Thank God we are free, unlike this poor sod
Twice in my life, I have attended Passover Seders1 in people’s homes in which we, as we celebrated our freedom, were attended by Black servants. Perhaps if I had been raised in a social class where “the help” was a constant presence in my life, I would not have considered this unusual, but I felt like the hosts must have been deaf to irony. What did those women say to their families when they got home from their jobs? I hope that at least they were well paid.
It turns out that Maimonides, who was not raised with even the illusion of living in a classless society, had a different approach to this kind of situation. He wrote, in Hilchot Chametz u-Matzah 8:2:
If [the son at the Seder] is young or of low intelligence, [the father] says to him, “My son, we all used to be slaves—like this maid, or like this slave—in Egypt, and on this night the Blessed Holy One brought us out to freedom.”
Fortunately, in this millenium, other people have come up with better ways to explain slavery to the very young.
1 One of them was not, technically, a Passover Seder, but rather a birthday bash held on the first night of chol ha-mo’ed in which the hosts decided to break out the haggadot. Don’t ask.
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Dubious taxonomical choice of the day The Internet interprets a cherem as damage and routes around it
I’m not seeing the irony here either. I think we can assume that your hosts’ servants were paid, got regular days off and vacations, and could quit after giving some minimal notice, nor were they physically abused for not performing their duties adequately.
I’m assuming that since you mentioned the servants’ race, that that is relevant, and you would have felt differently if the servants were white latinas, or WASPs. So I assume that the history of slavery in antebellum USA has some connection here. But I’m still not quite seeing it.
To rephrase what I said in LJ-comments: Once you create a frame of “our actions here and now represent historical events significant to our culture”, you risk having your audience apply that frame to any action you take, whether or not you intended that particular action to represent anything beyond itself. And in the US you can’t talk about slavery without reminding people of the antebellum South, even though antebellum Southern slavery and ancient Egyptian slavery were very very different institutions.
At least that’s my reaction, as both a participant and audience member at sedarim. For all I know, this is entirely my hangup and the women serving at these particular sedarim saw it as just another job.