Violence vs. Nonviolence

Violence vs. Nonviolence

Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections

2015

Moshe Kornfield, Scott Meyer, Elias Sacks, Stephanie Yuhas, Andrew Violet, Jane Thaler

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English

Violence vs. Nonviolence After recalling both the ten plagues that God brought upon the ancient Egyptians in the Bible, and the tradition of spilling drops of wine from one’s cup to “reduce our pleasure as we remember the sufferings of the Egyptians,” Rabbi Balfour Brickner led participants in a meditation on the question of violence. The Village Voice reported: “Unlike the King memorials all over town… the Freedom Seder met the issue of violence head on. While the rest of Washington remembered with nostalgia King’s non-violence, and forgot the social turmoil he caused in the early ’60s, the worshipers at Lincoln Temple faced the issue of the late ’60s.” While nonviolence dominated civil rights activism in the early 1960s, the late 1960s saw the rise of an increasingly militant strand within the movement. The Freedom Seder addressed the question of violent versus nonviolent activism directly. “But let us also remember the lesson of the plagues: the winning of freedom has not always been bloodless in the past.” (The Freedom Seder)