The Preposterous Politics of Passover

….In a superficial way, these versions of the medieval rabbinical assemblage of prayers, stories, fables, songs, and eating rituals … reveal the contours of a culture war. Passover is the most important holiday relating to the Jewish people as a people, and the Haggadah is the best-known Jewish text outside the prayer book and the Torah. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that it has become a political battleground, and not only within the notoriously .

Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs “Cokie” Roberts remains a proud Roman Catholic and so, despite her enviable career as a broadcast journalist for ABC and NPR, she might not constitute the most obvious choice to reformulate the ancient liturgy of the festival most firmly associated with the emergence of the Jewish people as a distinctive nation with a unique godly calling. …. To lend an air of traditionalism and authenticity to their new venture, Cokie and Steve launched their Our Haggadah book tour at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, apparently ignoring the likelihood that the impoverished, fiercely Jewish immigrant masses who made that gritty neighborhood their portal to America would have lacked both the inclination and the funds to shell out 20 bucks to purchase a “fun, intimate” interfaith Haggadah.

..evangelical Christians to celebrate their own Christ-centered seders as a means of connecting with their faith’s Hebrew roots. The Lamb and His Shadow: A Christian Passover Guide features the traditional Jewish blessings and formulations, respectfully, even lovingly, presented in Hebrew, with transliteration and English translation, but packaged behind a profoundly unappetizing cover photograph of matzo-ball soup in a Star-of-David-shaped bowl, featuring twigs of rosemary and a large chunk of unskinned salmon. The commentary, by the Texas husband-and-wife team S. Blair and Tracy Korschun, ingeniously finds christological references in every Passover tradition. For instance, during the traditional washing of the hands before tasting the first bite of karpas (fresh greens), they suggest that participants should “think of the scene from the last supper where Christ washed the apostles’ feet prior to the Passover Last Supper.” Concerning the unleavened bread and the three matzo loaves of the seder plate (which are said to represent the Trinity), they note: “Christ becomes a new lump or new leaven for us which will never die or pass away. So we are being commanded to not eat of temporary leaven but rather to hold out for the eternal leaven found in the body of Christ.”

……there’s no evidence whatsoever that Siddhartha Gautama, the sixth century b.c.e. Indian prince who founded Buddhism, ever sampled bitter herbs, matzo, or Pesach wine. Nonetheless, the promoters of The Haggadah for Jews and Buddhists (2006) insist that “Jewish tradition flows naturally through the landscape of Buddhist belief, enhancing, not detracting.”   Edited by Elizabeth Pearce-Glassheim, who was “raised by Catholic parents who had a lifelong fascination with Buddhism” before marrying into a Jewish family, the book carefully ensures that “the more violent elements of the Passover story are balanced by the emphasis on peace of Buddhism,” adding “an extra bit of peace, stillness and, yes, even meditation to the Passover ritual.” Considering the raucous, boisterous nature of most seders of my experience, the idea of “stillness” and “meditation” as part of the annual family gathering sounds profoundly exotic, as do the prescribed recitation of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths (a response to Pearce-Glassheim’s reformulated Four Questions) and the chanting of “Eight Verses for Training the Mind” by Genshe Langri Thangpa.

…The Santa Cruz Haggadah: A Passover Haggadah, Coloring Book, and Journal for Evolving Consciousness…. urged participants to “connect with other groups who are needing freedom or protection now—the homeless, the redwoods, those discriminated against because of their age, sex, sexual preferences, etc.”…..d God-neutral teaching tool for parents and/or teachers.”

Other noteworthy Haggadot have provided a radically different perspective—not violence-free and God-neutral but instead extolling violence against perceived American oppression and calling on a vengeful God to punish capitalist exploiters. Most famously, Rabbi Arthur Waskow created the “Freedom Seder” in 1969, with its own Haggadah, complete with crudely drawn agitprop illustrations, published initially in Ramparts magazine and then later by Holt Rinehart Winston.

……Waskow couldn’t call forth supernatural plagues or Red Sea waters to wipe out the American military, but he did invoke the bloody words of various figures in “liberation” history in his new Haggadah, pointedly comparing them to biblical shoftim (judges):

It was not bloodless when the shofet Nat Turner proclaimed, “I had a vision, and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened, the thunder rolled in the heavens and blood flowed in streams . . . ”

And it was not bloodless when shofet Eldridge Cleaver (who went into exile like Moses) said . . . “It was too late because it was time for the blacks (‘I’ve got a mind of my own!’) to riot, to seep through the Harlem night like a wave of locusts, breaking, screaming, bleeding, laughing, crying, rejoicing, celebrating, in a jubilee of destruction, to regurgitate the white man’s bullshit they’d been eating for four hundred years; smashing the windows of the white man’s stores, throwing bricks they wished were bombs, running, leaping, whirling like a cyclone through the white man’s Mind, past his backlash, through the night streets of Rochester, New Jersey, Philadelphia.”

Naturally, Waskow never acknowledged that the “white man’s stores” whose destruction he celebrated may have been in some cases the struggling enterprises operated by parents of the radical participants in his Freedom Seders, ……….The next year, the Freedom Seder Show packed 4,000 into the field house at Cornell University and featured a special guest appearance by antiwar activist Father Daniel Berrigan, at the time a high-priority fugitive from the FBI (more minions of Pharaoh’s Army, no doubt).

In his original liturgy of 40 years ago, Rabbi Waskow composed a fresh, contemporary version of the beloved traditional song “Dayenu” (“It would have been enough”), reading in part:

If we were to end outright police brutality but not prevent some people from wallowing in luxury while others starved, it would not be sufficient;

If we were to make sure that no one starved but were not to free the daring poets from their jails, it would not be sufficient;

If we were to free the poets from their jails but to train the minds of people so that they could not understand the poems, it would not be sufficient.

Waskow tried again with fresh creations for his “New Freedom Seder” of 2004, aimed directly at unshackling suffering humanity from the galling chains of the George W. Bush administration. As he put it in his introduction: “New Pharaohs have arisen. It is time for a new birth of freedom, time for a NEW FREEDOM SEDER.”

This time, the recitation of the Ten Plagues included a guide to contemporary afflictions:

• Water into Blood (Pollution & privatization of water; the flood that destroyed New Orleans)

• Frogs (Frogs—dead & maimed by chemicals)

• Vermin (Poverty)

• Beasts (Extinction of thousands of species)

• Boils/Pestilence (Collapse of health system; disappearance of health insurance . . . neglect of people with HIV and AIDS)

• Hail (Radical climate change, global scorching)

• Locusts (Famine, genetically modified foods patented seeds)

And who bore responsibility for these horrors? The New Freedom Seder reveals all with yet another poem/chant “Big Oil Burning: The Planetary Pharaohs,” which explains:

They melt the ice caps that keep our planet balanced
They torch great Amazon forests.
Their Saudi branch pipe-line paid to explode the Twin Tower
And their Texas branch pipe-line cooked lies to burn Iraqi cities.
With oily money they bought the oil-soaked White House
They scorch all earth, befoul all oceans.

In other words, the New Freedom Seder imputes to Big Oil the same awe-inspiring omnipotence that a traditional Haggadah imputes to God.

……

According to Heschel: “That first year I used a tangerine. Everyone at the seder got a section of it and as we ate it we could spit out the seeds in solidarity with homosexuals—the seeds represented homophobia.” ….While the gesture of public spitting never caught on as a celebration of gay pride,….

A Boy, a Chicken, and the Lion of Judah: How Ari Became a Vegetarian) stresses the unspeakable cruelty visited upon cows, poultry, sheep, and other beasts bred for slaughter. I….A Holocaust on Your Plate.” A friend recently attended a “Liberated Lamb” seder with his young children, but the kids eventually left the table in tears over the gruesome descriptions of factory farming and brutal stockyards.

For instance, The Liberated Haggadah: A Passover Celebration for Cultural, Secular, and Humanistic Jews (2006) promptly dismisses the Exodus story as mythical rather than historical, excludes any references to a divine role in the liberation from bondage, and treats the entire tale as “a humanist parable, highlighting contemporary relevance.” ………… As in so many contemporary Haggadot, the somber tone of this unabashedly secular text gives the lie to the notion that religious believers display a gloomier outlook, or a greater fixation on fire and brimstone, than their issues-obsessed freethinking counterparts.