I’ve struggled to write lately, but I wanted to get this out while Passover is still here. I’m just under the wire.

Holidays, by their very nature, are repetitive; Passover especially so, because while many people think of Passover as mostly about eating, it’s also a LOT about talking. The very name of the holiday, “Pesach”, means “mouth (peh) talk (sach)”. On top of that, you tell the same story every year. Now, it’s an important story, but that can heighten the feeling of, “Oh, I’m doing this again.”

That’s why I try to learn something new about Passover every year. This year, my learning was fascinating, but also I think timely. It’s about karpas.

Karpas is one of the six original ceremonial foods displayed for the Passover ceremonial meal called a “Seder”. It is the green vegetable and symbolizes things like spring, hope, and renewal, and it is dipped in salt water to represent the salty tears of the Israelites during their enslavement in Egypt, but it’s more than that.

Karpas is actually not the Hebrew word for vegetable. That is “yerek”. The word karpas, in fact, only occurs once in the bible or the talmud. In the book of Esther, “karpas” describes a fancy wall hanging. Later, the medieval rock star Rabbi Rashi linked the word to another fancy hanging thing, Joseph’s coat, which is called a “passim” (i.e., the “pas” part of “karpas”).

Rashi uses the connection to write about how the karpas is a symbol of the fact that Jews would never have been in Egypt at all if it weren’t for Joseph getting sold into slavery by his brothers so that he later became the guy in Egypt to go to for food. It’s used as a warning against sibling rivalry or a parent favoring one child over another (a bit that ties to a whole story about different kinds of children elsewhere in the Seder).

Joseph is an integral part of the Passover story, but there is another part of Joseph’s story that doesn’t get much attention, which has far greater implications for the way we think about Passover. 

In the story, Joseph gets successful in Egypt because, with God’s help, he is able to use Pharoah’s dream to predict a famine. With this foreknowledge, he organized a massive food storage program so that Egypt alone in the region had food when the famine came. Great so far. It’s good to know what’s coming. When I worked at Amazon, one of the “Core Leadership Principles” was “Be Right…A Lot.” However, what is usually ignored is the way the stored food is distributed to the Egyptians. Joseph doesn’t just hand it out. He sells it. And the conditions of those sales get progressively worse. First, he sells it for money. When the Egyptians had no money left, they bought grain with their livestock, then their possessions. Finally, when they have nothing left, they pay with their freedom. “Buy us and our farmland for food, so that we and our farmland will be slaves to Pharaoh.” 

Before Joseph, Pharaoh was a king, but not an absolute dictator. It’s only through Joseph’s actions that Pharaoh achieves absolute power and that mass slavery is introduced into Egypt, the same slavery which ultimately impacts his own immigrant family.

There is a lesson here about power and its use, especially without compassion. Joseph is invested with tremendous power to help others in this story, but he uses it without much thought about the impact it has on others. Why would he do that? Watching him grow up, we already see the arrogance at the heart of his character. He dreams that his brothers will all bow down to him, but then he decides to tell them about it. He sees himself as inherently better than those around him. Maybe he is in some ways. But letting whatever “betterness” he has make him less able to see the needs of those around him is what leads him to the colossal mistakes he makes in Egypt. 

There is a tendency for us to think of the Jews in the Passover Seder only as the victims and the heroes of the story. And of course, the primary lesson of Passover is that slavery in any form is wrong, completely and inherently, so I’m not in any way saying the story tells us the Hebrews deserved their slavery. But I think it is telling us that what we do when we have power creates the type of world we live in. It is a mistake for any of us to ever see ourselves as better than someone else. Life is too complex for that. But it is naive to believe that some of us do not have more power than others, and power over others. When we do, the degree that makes us more or less sensitive to those with less power determines our character and, in the Passover story, the nature of the world we create. Do we believe power imbues us with “betterness” or a greater degree of “rightness” that permits us to serve our own needs and desires without consideration for the powerless in our world? If so, we create a world in which horrible things can happen and which may very well happen to us or our descendants.

It makes sense that we’d symbolise this lesson with a green vegetable. Having fresh food is one of the clearest signs of power. Just look at the division of who does and doesn’t have access to it. And if we look at karpas as a symbol of the dangers of arrogance, it makes more sense that we’d dip it into water, which represents purification and which we hope will remove this from us.

We live in a time when the balance of power is skewed and the feeling of inherent “rightness” is widespread and deeply ingrained. It’s so easy to let the feeling that we are right and our power to exercise that feeling blind us to how we ignore how other people are hurting. I’m seeing it in my country, and I’m seeing it in the Jewish spiritual home of Israel, and in both cases, the ability or failure we exhibit to let our actions be guided by compassion rather than arrogance will be what creates the future we must live in.