -- was a scene, I'd swear, was designed to convince me to heed my gut reaction.
A chorus of Messianic Jews, Christians who focus on Jesus' Jewishness, was blowing ram's horns. My people call the instrument a shofar, and its throaty sound brought to mind a Negro spiritual, "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho." Picking up the story where the Haggada leaves off, it recounts how the children of slaves won a place of their own in the Holy Land:
Then the lamb ram sheep horns began to blow.
The trumpets began to sound.
Old Joshua shouted glory.
And the walls came tumbling down.
It's a chapter of Jewish history sung in black churches. Much of the Jewish Bible resonates with African Americans -- for whom slavery and segregation are vivid memories. But for my children and grandchildren, the servitude of their ancestors belongs to a dimly perceived past. Some live in a lovely apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. How are they to come to the Passover table thinking of themselves as if they "had gone personally forth from Egypt?"
Maybe I can help them by sharing my memories of the Selma commemoration, including something I experienced the day President Barack Obama spoke.
Downtown Selma having been cordoned off, it took an hour to get through security. After a church choir sang, there was a pause in the program, it being announced that the president was delayed. Minutes passed, became an hour, two hours. Yet 50,000 people, jammed shoulder to shoulder, didn't budge. No one complained. Tempers didn't flair, though there wasn't a single update on what was going on.
Finally, blue lights flashed at the crest of the bridge, and the presidential cavalcade came into view. It was greeted by a deafening roar, such as I've never heard, even at a Blackhawks game.
An African-American high school student who was a preliminary speaker noted that when she told her grandmother she'd be on a platform with the president, the older woman said: "So there has been change."
When the president quoted taglines from the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, voices in the crowd echoed phrases like "All men are created equal" and "In order to form a more perfect union."
Yet words like "change" and "equal" are hardly reflected in Selma's skyline. Storefronts stand empty. There are blocks of shacks and rundown trailers. Clearly the political victories that the marchers of 1965 inspired haven't been followed by equality of economic opportunity. Yet people left in a holiday mood, as if the president's visit had turned their attention to hopes for a better future.
We fell in step with several young black men who were still relishing the president's words. "He is the leader of the free world," one said. "The most powerful man on the planet."
For days, I thought about that. Then it hit me: Through that young man's eyes, I had had a glimpse of Moses.
rgrossman@tribpub.com
