Tikkun Magazine Archive 1994 - 2018 (https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/2010/03/)
Here is a series of articles that may help you negotiate through the Passover holiday and the ethical morass facing those who wish to celebrate the holiday of our freedom from slavery without going dead to the reality of the Jewish people’s role in the suffering of the Palestinian people, today, right now, as we celebrate this year’s Passover!
I’d like to share an excerpt from the Passover supplement published in the March/April 2010 issue of Tikkun. Passover is not meant to be merely a celebration of the Jewish victory for liberation in our past, but is rather meant to stimulate us to extend that liberation to the whole world. Such liberation would bring an end to the destruction of the environment. It would bring an end to the cheapening of cultural life by the dominance of an ethos of “looking out for number one.” It would bring an end to rampant materialism and our society’s belief in salvation through mechanical objects and technological fixes …
The future of God depends on the future of secularism. Most people will hear in that sentiment a prediction about the growth of secularism: If secularism grows, belief in God will commensurately shrink. If secularism stagnates, the world will continue to believe in God in 2100.
Without the compassion that arises when we realize our nonduality — empathy not only with other humans but with the planet — it becomes increasingly likely that civilization as we know it will not survive the next few centuries.