Pesach / Passover: A Celebration of Liberation
March 28, 2023
The first time I heard the phrase “Black Liberation” was at a Passover Seder led by my father. Each year as we gathered at our family table, he connected our ancestral enslavement to the recent emancipation, and continued oppression, of Black Americans. The seder was a call to our responsibility as Jews to show up for our siblings in the Liberation struggle, and use the privilege we had as a white Jewish family to support.
Each year on the 15th sunset of Nisan - along the lunar Hebrew calendar - we gather to bask in our liberation. We recline in our chairs to represent our freedom from bondage. We drink the fruit of the vine in abundance. We sing the multilingual songs we have sung for hundreds of years. And we feast.
This is a holiday to notice and reflect. By exploring our own legacy of oppression, we practice self awareness of our current and historical placement within systems of oppression. We see the system by connecting our past trauma to our current oppression and privilege. We use somatics to build empathy as we hold the current and ongoing pain of oppression, exploitation, and enslavement felt across identities, generations, and nations.
We eat bitter herbs and unleavened bread to remember the bitterness of oppression and the sacrifices made to flee. We construct symbolic “brick and mortar” sandwiches to remember our exploited labor. We dip our herbs in salt water to taste our tears. We retell our story so we may not just remember the sacrifices and bravery of our ancestors, but experience it. It is the legacy we carry forth as ethnic Jews, to teach our youth to know the pain of our past as they bear the torch of our people’s liberated future. We acknowledge the pain and suffering we ourselves inflicted on our oppressors as we fled to freedom. And we ground in the tenet that our fates are linked, our collective liberation bound together: none of us are free, until all of us are free.
“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” - Emma Lazarus, 1883
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” - Fannie Lou Hamer, 1971
As we move through acts of abundance and celebration, we pause for somatic experiences of confinement and loss as we remember our enslavement, resistance, and exodus. We use the first person when referring to the past - we are meant to feel and know our ancestral joy and pain as it ours to bear - along with our responsibilities to disrupt oppression, and to dream of liberated futures beyond the narrowness of our current condition.
We close our seder with a freedom dream: “This year we are in bondage. Next year, may we all be free.” And we toast to our collective liberation and solidarity. L’chaim.
Passover sounds like:
Dayenu, Ahavat Hinam
Passover tastes and smells like:
Passover looks like:
A Rugrats Passover, Rugrats Season 3 Episode 26
Passover feels like:
Not Just Kumbaya: Multiracial Coalitions Yield Pragmatic Results for the Common Good - Jennifer Richeson
Telling the Story of How a People Gets Free - Jewish Voices for Peace
Jewish Resistance at the Seder Table - Jews for Racial and Economic Justice
