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Hi! I wanted to take a moment to send you Passover, Easter
and Spring blessings. Blessings for a world of peace, social justice,
ecological sanity and love pervading all.
And I thought I'd share some of my thinking with you
through the vehicle of this supplement to the Passover Seder,
which you can read through (whether or not you are personally
going to a Seder). I think you'll find the thoughts of some use
even though they are framed in the context of a supplement to the
traditional Seder which you may not be doing. Please read it.
Warm regards,
Rabbi Michael Lerner
P.S. I've received several wonderful communications from Israeli peace
activists thanking us for giving support to the Fast for Peace which
they are starting March 25th and which our TIKKUN COMMUNITY is
participating in on March 27th (from sun-up to sun-down, stopping at
about 7 p.m. when the Seder begins). Encourage your friends to join
in this symbolic act in support of peace and an end to violence.
P.P.S. I also want to thank all of you who generously supported the
ad in support of the Reservists who refuse to serve in the West Bank
and Gaza. The NY Times told us that the ad should run on Friday, March 22nd (i'y'h).
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We are on the verge of Passover, Holy Week, and the rebirthing of Nature.
If you know anyone who is going to a Passover Seder, or who might
be able to deepen their family or community gatherings around Easter,
or who have secular alternatives to these holidays, please send them
this supplement (not replacement) to the traditional Haggadah (the
book that is used at many Seders). Guaranteed to generate passionate
discussion and to make the occasion more serious. Feel free to make
copies of this and send to anyone who might be interested.
{Helpful tip:
Many people report that their families or friends complain
about the Seder going on too long and wanting to eat. Solution: after
the first blessing on the vegetables (borey pree ha'adamah) which can
be as soon as ten minutes into the start of your Seder, you can serve
any vegetarian food you wish as long as it doesn't include a matzah or
any derivatives. So, for instance, you can serve vegetarian
chop-liver, chumus, baba ganoush, potato pancakes, even vegetable
soup, tofu derivatives, etc (all this on the assumption that you are
following the Sephardic custom to eat legumes, a custom which is now
obligatory so as not to unncessarily divide the Jewish people). So,
EAT PLENTY AT THE BEGINNING, FILL YOUR GUESTS UP WITH VEGETARIAN
DELIGHTS, AND THEN GIVE ENOUGH ATTENTION TO THE SEDER AND THE ISSUES}.
And here is what you could use for stimulation this year-The Tikkun
Passover supplement. Remember, you can use this even if you are not
having a Seder--invite friends over and use this as the basis for an
evening of discussion and ritual. You don't have to be Jewish to use
these ideas--they are for everyone.
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TIKKUN PASSOVER SUPPLEMENT 2002
(Read after lighting and blessing the holiday candles):
This year, 5762 in the Jewish calendar, the Jewish people celebrate
Passover with great sadness. Jews in Israel face great personal
dangers. We are in mourning for the many Jews in Israel who have lost
their lives to acts of terror and random violence against civilians.
We are also mourning the far larger number of Palestinian civilians
who have lost their lives in acts of terror directed against them by
the Israeli army. We are mourning for the thousands of Americans who
lost their lives to acts of terror this past September 11. We are
also in mourning for the far larger number of civilians who have died
from malnutrition-related diseases that are linked to the poverty
generated by our global economic system and its insensitivity to
anything other than a 'bottom line' of maximizing profits. We are
facing a world that has lost its moral grounding.
The Seder is the place where we can begin to strategize about how to
change this. Ever since Rabbi Akiba used the Passover seder to plan a
revolutionary struggle against the Romans, Jews have used the Seder to
begin work on TIKKUN. So, to make your seder authentic, try to avoid
two equally bad distortions: a. Don?t let the Seder devolve into a
discussion of food or gossip or merely 'feel good' family
togetherness; b. Don?t let the Seder be totally dominated by
recitation of the Hebrew and the rituals. Instead, make sure
you take time for serious discussion about what is wrong in our world
and how to make 'TIKKUN' (healing and transformation).
Don't let anyone tell you that you are being 'too political'? What
do they think the Exodus from Egypt was, a meditation session or a
prayer service? And when Jews retold the story, the point was not
just to talk about 'the good old days,' but to remind us that the
same Power in the Universe (YHVH or in English 'God') that made
possible the Exodus makes it possible at this very moment for the
world to be transformed and liberated from all forms of oppression.
So don?t just read about the past: let the Seder table be filled
with ideas, debate, and visions of what could be--and what you
personally will do to make it happen.
Recognizing the Transformative Force in our own lives is the central
point of telling this historical story, and the reason the tradition
obligates us to see ourselves as though we had participated in the
Exodus is so that we can testify to the central Jewish truth: The
world can and should be radically transformed.
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KIDDUSH:
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Before the blessing over the first of four cups of wine we drink at
the Seder, say:
We are gathered here tonight to affirm our continuity with the
generations of Jews who kept alive the vision of freedom in the
Passover story. For thousands of years, Jews have affirmed that by
participating in the Passover Seder, we not only remember the Exodus,
but actually relive it, bringing its transformative power into our
own lives.
The Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, means 'narrow straits.'
Traditionally, Mitzrayim has been understood to mean a spiritual
state, the 'narrow place,' a place of confusion, fragmentation, and
spiritual disconnection.
The way out of Mitzrayim is through chesed, compassion--through
embracing that which we have been taught to scorn within ourselves
and others and through attempting to understand those who seem very
different from us. Israel left Egypt with 'a mixed multitude;' the
Jewish people began as a multicultural mélange of people attracted
to a vision of social transformation. What makes us Jews is not some
biological fact, but our willingness to proclaim the message of those
ancient slaves: The world can be changed, we can be healed.
(Now, do the kiddush,bless the wine and bless the opportunity to be
together with others in celebrating this holiday)
KARPAS (dipping some vegetable in salt water)
Baruch...borey pree ha'adamah (after this, you can eat all the
vegetarian dishes you wish as long as they don't have matzoh flour
or matzah meal or the like).
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Before dipping the greens in salt water, say:
The salt water on our table traditionally represents the tears of
the Israelite slaves. The green vegetable we dip in the water
suggests the possibility of growth and renewal even in the midst
of grief.
The greens on the table also remind us of our commitment to
protect the planet from ecological destruction. Instead of focusing
narrowly on what we may 'realistically' accomplish in today's world,
we must refocus the conversation on what the planet needs in order
to survive and flourish. We must get out of the narrow place in our
thinking and look at the world not as a resource, but as a focus for
awe, wonder, and amazement. It is this spiritual attitude, so absent
from the logic of the marketplace or the speed of new technologies,
that is fostered by the weekly observance of Shabbat and by the
slowing down that accompanies our development of an inner spiritual
life.
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MAGID (TELL THE STORY):
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WHAT IS PHAROAH TODAY?
We are descended from slaves, from people who staged the first
successful slave rebellion in recorded history. Ever since, our
people has kept alive the story of liberation, and the consciousness
that cruelty and oppression are not inevitable 'facts of life' but
conditions which can be changed. The Exodus message is revolutionary:
the way the world is is not the way it has to be. Everything can
change once we recognize that the God who created the world also
creates the possibility of transformation and liberation.
This task may seem more overwhelming to us today than in previous
times. Today there is no longer some easily identifiable external
evil force playing the role of Pharaoh. Instead, we live in an
increasingly unified world economic and political system which
brings well-being to some even as it increases the misery of others.
Our planet experiences unprecedented economic growth, but also a
staggering polarization of wealth. In 1960 the richest 20 percent of
the world?s population owned 70 percent of the world?s wealth; today
they own 86 percent of the wealth. In 1960 the poorest 20 percent of
the world's population owned just 2.3 percent of the wealth of the
world. Today this has shrunk to just barely one percent.
Globalization, the integration of world markets, has promised to
'lift all boats,' rich and poor, and to bring a global culture of
material happiness. That hasn't happened.
Today elites of every race, religion, and nationality champion
globalization and free trade while ignoring the fate of their
fellow citizens who sink deeper into poverty and despair. Large
metropolitan areas seem to flourish, while millions are faced with
malnutrition and disease. The homeless and the hungry are forcibly
removed from public view, but they remain a central global reality.
Over one billion people on this planet earn just one dollar a day in
income, and two billion earn less than two dollars a day. Hundreds of
millions of people will go to sleep hungry Tonight as we sit here and
enjoy the benefits of this global system. The globalization of
selfishness makes us believe that our insensitivity to the suffering
of others is somehow part of human nature--when it is only part of
our choice to be insensitive. We live in a society which willfully
shuts its eyes to the suffering of the global system we have created,
instead telling ourselves that 'there is no alternative' because we
can't imagine people being more generous and sharing with others. We
tell ourselves that there isn't enough to go around, that we cant
afford to share--but the truth is that when our society had less money
it had more willingness to share what we had. There is enough--but we
need a spiritual transformation to believe that there is enough, that
we won't lose everything if we share our societal wealth with the rest
of the planet, and do so in an ecologically responsible way.
Yet even those of us (and that's most of those reading this) who reap
the material benefits from the globalization of capital have not
found fulfillment with all that we have. Our society is filled with
unhappy people medicating themselves into happiness, drinking,
drugging, drowning our feelings, pretending that everything is fine
when it isn't, and otherwise doing our best to ignore the pervasive
spiritual crisis that surrrounds us. We find that the labor-saving
advances in computers, cell phones (turn them off now for the rest of the Seder), and other electronic devices that were supposed to make
us free have only subjugated us further to the idea of 'making it;'
we find ourselves with less time for play, intimacy, volunteering
in our communities, participating in politics, or expanding our
intellectual and cultural interests. We feel that we have less time
for what really counts.
The 'rational' philosophy driving globalization has led to a loss
of community that threatens us all. The underlying assumption is that
we should maximize our own advantage without regard to the
consequences for others. This belief that looking out for number one
is all that matters has led all of us, but particularly large
corporations, to be oblivious to the ways we are destroying our
physical environment.
It can seem overwhelming to confront this world system, but the
Exodus story teaches us to have faith in spite of our fears. When
Moses first brought the news of impending deliverance to the Hebrew
slaves, they refused to listen to him because they were so deep in
despair. Yet a major teaching of Judaism and of the Seder is that
powerful realities can be changed--there really is a Force or Power
(we call it YHVH or 'Adonai' or 'HaShem') in the universe which makes
it possible to move from 'that which is' to 'that which ought to be.'
That Force (and not some big authoritarian man in heaven pulling all
the strings) is what we celebrate when we talk about God.
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THREE SYMBOLS of PASSOVER
----------------------------
PESACH (the BONE or Paschal vegetarian BEET): Our Seder plate
includes a symbol of the ancient Passover sacrifice which was brought
each year while the Temple in Jerusalem stood. The word for sacrifice
is korban, from the root meaning 'near.' Offering a sacrifice was
something one did to draw closer to God, to enter into sacred space
and intimacy with the Divine. While holding aloft this pesach beet,
we ask ourselves what spiritual practice or social-change activity
we will take on in the coming period after this Seder which could
draw us closer to God. Let each of us here make a commitment to
taking on one such practice in our life, be it daily meditation,
bringing home a homeless person, becoming involved in an
environmentalmovement, observing Shabbat, or in some other way
making a serious investment of time and energy in transformation.
MATZAH: The Torah tells us that the Israelites had to take the
uncooked dough with them,'For they had prepared no provisions for the
way.' Symbolically, the matzah reminds us that when the opportunity
for liberation comes, we must seize it even if we do not feel fully
prepared--indeed, if we wait until we feel prepared, we may never
act at all.
There is a tradition that the matzah miraculously tasted just like
the manna which the Israelites ate in the desert, food they had to
gather each day and which could not be saved or accumulated because
it went sour each night. The manna taught the Israelites to overcome
their belief that they had to compete with one another--and to trust
that there would be enough for everyone. Only once they had let go
of their terror of scarcity and their hard-hearted competitiveness
could they learn to open their hearts to one another in empathy.
Here is a central spiritual message: There is enough. We are enough.
Dayenu.
The matzah also stands in contrast to chametz (the expansive yeast
in bread which makes it rise) which symbolizes false pride,
absorption in our individual egos, and grandiosity. When we can clean
out the ego distortions inside ourselves we are better able to engage
in the struggle for social liberation. To the extent that people are
'not interested' in politics they are actually saying, 'I don't care
to put my time into the struggle to end the suffering of others,
because I can't be sure that I'll get a payoff or that it will work,
so why should I waste my energies on that?' This is a state of ego
gone wild, and the only cure is to shrink our egoes and recognize
that our well being depends upon the well being of every other person
on this planet. Eating matzah is a symbolic ego contraction.
MAROR (the Bitter Herbs): One of the most radical messages of the
Torah is that cruelty is not destiny. Though we tend to treat others
the way that we ourselves were treated, the message of Torah is that
the chain of pain can be broken--that we do not have to pass on to
others what was done to us.
One of the most frequently repeated injunctions in Torah are variants
on the command: 'When you come into your land, do not oppress 'the
Other' (the stranger), remember that you were 'the Other' in the land
of Egypt.' In fact, the Torah goes further and makes it an absolute
categorical command: 'Thou shalt love 'the Other'.'
We, the Jewish people today, are systematically violating this
command. We celebrate this Seder at a moment when the Jewish people
are acting as oppressors to another people--the Palestinians.
Israel has occupied and dominated the lives of over two million
people for the past thirty-five years (the longest such occupation in
the post-World War II period by any country on earth except for China
in Tibet). We neither allow the Palestinians to run their own affairs,
nor do we give them the right to vote inside Israel: they are a
people who are dominated and subjugated.
We in The TIKKUN COMMUNITY totally oppose the violence used by the
Palestinians in their struggle for liberation. Violence against
civilians is wrong--no matter what the excuse being used. But to be
consistent we must also critique the violence used by Jews like
former Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir
in the days when they led the terrorist Irgun organization against
British rule. Moses himself killed an Egyptian taskmaster who was
beating a Jew. Our own people has resorted to violence when we've
felt that that was our only option to achieve our own independence.
The use of violence, from the Maccabees to the Zionists, is often
honored in Jewish tradition--so it should not be hard to understand
the violence of some Palestinian terrorists. In fact, the traditional
Seder projects a vision of God as using violence to defeat the
oppressive Egyptian taskmasters.
We are trying to evolve beyond that level of consciousness. We oppose
violence, even in the service of decent aims. We do not condone the
double standard that says 'well, we have a right to use violence
against those who attacked us on 9/11, but others have no right to
use violence in pursuit of their aims.' So, we condemn all violence.
Palestinian violence against the Israeli people is unacceptable. We
call for them to follow the path of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
But by the same standards, we condemn the violence inherent in the
Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. We know that there are
over three million Palestinian refugees and that Israel has failed to
honor the agreement it made at Oslo eight years ago to end the
Occupation and give Palestinians a state of their own. Hundreds of
Israeli military leaders have made clear that owning this territory
does not increase Israeli security. Israel is not more secure but
less secure because of the Occupation. The daily realities of
Occupation are not only cruel to Palestinians, but also distorting
to the Jewish soul. The torture of civilians, the targeted
assassinations, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes, the
uprooting of their trees, the seizing of Palestinian lands by
Jewish settlers, the murder and maiming of Palestinian civilians,
and the systematic refusal to learn about these things (and our
anger at 'the messengers' who tell us about all this)--this is a
pattern of life that destroys the very foundations of our Jewishness.
Last week Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, reported that Israeli
troops occupying Ramallah not only randomly destroyed homes, but also
looted homes of the Palestinian people. This is the level to which our
people has fallen.
If the Jewish people want to build a state in our ancient homeland
where another people already resided, we have got to take into account
the needs of that people and of the surrounding one hundred million
Arabs. Otherwise, Jews would do better to use our power to allow
Israelis to freely emigrate to the United States. But if we want to
remain in the Middle East, we need to honor the peoples of that area,
not treat them as though their rights are not of interest to us. And
we need to root out the discourse of demeaning Arabs or demeaning
Muslims which has become too much an element in our discussions of
the Middle East. Just as we justifiably are angry at the use of anti-
Semitic stereotypes in the media and textbooks of Palestinians and
other Arab societies, we should be outraged at the persistence of a
discourse of prejudice and steretyping of 'the Arab mind' in Jewish
and American circles.
We need to change the whole dynamic in the Jewish world from a narrow
chauvinism and ethos of 'goyim-bashing' to a recognition that we are
one part of the human race, that our well-being depends on the
well-being of everyone on the planet, and that if this generation of
Jews merely seeks to align itself with American power and
contemptuously ignores the needs of the Palestinian people, that
future generations will face the wrath of the world.
We are setting up future generations of Jews so that they will face
global outrage at the insensitivity our generation of Jews manifested
when we had power over others. That is why it is so important for us
to volunteer time, give money, and publicly insist that we are a part
of the Jewish world and do not accept the Occupation as legitimate.
And we need to make clear to our non-Jewish friends that they are
doing no service to the Jewish people if they keep silent their own
criticisms of what Israel is doing. We have to overcome the forces of
Jewish 'political correctness' which seek to silence all criticism of
Israel or to silence people by reminding us of the Holocaust or other
past suffering.
But we must offer our critique in a balanced way. We Jews are a good
people, and our current errors are a product of our own pain. Our
task is not to condemn Jews, but to heal the fear that has led so
many Jews to shut their eyes to the pain we are causing others.
Jews are fundamentally good (like everyone else on this planet),
and our distortions are not a manifestation of an underlying evil
but of an unhealed trauma at thousands of years in which we were the
victims and others acted with outrageous insensitivity to us. Yet
that healing also requires genuine repentance at the ways we have
abandoned the compassionate gentleness that was once the hallmark of
the Jewish soul for thousands of years. The terrible truth is that
many Jews were so traumatized by Hitler that they now believe that we must adopt the logic of power and rely on power rather than to rely
on the logic of love, generosity and goodness.
This is really a central issue of our Seder this and every year: the
struggle about Who Is God? Is our God the god of money, power, fame,
or the other 'realistic' goals of contemporary life? Or is our God
the Force of Transformation that teaches that the real world can be
based on compassion, generosity, justice, peace and love? Have we
become slavish adherents to the dominant idolatry of contemporary
America--the worshippers of 'realism,' or are we still connected to
the original project of the Jewish people--to transcend 'realism'
and rebuild the world on a foundation of goodness?
This Passover we who feel a deep loyalty to the Jewish people and to
our highest values ask each other the following questions: What can
we do to stop the chauvinism in the Jewish world which treats Arabs
and Palestinians as somehow less decent human beings or less
entitled to live in dignity than Jews? How can we combat the double
tandards that allow us to be outraged at the hate being taught
against Jews in Palestinian schools and in Islamic mosques while
turning a blind eye to the hate being taught against Palestinians
in Israeli schools and in many of our synagogues? How can we change
the climate in our synagogues and Jewish institutions so that people
questioning Israeli policy are no longer treated as disloyal or
potentially 'self-hating' Jews, and so that raising the questions
doesn't have to feel like an act of courage in a hostile climate?
How can we support voices like Tikkun magazine and The Tikkun
Community--which understand Jewish values as requiring a commitment
to loving and caring for all human beings on this planet? How can we
retain our love for Judaism and the Jewish people without abandoning
our connection to the Unity of All Being and to a higher planetary
consciousness manifested in a commitment to love, generosity,
open-heartedness, repentance, kindness, and gentleness. This is our
task tonight--to chart a path to this kind of Judaism!
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THE MEAL:
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The Hagaddah says, 'Let all who are hungry come and eat.'
Traditionally, this is understood to mean not only literally
feeding the hungry, but offering spiritual sustenance to those in need. Both most go hand in hand. We live in a society of
unprecedented wealth--yet we turn our backs on the hungry, so that
even supposedly liberal or progressive political leaders are
unwilling to champion any program to seriously end world hunger
and homelessness. When liberals were in power they did little to
seriously confront these issues.
Yet most of us are not materially hungry. There is a deep spiritual
hunger that must also be fed. Though the cynical proclaim that 'those
who accumulate the most toys win,' our tradition teaches that money,
power, and fame cannot sustain us. Our spiritual tradition teaches us
to be present to each moment, to rejoice in all that we are and all
that we have been given, to experience the world with awe and wonder
and radical amazement, and to recognize that we already have enough
and are enough. With this in mind, we eat the festive meal.
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BARECH
______________________________
After the meal, let each person eat the Afikomen (the symbolic last
Matzah) and then share blessings for all that we have, for the food,
for the goodness of the human race and the goodness of the universe
that has put us on this incredible plane. Share visions of the world
we hope to build together--and bless each other that that world may
soon be built.
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WELCOMING THE MESSIAH:
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Tonight we remember the millions of our sisters and brothers who
were killed by the Nazis in Europe, and the millions of others who
have been martyred throughout history. What was done to us was wrong,
disgusting, an assault on the sanctity of human life and on God.
Our tradition teaches us to affirm our righteous anger and then
to move on. So, we open the door for Elijah, the prophet who heralds
the coming of the Messiah and a world in which all peoples will
coexist peacefully, acknowledging the Image of God in one another.
To deny the possibility of fundamental transformation, to be stuck
in the pain of past oppression, to build our religion around memories
of the Holocaust and other forms of suffering, is to give the
ultimate victory to those who oppressed us. To testify to God's
presence in the world is to insist on shifting our focus from pain to
hope, and to dedicate our energies to transforming this world and
ourselves. We still believe in a world based on love, generosity,
and open-heartedness. We continue to affirm the Unity of All Being.
By Rabbi Michael Lerner © Tikkun magazine.
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