Like so many other American Jews, I love Pesach. I love its themes of slavery and freedom, and the ease with which we apply these to our modern world and personal struggle for emancipation.
But I also love the holiday because of what it has become in America.
Pesach has become the Jewish holiday of inclusion, the one that beckons Jews of every shape and flavor to check their calendars and make sure that, at least for one night, they’re sitting at a table somewhere with other Jews honoring their Jewishness.
The incredible magnetism of Pesach is felt worldwide. Even in as seemingly remote spots as Thailand and India, young Jewish travelers gather for Passover seders hosted generally by the Chabad Lubavitch movement.
Here in Milwaukee, in our provincial and conservative community, Pesach offers the opportunity to reach out and to reach in. And people are taking the opportunity.
Last week, I attended two of the many local specialized seders. For the sixth time, women gathered en masse at “Our Community Women’s Seder,” an evening that celebrates the oft-forgotten role of women in Jewish history.
Also, the American Jewish Committee teamed with the Milwaukee Urban League for the eighth annual African American Jewish Task Force Seder, which explored the shared experiences and struggles of Jews and African Americans. Though I stayed for only a short portion of the evening, I was moved; it demonstrated boldness and tolerance, a tangible step of community building.
And there are more: an interfaith seder, an intergenerational seder with the JCC Senior Center and Milwaukee Jewish Day School students, a seder for veterans organized by the Jewish War Veterans, and a seder for people with special needs organized by the Jewish Chaplaincy Program, among others.
All these feasts of freedom are doors to Jewish identity, ways of connecting. And I love it. New doors in are just what the American Jewish world needs.
Mainstream Jewish organizations aren’t right for everybody and that’s okay. But I fret about assimilation and the loss of Jewish folk who can’t find a way to connect with American Judaism.
The variety of seders offered locally and worldwide show our diversity — religiously, racially, sexually and ideologically. And Judaism has a place for each of us.
Their success also demonstrates the real hunger among American Jews to forge new identities, to merge the different parts of themselves and feel like a whole, integrated people.
Experiencing wholeness
My experience with creative seders did not begin in Milwaukee, however. In 1990, I hosted my own seder in my small apartment in Oakland, Calif. In addition to completing the essential rituals and readings, we played music, sang, read poems and shared ideas.
Just months earlier, I had been to some of the massive rallies against the impending first war with Iraq, and felt disappointed by their anti-Israel twist. Eventually I found my way to a day of learning organized by now Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine.
That event gave birth to meetings at his house and then participation in a core group of “Progressive Jews” who shared Shabbat and holidays and worked to weave a new community.
My seder was, for me, a real feast of liberation, of wholeness, of delivery out of my exile. I could finally feel safe being both lefty/free spirit and Jewish.
In the gathering of our people around seder tables of all shapes, I hear the same drum beat of emancipation, the same sigh of relief as we sew together the fractured parts of ourselves. And, with all the parts of me, I rejoice. Hag Pesach Sameach.
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