Category: Pesach

Pesach is many things to many people: memory, message, meaning, food, tradition, song or a call to justice, action, and transformation. Regardless how Pesach may resonate with you in your own life, give yourself a unique Pesach gift: the blessing of telling your own story.

This can be interpreted literally of course: we tell the stories of our ancestors at our Seders, just we chant Hallel, the festive psalms, at our Festival services. From Kiddush to Chad Gadya, from Maggid to Nirtza there is plenty of story and song. We can also, however, transcend the literal understanding and look at a deeper meaning: what does it mean for us to tell our own story?

The word Haggadah means ‘the telling’. It’s interesting that our tradition has chosen this word when other terms would have fitted too: ‘Limmud’, ‘the learning’ would have been adequate – after all, the Seder has an undeniable pedagogical methodology through its melodies, foods and rituals. Yet, it’s the verb ‘lehagid’, ‘to tell’ that has become the centerpiece of Pesach. As the Torah commands us, ‘higadeta levincha bayom hahu lemor: ba’avur zeh asah Adonai li betzeti mimitzrayim’ – ‘and you shall tell your child on that day saying, it is because of this what the Eternal did for me, when I came out of Egypt’. (Ex. 13:8)

When studying this verse, we usually focus on ‘ba’avur zeh asah Adonai li betzeti mimitzrayim’ – ‘it is because of this what the Eternal did for me, when I came out of Egypt’. This verse provides the basis of the famous statement by Rabban Gamliel in Mishnah Pesachim 10:5 that ‘in every generation a person must regard him or herself as though he or she personally had gone out of Egypt’. Personalizing the Seder as if we suffered the deprivation of slavery and the liberation of the Exodus is one of the cardinal commandments of the Festival. In each age, we are called to hear the ‘tza’akah gedolah’, the ‘great outcry’ of our time and cultivate radical empathy.

Still, there’s another dimension to the verse from Exodus: ‘higadeta levincha’ – ‘and you shall tell your child’. What is it about this ‘telling’? A story is more than just a series of facts. A story aspires to bring intent to its telling. A report may focus on dry data. A story, however, is meant to bury its way into our kishkes, our innermost, intuitive selves. The gift of Pesach is that we are invited to take ownership over our stories and write them.

What an amazing, powerful thing. The difference between victimhood and empowerment is wafer thin, like the matzah we eat. Many peoples, nations, cultures and faiths have narratives centering on their own hardship and oppression. What makes our Jewish narrative unique is that our ancestors had the courage to tell our story in a different way. The Torah and Mishnah encourage us to tell the story with radical empathy; with a living, breathing concern for the other. We are charged to control our own message and ultimately we are shaped not merely by our circumstances but through our choices and commitments.

What story will you be telling this year? The words and melody mutate across the centuries, but the sacred intent remains constant. Our liberation is tied up with the liberation of all humanity. We empower ourselves not at the expense of our enemies but in the name of ethical monotheism. We place at the center, like the Seder plate at our home Seders, our own vulnerability and derive incredible strength from it.

Give yourself this gift. Tell your own Pesach story. Tell those who you love, tell the world, tell God what your great dream is. Call out, sing praise, dance at the shore, cry bitter tears, laugh and love and through all of these, see the divinity in our common humanity. Know that we can transform trauma into redemption in the crucible of our People’s greatest gift: the ability to tell our story. That our stories may be a blessing to all.

—

Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz serves  Congregation Agudas Achim, in Iowa City, Iowa.

The orange on the seder plate is a newer tradition in the Passover seder, which especially speaks of the balance between the old and the new. This tradition has come to symbolize for some feminism and the equality of women in Judaism.

I remember the first time my aunt put an orange on the seder plate.  I think I was in rabbinical school at the time, and it was a powerful symbol, as we perceived at the time, of women in the rabbinate.  I was extremely appreciative of the gesture at the time—and that my family was embracing the idea (and not just when I insisted on my parents putting one there when the seder was at our house).  And I’ve come to be increasingly appreciative of the orange on the seder plate, even as I’ve learned more about how it came to be—and what it truly symbolizes.

The story, though, is not as we first heard it.  The actual tale, from Susannah Heschel’s point of view, comes from an experience she had at Oberlin College in the 1980’s, where she was shown an early feminist Haggadah which suggested including a crust of bread on the seder plate, as a sign of solidarity with Jewish lesbians. She changed the tradition to an orange—symbolizing the fruitfulness of Jewish life when all are included and contribute to the community—and also the pits of hate that should be spit out. She broadened the definition to include all who are marginalized in Jewish life. To her, the crust of bread implied that those who were other were somehow chameitz—that they violated the spirit of Judaism like bread is forbidden on Pesach.

Over time, the story itself transformed into the legend of a women speaking in Florida, at which a man heckled from the audience, saying, “A woman belongs on the bimah as much as an orange on the seder plate.”

As Heschel reflects, “A woman’s words are attributed to a man, and the affirmation of lesbians and gay men is erased. Isn’t that precisely what’s happened over the centuries to women’s ideas?”

But the story of this story gets even more interesting—the women who wrote that Haggadah at Oberlin wrote recently about their version, in which they shared that they had never put the bread on the seder plate.

Instead, they took the crust of bread concept from a short story, and transformed it into leaving a blank space on the seder plate, “A Makom (place) on our seder plate for all who have been condemned and excluded because of fear or ignorance.”

In Heschel’s telling of the story, the act of the students was erased, even in an act of attempting to be inclusive.   And so this orange becomes a symbol of those who have been erased…and also the idea of how stories change over time…a symbol, perhaps, of the very idea of the balance of our sacred obligation not to change and that which demands change.

—

Rabbi Elisa Koppel serves Congregation Beth Emeth in Wilmington, DE. 

How do we teach our children the story of Passover when there are so many atrocities? How can we play with plague puppets and plastic toys when reciting curses that befell other people? In what world is it ever okay for a divine emissary to slay children?

These are some of the questions I was asked while facilitating a conversation for interfaith parents while their children learned in a small and vibrant Jewish religious school one room over. They struggled with deep fear over the Passover narrative and left the question lingering for me about the role of victim in our communal narrative.

In a pinnacle moment of the Passover story, the angel of death passes over the Jewish homes and spares our children’s lives. Suddenly, we are not the victims of the newest tragedy – the Egyptians are. Instantaneously we transform from being the helpless people of the story to the lucky ones, with God on our side.

Yet the pain we feel from everything that happened previously doesn’t vanish, so we are reluctant to recognize this shift from destitute to saved. We continue to think about our own slavery experience instead of mourning with and for our Egyptian neighbors.

It’s true, we lessen our joy by diminishing our cups of wine and we have rabbinic commentaries telling us all the people of the world are God’s children. Yet while expressing gratitude over making it through every step of the story we praise events that caused others pain.

We cannot let go of our narrative of being the downtrodden – even though in that moment – that morning – there were others far worse off.

This reluctance to recognize our blessings and cling to the narrative of victimization remains an enduring struggle for the Jewish community.

While others may see us as successful, lucky and blessed, we continue to see ourselves through eyes of fear.

Though we have legitimate gripes about past wrong doings and potential future pain, a failure to see ourselves as the lucky ones in the story of life becomes a failure to see those who truly are victims of our times and in need of our help. If we cannot see the other who needs our voice and support than we squander the privilege we have and do a true disservice to our ancestral narrative.

I’m not saying we don’t have the right to feel broken by life’s hard moments. As individuals and as a community we sometimes endure great pain. All I’m saying is that remembering our experiences of pain shouldn’t prevent us from seeing the pain of others or prevent us from recognizing the blessings we do have.

This is the reason vocal liberal millennials turn a blind eye to our claims of anti-Semitism while embracing flagrantly anti-Zionist behaviors that fill our society under the guise of intersectionality. It brings me great frustration, but I’ve come to see that until we acknowledge the ways in which we are the lucky ones and others are the trampled we will not only fail to find partners for our cause but others will prefer that we not engage in theirs.

Let me be clear – I do not believe there is anything wrong with having privilege, power, and promise. However, there is something wrong when memories of our times without these strengths lead us to believe we are forevermore without agency. That is the exact opposite of why we retell this narrative.

Our Torah reminds us over and over again of our experience of slavery, not to spread fears of anti-Semitism but rather to encourage we seek justice for all. So even though there are moments in the Passover story when we feel God is acting on our behalf at the expense of others, we will not teach our children that this is easy, silly, or just. We will sit with discomfort and acknowledge that we care about all people on this earth, not simply our own.

—

Rabbi Samantha Kahn serves Interfaithfamily in the San Francisco Bay Area and blogs at RabbiKahn.com