The celebrated actor authored a moving essay on the meaning of Passover and justice after taking an American Jewish World Service trip to the genocide-ravaged region
By Joe Freeman
TabletMag
As
someone who has spent the past four years reporting in Southeast Asia, I
want to make a suggestion: this Passover, put down the Haggadah for a
few minutes and read aloud from an essay by actor Mandy Patinkin about
his trip to Cambodia.
On
the Showtime series “Homeland,” Patinkin plays Saul Berenson, a senior
CIA official who tirelessly attempts to thwart terrorist attacks while
grappling with boneheaded government officials and unpredictable
colleagues. One of the many charms of what he has written here is that
it better acquaints us with the real guy behind the role. And yet, as we
will see, some of Saul’s passion is evident here too.
Patinkin,
who traveled to the country in the first week of February, went as a
supporter of the American Jewish World Service (AJWS), which helps fund
Cambodian civil society organizations working in everything from
indigenous rights to labor advocacy. He also traveled with his wife,
Kathryn Grody, a longtime friend of Ruth Messinger, AJWS’s outgoing
president.
Cambodia
has a way of making a strong impression on even short-term visitors,
but Patinkin’s reflections on his trip in the context of Passover,
complete with Biblical references, are especially poignant. The American
Jewish World Service published his thoughts as part of its Chag
v’Chesed (Celebration and Compassion) series of essays in which
prominent figures use teachings from the holidays to highlight the links
between Judaism and social justice.
“Several
months ago, I felt the power of the thousands-year-old Passover story
as palpably as I ever have,” Patinkin writes in the opening line of his
piece. “My sense of what it means for a people to go from slavery to
freedom deepened when I spent time listening to the modern-day
narratives of Cambodians who live in the shadow of a genocide that
claimed 2 million lives.”
While
in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, Patinkin visited S-21 prison and
the ‘Killing Fields,’ two of the more infamous sites tied to the Khmer
Rouge, a collection of merciless ideologues who seized power 41 years
ago this month and enacted a reign of terror that lasted almost four
years.
Through
the prism of 2016, Patinkin was struck by the tragedy of the past
compared with the energy he felt while meeting activists striving to
effect change in today’s Cambodia.
“This
juxtaposition between the deepest injustice and the most transcendent
hope reminds me of our own people’s transformations – from slaves in
Egypt to a free people at Sinai; from those Jews who did whatever they
could to resist the genocide perpetrated against us, to Jews today who
find meaning in that tragic chapter of our history by standing up for
freedom for others in the new millennium,” he writes.
“In Cambodia, juxtapositions such as these are everywhere.”
He
meets a woman named Sitha, who organizes fellow garment workers.
Likening her to a “modern-day, female Moses,” Patinkin lauds her efforts
to obtain fair wages and safe working conditions, “just as many of our
grandparents and great-grandparents did in New York and around the world
in the early 20th century.”
A paragraph later, he returns to the Passover story.
“Like
the matzah, which reminds us that we were once slaves and are now free,
the Cambodian activists we met are confident that the unleavened bread
will rise. There is no sense of defeat within them,” he writes. “The
young generation of Cambodia possesses the kind of optimism that is rare
to see on this earth, much like the very optimism that freed us from
Pharaoh’s grip.”
Some
may quibble with Patinkin’s attempt to lump one historical experience
with another–he wrote a similar piece last year juxtaposing the plight
of Syrian refugees in Greece with relatives of his who fled the
Holocaust and pogroms in Russia.
But
such quibbling would be missing the point. Patinkin isn’t the first to
mention the similarities between the Cambodian and Jewish experiences.
Cambodians themselves have made the connection.
When
Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, died an old man in 1998, having never
been held accountable for his crimes, Dith Pran, the Cambodian New York
Times reporter portrayed in the film The Killing Fields, had this to
say: “The Jewish people’s search for justice did not end with the death
of Hitler and the Cambodian people’s search for justice doesn’t end with
Pol Pot.”
Like
the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge era never seems that far off. Although a
United Nations-backed tribunal still seeks to hold senior leaders
accountable, countless functionaries and foot soldiers will never see
the inside of a courtroom or be forced to explain their crimes.
Cambodia’s Prime Minister, Hun Sen, was a former member of the Khmer
Rouge who fled purges and returned with the support of the Vietnamese
army. In the tradition of strongmen everywhere, he has invoked the
horrific past to justify his stabilizing presence at the top, where he
has been for more than 30 years.
To
his credit, however, Cambodia today is, in many respects, a thriving
place with a booming tourism industry, a rising middle class, and a
relatively free press. But another version of the country, a version
drenched in crony capitalism, human rights abuses, violence, labor
fights, land grabs, environmental degradation and widespread corruption
is alive and well. By highlighting the good fight in a Buddhist country
in Southeast Asia, Patinkin reminds us that Passover is not just a time
to reflect on our own history, but a very modern call to action.
And
so, as Patinkin puts it, “let us all lean forward from our reclining
positions at our seder tables, and awaken our hearts, our compassion and
our abilities to listen.”
Joe
Freeman is a Southeast Asia-based journalist whose work has appeared in
The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Christian
Science Monitor, The Phnom Penh Post, and the Nikkei Asian Review.
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