Tonight Is Passover. Our Neighbors Are Wandering in the Wilderness

Tonight, families across Vermont and the world will gather at the Passover seder. They will tell the story of a people enslaved. Of systems built on their exploitation. Of a long, agonizing road to freedom.

Tonight, some of our unsheltered Vermont neighbors will sleep outside for the first time. Because today, their motel shelter ends today.

The irony is not subtle.

Vermont’s General Assistance Emergency Housing Program has “exited” hundreds of our neighbors from motel shelter this spring. The word “exited” does a lot of work. It sounds orderly. Administrative. Managed. What it actually means is this: people who had a door to lock and a bed to sleep in no longer do.

These aren’t strangers passing through. The vast majority of Vermont’s unhoused neighbors are native Vermonters. Born here. Raised here. Worked here. They are not outsiders who wandered in from somewhere else. They are Vermonters.

The Passover story is about a people enslaved by an empire that found them inconvenient. Costly. Expendable. Sound familiar?

Our neighbors are enslaved, not by Pharaoh, but by intersectional impoverishment. In a hyper-consumeristic system, they can’t play the role the empire requires. They are neither reliable consumers nor, often because of disabilities, laborers in the empire. So the system has no use for them. It doesn’t oppress them so much as discard them. The chains are different. The captivity is real.

At Green Mountain Justice, we work alongside these neighbors every day. We know their names. We know their kids’ names. We sit with them at our monthly Neighbors’ Table. We hear their stories on our Voices from the Edge podcast. We know that what they are living through is not a policy problem. It is a moral crisis.

Vermont prides itself on a liberal tradition. We pass resolutions. We march. About 42,000 Vermonters showed up for “No Kings” rallies last year. Even more last week.

But how many have called their legislators to oppose H.772, the bill that will make it easier to evict our neighbors? How many have demanded a real, strategic plan to end homelessness in Vermont? Fewer than 900 contacted the governor about housing our neighbors during last spring’s motel exits.

Here is the hard truth: you don’t get to claim a liberal tradition if you are not liberating your people from poverty.

The Israelites were delivered by something beyond their power to manufacture. Are we waiting for that? Are we waiting for plagues before we act? Are we waiting for a burning bush to remind us that every person sleeping outside tonight is equally and inherently worthy of a dignified life?

Or have we simply decided that some people’s freedom matters more than others?

Our neighbors are wandering in their own wilderness now. No promised land on the horizon. No pillar of fire to make safe their way. Just the cold April night and a system that called this an “exit.”

Here is the question the seder asks every year: in every generation, each person must see themselves as if they personally came out of the wilderness. Not your ancestors. You.

So. Which side of the sea are you on?

Are you walking through it toward freedom? Or are you standing on the shore, watching your neighbors wade in alone, and calling that somebody else’s problem?

Vermont has the money. After spending $500-700M not on a strategic plan but on a patchwork of nonprofit salaries and programs, Vermont should already have the programs. Vermont has, in communities like ours, neighbors ready to walk alongside the marginalized in authentic, proximal care. What we have not yet found is the collective will to act like we actually mean what we say.

Tonight, light your candles. Tell the story of liberation. Let it land.

Then ask yourself what you are going to do in the morning.