Passover Texts
Part 1: Passover 5778/2018: Detroit . (Scroll down for New Orleans texts)
In the spring of 2018 I wrote dedications for the four cups of wine we drink during the Passover seder. Sometimes the pieces I write refer to local and topical issues that are less relevant across space and time, and sometimes they're useful in many times and places.
When I worked with Rabbi Alana Alpert of T'chiyah and Detroit Jews for Justice to create dedications for their seders, one theme I was asked to respond to was the idea of sanctuary, and what I wrote referred to both local and immediate issues, and broader events and concerns:
Third Cup:
We raise this cup to sanctuary, to the places that become holy because we shelter each other there. We raise this cup to escape. To the doors we open through fences and walls. To the rivers we ferry each other across. To the journey from danger to refuge.
Everywhere rulers find someone to blame. They use the language of contamination, infection, infestation, epidemic, speak of cleansing their countries, pass laws, send soldiers, build holding pens, and people are blown across the map like dust. Everywhere people risk themselves in makeshift rafts, creep under wire, hide in cellars and gullies, find passage, pay bribes, beg shelter.
526 years ago tomorrow the monarchs of a newly formed Spain issued their edict of expulsion and drove at least 40,000 Iberian Jews into exile, and they went, carrying the keys to their stolen houses, occupied by strangers, handing them down across generations.
Three days from today lawyers will debate in Israeli courts the plan to drive 40,000 African asylum seekers into the arms of waiting slavers and executioners. If they are stripped of everything, to whom will they give their keys?
70 years ago this May a million Palestinians were driven from their land and their towns demolished to lay the foundations of settler houses. Their keys were scattered to the four quarters of exile, but like compass needles they keep pointing the way home. Yesterday thirty thousand gathered at the edge of that exile and soldiers on duty during the feast of freedom killed seventeen people simply for being where they were.
One month ago on Sunday, our sister Siwatu and her unborn child were sentenced to prison because she tried to defend herself and her family from violent assault, and the laws that protect white men with guns did not protect her. Can we become the key that will open her cell?
Lift a cup to the makers of refuge, to the lantern in a window, to the secret attic, to the loaf in the haystack and the water jug in the desert. To the falsified papers, to the loan of a name, to the pro bono lawyer, to the crowds at the airports.
Lift a cup to the ending of borders. To the end of all danger. To the end of all harm. To the day when we migrate like sea turtles and swallows, like pollen and dust, like songs and ideas, to free passage everywhere under the sun. And here’s to the day when no one is uprooted, to digging in deeper in the places where are, to universal safety and the right to remain.
Lift a cup the sanctuary planet we dream.
When I worked with Rabbi Alana Alpert of T'chiyah and Detroit Jews for Justice to create dedications for their seders, one theme I was asked to respond to was the idea of sanctuary, and what I wrote referred to both local and immediate issues, and broader events and concerns:
Third Cup:
We raise this cup to sanctuary, to the places that become holy because we shelter each other there. We raise this cup to escape. To the doors we open through fences and walls. To the rivers we ferry each other across. To the journey from danger to refuge.
Everywhere rulers find someone to blame. They use the language of contamination, infection, infestation, epidemic, speak of cleansing their countries, pass laws, send soldiers, build holding pens, and people are blown across the map like dust. Everywhere people risk themselves in makeshift rafts, creep under wire, hide in cellars and gullies, find passage, pay bribes, beg shelter.
526 years ago tomorrow the monarchs of a newly formed Spain issued their edict of expulsion and drove at least 40,000 Iberian Jews into exile, and they went, carrying the keys to their stolen houses, occupied by strangers, handing them down across generations.
Three days from today lawyers will debate in Israeli courts the plan to drive 40,000 African asylum seekers into the arms of waiting slavers and executioners. If they are stripped of everything, to whom will they give their keys?
70 years ago this May a million Palestinians were driven from their land and their towns demolished to lay the foundations of settler houses. Their keys were scattered to the four quarters of exile, but like compass needles they keep pointing the way home. Yesterday thirty thousand gathered at the edge of that exile and soldiers on duty during the feast of freedom killed seventeen people simply for being where they were.
One month ago on Sunday, our sister Siwatu and her unborn child were sentenced to prison because she tried to defend herself and her family from violent assault, and the laws that protect white men with guns did not protect her. Can we become the key that will open her cell?
Lift a cup to the makers of refuge, to the lantern in a window, to the secret attic, to the loaf in the haystack and the water jug in the desert. To the falsified papers, to the loan of a name, to the pro bono lawyer, to the crowds at the airports.
Lift a cup to the ending of borders. To the end of all danger. To the end of all harm. To the day when we migrate like sea turtles and swallows, like pollen and dust, like songs and ideas, to free passage everywhere under the sun. And here’s to the day when no one is uprooted, to digging in deeper in the places where are, to universal safety and the right to remain.
Lift a cup the sanctuary planet we dream.
I also wrote a dedication to clarify widespread confusion about the nature and functions of antisemitism.
Second Cup:
A cup of clarity, a cup to reveal the workings of a vast machine whose engine is greed, and all the different wheels that engine turns. A cup to show how the teeth of the wheels interlock.
Imagine racism is a millstone, a crushing weight that grinds and presses down relentlessly on people intended to be a permanent underclass. Its purpose is to extract the oil of profit from us, right to the edge of extermination and beyond. It presses and crushes and grinds, but the people push back and it generates heat that begins to rise. If the owners of the mill, their hands on the switches and cranks, don’t insulate themselves, it will all get too hot to handle.
Imagine the oppression of Jews is that insulation, a pressure valve, a shunt that redirects the steaming rage of working people away from the mostly white and Christian 1%, who own the machine and collect the oil pressed from our lives. Imagine a valve they can open at will, a pipe that diverts the scalding heat off to the side. For Jews to be blamed for oppression, some of us must be seen to prosper, must be well paid and highly visible, positioned as the public faces of an inequality we help to administer, but do not own. The purpose of oppressing Jews is not to crush us day after day. It’s to have us available for crushing. To be the bone they throw.
Nobody sees the owners. They don’t let their faces appear on the cover of Time and Newsweek. They hire us to be their faces. They send us to collect taxes. They appoint us as judges. Long before they let us live in their neighborhoods, they let us manage their inner city buildings full of brown people. And some of us agree. And some of us don’t. But they keep telling stories about how we’re greedy. When they cut 500 million dollars from the budget of the city university of New York, they tell the working class people of color who study there that the reason isn’t that they hate public universities. The reason, they say, is that the people of color have upset the Jews. We are 1.7% of the world’s people and 1.7% of the world’s rich, but they say we are the reason people are poor.
Imagine the people under the grindstone are in a fury, marching down the road toward where the owners live. Imagine the oppression of Jews is a conjuring trick that works through misdirection, that the Protestant heirs of slaveholder fortunes, pilgrim entrepreneurs and railroad barons grown rich from stealing indigenous land, the people who gamble with our mortgages, shoot our children, poison our water and break the circle of seasons are holding a great big DETOUR sign with red arrows pointing toward the Jews, and some of the marchers on the road begin to think the problem with Jewish financiers is that they are Jewish, not that they are financiers, that the problem with Jewish slumlords is that they are Jewish, not that they are slumlords. They don’t notice that nobody ever says Presbyterian banker, Baptist slumlord. Some of them wander onto the side road, the momentum of their fury drains away into resentment, and they talk about Jews instead of class, begin to think maybe Jews ARE class. The steam thins out and blows away and the owners are safe for another day.
So, here’s a cup to the end of deception. Here’s a cup to watching their hands. Here’s a cup to steam under pressure, to no more grindstones and no more valves. May we all be the wrench in the gears.
A cup of clarity, a cup to reveal the workings of a vast machine whose engine is greed, and all the different wheels that engine turns. A cup to show how the teeth of the wheels interlock.
Imagine racism is a millstone, a crushing weight that grinds and presses down relentlessly on people intended to be a permanent underclass. Its purpose is to extract the oil of profit from us, right to the edge of extermination and beyond. It presses and crushes and grinds, but the people push back and it generates heat that begins to rise. If the owners of the mill, their hands on the switches and cranks, don’t insulate themselves, it will all get too hot to handle.
Imagine the oppression of Jews is that insulation, a pressure valve, a shunt that redirects the steaming rage of working people away from the mostly white and Christian 1%, who own the machine and collect the oil pressed from our lives. Imagine a valve they can open at will, a pipe that diverts the scalding heat off to the side. For Jews to be blamed for oppression, some of us must be seen to prosper, must be well paid and highly visible, positioned as the public faces of an inequality we help to administer, but do not own. The purpose of oppressing Jews is not to crush us day after day. It’s to have us available for crushing. To be the bone they throw.
Nobody sees the owners. They don’t let their faces appear on the cover of Time and Newsweek. They hire us to be their faces. They send us to collect taxes. They appoint us as judges. Long before they let us live in their neighborhoods, they let us manage their inner city buildings full of brown people. And some of us agree. And some of us don’t. But they keep telling stories about how we’re greedy. When they cut 500 million dollars from the budget of the city university of New York, they tell the working class people of color who study there that the reason isn’t that they hate public universities. The reason, they say, is that the people of color have upset the Jews. We are 1.7% of the world’s people and 1.7% of the world’s rich, but they say we are the reason people are poor.
Imagine the people under the grindstone are in a fury, marching down the road toward where the owners live. Imagine the oppression of Jews is a conjuring trick that works through misdirection, that the Protestant heirs of slaveholder fortunes, pilgrim entrepreneurs and railroad barons grown rich from stealing indigenous land, the people who gamble with our mortgages, shoot our children, poison our water and break the circle of seasons are holding a great big DETOUR sign with red arrows pointing toward the Jews, and some of the marchers on the road begin to think the problem with Jewish financiers is that they are Jewish, not that they are financiers, that the problem with Jewish slumlords is that they are Jewish, not that they are slumlords. They don’t notice that nobody ever says Presbyterian banker, Baptist slumlord. Some of them wander onto the side road, the momentum of their fury drains away into resentment, and they talk about Jews instead of class, begin to think maybe Jews ARE class. The steam thins out and blows away and the owners are safe for another day.
So, here’s a cup to the end of deception. Here’s a cup to watching their hands. Here’s a cup to steam under pressure, to no more grindstones and no more valves. May we all be the wrench in the gears.
Part 2: Passover 5779/2019: New Orleans
My process in New Orleans was quite different. I had worked extensively with JVP New Orleans and understood their long term goals well. I challenged them to do more than add key issues to their seder, but to back up, slow down and think strategically about what they wanted the retelling of this story to do for them. We had had extensive conversations about their thoughts and feelings about Zionism, and how to build better relationships with other Jews with whom they disagreed about Israel/Palestine. I challenged them to go deeper, to the roots of the issues, and take the participants on a journey. They went away to think and discuss this and came back asking me to help create a seder on the theme of seeking safety. The core of the disagreement is about how we become safe and at what cost.
So I wrote four monologues, in the voices of four ancestors who represent different strategies for seeking safety, each with both strengths and risks.
FOUR ANCESTORS
Every living thing resists harm. Every living thing fights for its life. Who doesn’t long for safety, peace, to be free? But history pounds on us, shapes us, makes the roads we take and the ones we cannot see. Here are four ancestors, four ways to go. Each with their lessons and warnings, each with their word to say, each with a piece of the map to freedom, each one taking us part of the way.
The Ancestor Who Hides
I am the one who bides my time, who hid my face, who changed my name, who put the mezuzah inside the madonna, the orisha in the saint, the archives of the ghetto in a milk can underground. I passed on the knowledge of our history in secret, only lit candles behind shuttered windows, camouflaged my meaning in a layered song, whispered forbidden languages at night, and I saved myself and others through deceit. I lived in a closet, in a cellar, went underground, wore a disguise, changed my accent, my clothes, my food, the way I walked, became someone else each time I left my house. For centuries this is how I survived, keeping only the smallest flame of us alive. I watched and listened, kept a record, carried messages, was a model prisoner, always lowered my eyes, and worked in secret for the common good. I know how to speak in code, to recognize the others, to make a sign, to infiltrate, to pass as someone else, to save what matters most and leave the rest behind. I choose to live and fight another day, live til I have a chance to get away, carry the seeds of other times within, and wear my secret like another skin. I am alive, but after so long in hiding, who do I know, and who in world knows me? When it’s time to open the doors and windows wide, what if I can’t find the key? My strength is to reckon up the odds, avoid the battles that I know I’ll lose, and even though I count the heavy cost, because we live, not everything is lost.
The Ancestor Who Runs
I am the ancestor who runs, who carries the magic of escape, who knows the borders of captivity, each link of chain, each post. Who stows away, slips under barbed wire, swims the river, disappears into untilled land. I jump the train, head for the hills, go into the swamps, follow the drinking gourd, forge the papers, bribe a guard, dig a tunnel, pay a smuggler, go into exile, carry my life in my pocket, eat where I can. My map is a song, a quilt, a riddle, a name someone said to memorize and not write down. Somebody told me there’s a safer place than here, so I navigate by possibility and fear. My strength is to risk my life for something better, to take a chance and leave the devil I know, to break the line, to run for the woods, to cut the rope, no more heigh ho heigh ho and off to work I go. But when I run, who do I leave behind? Who else’s lives do I risk? And when I arrive, whose homes lie underfoot, what if my coming makes new refugees? Or do I keep running, never taking root, my promised land just over the horizon, round the bend? I ask you to think outside the box, beyond the borders of your lives. To leave the familiar and take a chance on something new. What if the dream that seems impossible is true?
The Ancestor Who Builds
I am the ancestor who takes root right where I am. I plant food in empty lots, and organize to stop the local dam, the prison over the hill, the incinerator upwind, the neighborhood gentrification plan. Day after day I plant and hoe and weed, fighting to build just a piece of what we need. Each time we win an inch, somebody lives, somebody gets the strength to take the next step and the next. The decent housing we can afford can shelter the dream of something more. I open freedom schools in storefronts, take over city councils, sink a well, start language classes so children will know their elders, make worker coops in the factories and fields, send books and water filters, tents and solar lights. I am a cup of water in a dry land. I am a lantern in the night. I build a little piece of freedom, but is it just for those whose names I know? I rig a shelter from the storm, but am I settling for staying dry, while wind and water rage and others drown? Did I make a country out of other people’s pain, learn to accept that their loss was my gain? Working night and day for what seems practical but small, will I forget to plant the seeds of a bigger liberation for us all? Did I cut down the leaves and stems of injustice and leave the root intact? My strength is making hope concrete, making it real, inspiration we can see and touch and feel. The lesson of my junkyard garden plot of food and flowers: each time you win an inch, reach for a mile. Hope builds on hope, and acting powerful builds power. But never settle for a little patch of sun. Push back the shadows til it shines on everyone.
The Ancestor Who Confronts
I am arise you prisoners of starvation, I am the walkout, the strike, the plantation house in flames, the raid on the settler town, the wheelchairs chained to fences, the ones who link arms and won’t be moved, the ones who sit down, occupy, block roads, say no. I am the uprising, the overthrow, the revolution in the streets and in the hills. I go face to face, hand to hand, toe to toe. I shout from the rooftops, I hold the line, I make demands. Right here, right now is where I make my stand. Safety will only come when we have won, torn down the palaces, and captured all the guns. If we win, there will be nothing to run away from. If we lose, there will be nowhere on earth to run. My strength is to push back, to break down walls and break the tyrant’s rule, to mobilize and fill the streets, to sue them for our future, to beat the drums, to make their everyday impossible, to disrupt, to tell the truth they want to hide, to bring the consequences home. But sometimes I hurl myself right at the wall and break my bones. Sometimes I burn out like a torch. Sometimes I’m hoarse from shouting, and can no longer sing. Sometimes I forget that fighting isn’t everything.
My process in New Orleans was quite different. I had worked extensively with JVP New Orleans and understood their long term goals well. I challenged them to do more than add key issues to their seder, but to back up, slow down and think strategically about what they wanted the retelling of this story to do for them. We had had extensive conversations about their thoughts and feelings about Zionism, and how to build better relationships with other Jews with whom they disagreed about Israel/Palestine. I challenged them to go deeper, to the roots of the issues, and take the participants on a journey. They went away to think and discuss this and came back asking me to help create a seder on the theme of seeking safety. The core of the disagreement is about how we become safe and at what cost.
So I wrote four monologues, in the voices of four ancestors who represent different strategies for seeking safety, each with both strengths and risks.
FOUR ANCESTORS
Every living thing resists harm. Every living thing fights for its life. Who doesn’t long for safety, peace, to be free? But history pounds on us, shapes us, makes the roads we take and the ones we cannot see. Here are four ancestors, four ways to go. Each with their lessons and warnings, each with their word to say, each with a piece of the map to freedom, each one taking us part of the way.
The Ancestor Who Hides
I am the one who bides my time, who hid my face, who changed my name, who put the mezuzah inside the madonna, the orisha in the saint, the archives of the ghetto in a milk can underground. I passed on the knowledge of our history in secret, only lit candles behind shuttered windows, camouflaged my meaning in a layered song, whispered forbidden languages at night, and I saved myself and others through deceit. I lived in a closet, in a cellar, went underground, wore a disguise, changed my accent, my clothes, my food, the way I walked, became someone else each time I left my house. For centuries this is how I survived, keeping only the smallest flame of us alive. I watched and listened, kept a record, carried messages, was a model prisoner, always lowered my eyes, and worked in secret for the common good. I know how to speak in code, to recognize the others, to make a sign, to infiltrate, to pass as someone else, to save what matters most and leave the rest behind. I choose to live and fight another day, live til I have a chance to get away, carry the seeds of other times within, and wear my secret like another skin. I am alive, but after so long in hiding, who do I know, and who in world knows me? When it’s time to open the doors and windows wide, what if I can’t find the key? My strength is to reckon up the odds, avoid the battles that I know I’ll lose, and even though I count the heavy cost, because we live, not everything is lost.
The Ancestor Who Runs
I am the ancestor who runs, who carries the magic of escape, who knows the borders of captivity, each link of chain, each post. Who stows away, slips under barbed wire, swims the river, disappears into untilled land. I jump the train, head for the hills, go into the swamps, follow the drinking gourd, forge the papers, bribe a guard, dig a tunnel, pay a smuggler, go into exile, carry my life in my pocket, eat where I can. My map is a song, a quilt, a riddle, a name someone said to memorize and not write down. Somebody told me there’s a safer place than here, so I navigate by possibility and fear. My strength is to risk my life for something better, to take a chance and leave the devil I know, to break the line, to run for the woods, to cut the rope, no more heigh ho heigh ho and off to work I go. But when I run, who do I leave behind? Who else’s lives do I risk? And when I arrive, whose homes lie underfoot, what if my coming makes new refugees? Or do I keep running, never taking root, my promised land just over the horizon, round the bend? I ask you to think outside the box, beyond the borders of your lives. To leave the familiar and take a chance on something new. What if the dream that seems impossible is true?
The Ancestor Who Builds
I am the ancestor who takes root right where I am. I plant food in empty lots, and organize to stop the local dam, the prison over the hill, the incinerator upwind, the neighborhood gentrification plan. Day after day I plant and hoe and weed, fighting to build just a piece of what we need. Each time we win an inch, somebody lives, somebody gets the strength to take the next step and the next. The decent housing we can afford can shelter the dream of something more. I open freedom schools in storefronts, take over city councils, sink a well, start language classes so children will know their elders, make worker coops in the factories and fields, send books and water filters, tents and solar lights. I am a cup of water in a dry land. I am a lantern in the night. I build a little piece of freedom, but is it just for those whose names I know? I rig a shelter from the storm, but am I settling for staying dry, while wind and water rage and others drown? Did I make a country out of other people’s pain, learn to accept that their loss was my gain? Working night and day for what seems practical but small, will I forget to plant the seeds of a bigger liberation for us all? Did I cut down the leaves and stems of injustice and leave the root intact? My strength is making hope concrete, making it real, inspiration we can see and touch and feel. The lesson of my junkyard garden plot of food and flowers: each time you win an inch, reach for a mile. Hope builds on hope, and acting powerful builds power. But never settle for a little patch of sun. Push back the shadows til it shines on everyone.
The Ancestor Who Confronts
I am arise you prisoners of starvation, I am the walkout, the strike, the plantation house in flames, the raid on the settler town, the wheelchairs chained to fences, the ones who link arms and won’t be moved, the ones who sit down, occupy, block roads, say no. I am the uprising, the overthrow, the revolution in the streets and in the hills. I go face to face, hand to hand, toe to toe. I shout from the rooftops, I hold the line, I make demands. Right here, right now is where I make my stand. Safety will only come when we have won, torn down the palaces, and captured all the guns. If we win, there will be nothing to run away from. If we lose, there will be nowhere on earth to run. My strength is to push back, to break down walls and break the tyrant’s rule, to mobilize and fill the streets, to sue them for our future, to beat the drums, to make their everyday impossible, to disrupt, to tell the truth they want to hide, to bring the consequences home. But sometimes I hurl myself right at the wall and break my bones. Sometimes I burn out like a torch. Sometimes I’m hoarse from shouting, and can no longer sing. Sometimes I forget that fighting isn’t everything.
