quotes for Seder meal

Some quotations to ponder while eating our Passover Seder meal:

There’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered. It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us, too. I can feel the suffering of millions—and yet, if I look into the heavens, I think it will come out all right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out. (Diary of Anne Frank, Amsterdam, 1944)



My thinking had been opened wide in Mecca. I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole. (El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”)



It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people…I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. (Nelson Mandela)



No matter what part of the world we come from, we are all basically the same human beings. We all seek happiness and try to avoid suffering. We have the same basic human needs and concerns. All of us human beings want freedom and the right to determine our own destiny as individuals and as peoples. That is human nature. (His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1989)



If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together (Lila Watson & an Australian Aboriginal Group)



But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order. (Gustavo Gutiérrez, “The Power of the Poor in History”)



For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed? (bell hooks)



Instead of standing on the shore and proving to ourselves that the ocean cannot carry us, let us venture on its waters just to see. (Pierre Tielhard de Chardin)