Passover — This Year??

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Dear companions,
 
For the last few months, my thoughts have been swirling about, stretching to wonder how to celebrate Purim as an actifest in the midst of terrible violence. In the last week or so, my thoughts have been swirling about, as I started thinking about how to move into Passover-mode, so different from Purim, still in the midst of terrible violence and death.
 
Let’s explore the differences between Purim and Passover, with the question in mind: How should we celebrate Passover this year?
 
At 3 o’clock on Sunday (Purim) morning, my body started swirling as I came a quarter-inch from falling out of bed — an adventure that for a 90-year-old might well have ended in a broken hip and a death sentence. All my innards felt shaken and twisted by what it took to save myself. I think my swirling thoughts shaped my swirling body.
 
I came awake and trembling that it was Purim. For months I had been part of The Shalom Center ‘s team of people trying — and succeeding! — to create new peaceful ways of celebrating the Fast of Esther and Purim: A Tent of Mourning, peaceful new versions of the murderous Chapter 9 of the Scroll of Esther.
 
For centuries, hilarity at Purim gave strength to a disempowered Jewish people. How strength? Most modern scholars teach the story in Megillat Esther is not a factual history but a satire against pompous, stupid, vicious, violent power-holders. Jews could listen to this elaborate joke, laugh at a world turned upside-down where the powerless take over and the powerful fall into the traps they had devised for women and the entire Jewish community.
 
But the Jewish celebrants were always conscious it was fiction, and a celebration of defeat. The real anti-woman kings and anti-Jewish prime ministers stayed in place, in power, while their Jewish subjects made fun of them.
 
But that was when Jews lacked political or military power in the real world. Once there was a State of Israel, with guns and bombers and atomic bombs, it was possible for Baruch/ Aror Goldstein [Blessed / Cursed] Goldstein in 1994 to take one bit of the satirical tale as real factual history — imitate it — and kill 29 Muslims in peaceful prayer, at the Tomb of Abraham who is revered as common Forebear by two peoples. Even easier, thirty years later, for the government of that state to kill 30,000 Palestinians.
 
And as I woke up on Purim morning about to fall out of bed and break a hip, I realized we were about to turn from the satire of defeat pretending to be victory to the festival recalling a real victory.
 
According to the Passover story, that king, that Pharaoh, ended up drowned with all his Army beneath the waves of the Reed Sea. And a portion of his kingly subjects, a band of run-away slaves, were free to start on the trek to Sinai. To a society that would, in a weekly celebration of their freedom, pause from work.
 
But wait! As I saved myself from falling into broken bones, those bombs were still falling on Palestinians. The Biblical Pharaoh had called upon his people to wipe out a troublesome tribe that lived just outside the boundaries of Egypt itself. They multiplied swiftly and could rise up as enemies and terrorists. He called them by a dehumanizing name — “Ivrim,” “folks who cross over all legitimate boundaries.” He didn’t need to mention they talked a foreign language and worshipped a strange god. He thought it would be easy to destroy them by killing their boy-babies as soon as they were born, and he called on midwives and other Egyptians to do so.
 
My belly churns as I realize how similar are these ancient charges to the patriotic speeches and miliary actions of Jews who govern Israel and the occupied territories of Palestine. Already on October 7 there were not just fearful imaginations but armed attacks by the Military Wing of Hamas against soldiers and civilians inside Israel. Some of the attacks were atrocious. It left traumatic scars on many Israeli survivors and made it easier for West Bank settlers to attack peaceful Palestinians. Easier for the Israeli government to destroy whole Palestinian neighborhoods and towns with everyone who lived there.
 
The theme of the Passover story is that Pharaoh had all power in his own hands until YHWH, the InterBreath of life, brought plagues upon his people. (Modern translation: Oppressing people and oppressing Earth are interwoven.)
 
How do we celebrate a Passover in which many may see that “Pharaoh” is a government made up of Jews?
 
Jews who govern what they claim and the world accepts is a “Jewish” State — and seem to have all power as well over millions of Palestinians?
 
That is not a “rhetorical” question. Let’s start with the Seder plate and the Four Questions. Should there be olives on the Seder plate to remember the symbolic lineage of Palestinian survival and the targets of attack by Israeli soldiers and settlers?
 
But that is just a tiny change. In 1969, half a century ago, the Freedom Seder proposed that all liberation struggles were legitimate stories for Passover. We highlighted the ongoing struggle of Black America. But we raised the question: ALL! And tens of thousands of Jews rushed to write Passover Haggadot that spoke their own struggle for their own freedom.
 
Did that mean even speaking in the Seder the struggle for freedom against an unjust Pharaoh if the unjust Pharaoh was some version of our selves?
 
Do we dare to shape a Passover that asks this question?
 
Do we dare not to, given that we might betray one of the deepest teachings of our tradition? It is taught by the Prophet Amos (9: 7):
 

הֲל֣וֹא כִבְנֵי֩ כֻשִׁיִּ֨ים אַתֶּ֥ם לִ֛י בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל נְאֻם־יְהֹוָ֑ה הֲל֣וֹא אֶת־יִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל הֶעֱלֵ֙יתִי֙ מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם וּפְלִשְׁתִּיִּ֥ים מִכַּפְתּ֖וֹר וַאֲרָ֥ם מִקִּֽיר׃
 

Is it not so
That to Me,
The Children of The Ethiopians
Are just like The Children of Israel
[The Godwrestling Folk]?
— declares YHWH [Yahhhh, InterBreath of life].

Is it not so that
I brought Israel up
From the Tight and Narrow Land
[Mitzrayyim, Egypt]
But also The Philistines from Caphtor
And The Arameans from Kir?

 

These radical affirmations are put to us in the form of questions. We must answer with the Truth. Now I know why almost falling out of bed keeps coming back to me: From a place of rest and comfort, these swirling questions might thrust us into a place of danger.

Yet — we must answer with the Truth.

Shalom, salaam

— Arthur

Embroidered Border: The Death of the First Born and the Israelites Sent Away, 1500s-1600s, Italy.