Published: 7 April 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
AUTHOR AND FORMER BARRISTER Elliot Perlman will participate in Pesach this year with extended family as planned, albeit via a different medium. The novelist and screenwriter acknowledges there will be differences in sharing the Seder over the phone, but tells me you can only do the best you can.
“My wife is from Sydney and we were planning to be in Sydney for Pesach…so we’ll do it over the phone with various members of our family. It will be different and it might be shorter,” he laughs.
"We have very small children so it’s hard to keep their attention at the best of times. Mind you, the thing they’re most interested in is screens so if we can turn Passover into an opportunity for them to play with screens, they could become extremely devout!”
For Perlman, the ban on physical gatherings will not detract from two strong Pesach messages that have always been important to him and his family: the role of Elijah the prophet as a symbol of fighting injustice and remembering the end of oppression.
“My emphasis is always on national liberation and the end of slavery so in that respect you can do that with a small group or with a larger group,” he says. “Perhaps [a smaller group] makes people value the connections more.”
Perlman does acknowledge a similarity between the devastation of the coronavirus and one of the plagues befalling the Egyptians in the Passover story. He feels, however, that there is a more profound difference between the current global crisis and the events leading up to the Exodus.
“It’s easy to explain it to the kids by saying [COVID-19] is very much like one of the ten plagues, except it’s omni-directional,” he says.
“The biblical plagues were directed at Pharaoh’s people to try and soften his heart so that he would let the Jews go. This [coronavirus] plague is ecumenical, isn’t it? This is not sparing anyone…so that raises some theological questions for devout people.”
“It will be really interesting to see, and this has nothing to do with Pesach or even being Jewish, frankly, to what extent we are all changed when this is over.”
