Kimberley, South Africa

Pesach 2016

Barney Horwitz’s PESACH 5776 2016 address

April 2016

Tonight at 5:40 p.m. it will be erev Pesach and tomorrow evening will be the first night of the Omer.

Once again we will gather with our family and friends, dip and eat our karpas, our sandwiches of matzah and maror and our hard-boiled eggs dipped in saltwater and relate the story of how our ancestors were led from slavery to liberty through a long and arduous journey both physical and spiritual.

Physical in the sense of a long and hard road of collective bargaining and a wearisome and dangerous journey of 40 years through the wilderness and spiritual in the sense that they witnessed the plagues at first hand and the miracles of the parting of the Red Sea, the Manna from Heaven and the revelation at Mount Sinai.

It is the oldest surviving religious ritual in the western world and as former Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks puts it in his “Haggadah” while “every other people known to mankind have been united because they lived in the same place, spoke the same language, were part of the same culture, Jews alone, dispersed across continents, speaking different languages and participating in different cultures have been bound together by a narrative, the Pesach narrative, which they told in the same way on the same night.”

It is this unity of purpose on this day in Israel and amongst us all throughout the diaspora from Wellington in New Zealand to Toronto in Canada that should be uppermost in our minds this evening. Unity is strength and in the difficult times we live in, we need unity within our ranks and not division

At a local level we need unity to maintain our proud little community with all its glorious history and unique Chagim. To mention but one, on a Friday night in all Orthodox Congregations they sing each of the four verses of Shalom Aleichem either once or three times whereas here we sing each verse twice.

At a national level we need to find a consensus on how the various different branches of Judaism can remember our common history, the good and the bad in unity and in this regard I refer to the tragedy of the court action currently playing itself out in the Equality Court in Cape Town over participation in the annual Yom Hashoah Memorial services in that City.
At an international level, we as Jews, no matter what our level of observance may be, need to be unified in our support of our National Homeland in Israel, the desire for which inspired our ancestors who left Egypt to endure years and years of hardship and deprivation and our own brethren who survived the Shoah to in fact survive and build anew.

My wife Maud and my children Ida and Roy join me in wishing you all a Pesach Kasher V’Sameach and may we all emerge from the next 8 days of the festival enriched in our knowledge of Jewish history and re-invigorated in our quest for solidarity.

Barney Horwitz
Chairman
Griqualand West Hebrew Congregation
Kimberley