See Yourself As If You Personally Were There… Save a Cambodian Child
To me the greatest challenge of the seder has been the one to walk in our ancestors' footsteps as they were freed from slavery in Egypt. It is the same mitzvah echoed so many times in the Torah when we read: for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
The teaching is quite simple: We were there. We know what it's like to be treated as if we were less than human. We know how it feels when a whole society stands by and watches it happen to us.
That's what I felt in Cambodia.
One of the most poignant images that stays with me still is the picture of a boy looking over the wall into the school where we were distributing supplies and games. We had brought fifty backpacks filled with pads and pencils and erasers. The orphans who were receiving them took everything out, tried the pens, looked at the pads and couldn't believe that all of this was theirs.
And then there was that boy – the fifty-first orphan, the one not yet taken in by a foster family because Arun, himself an orphan from the same community, did not have the $600 to pay a foster family for ten years of rice, the entire time that the boy would be in school.
We wanted to give him things anyway, but Arun said that there were twenty or thirty more just like him. So we gave him $600 right then, and now there is one fewer eager child unable to go to school or to have a family with whom to live.
Thanks to many of you at least four additional orphans will now be adopted. I so appreciate your caring and your rapid response.
Passover is a time of tzedakah – right before the seder begins. Maybe, those at your table, feeling the pain and isolation our ancestors experienced, could help to save one more orphan so eager to learn and to have a future, to become the wise child himself.
Let's bring them all over the wall and into the school!
