For thousands of years, the Passover Seder has focused solely on the liberation of the Jewish people -- whether anciently from Pharaoh or in liberations since. But beginning with the Freedom Seder in 1969, in the new atmosphere of an America in which Jews did not fear oppression from the state or from other communities, many Jews have seen that the liberation of other peoples echoes elements of that ancient struggle for liberation from Pharaoh.
So in this past generation there have emerged Haggadot – the text of the Telling that guides the Passover Seder —that have celebrated the struggles for freedom of Black America, of Israelis and Palestinians striving for a peace that would liberate them both, of the mothers of the "disappeared" in Argentina and the victims of U.S.-encouraged death squads in Central America, and of women striving to liberate themselves from patriarchy.
This year, two calls for freedom have especially resounded across the Internet as Jews have prepared for Passover: the outcry of Tibetans bereft of their sacred land and leadership by a modern Empire, and the outcry of the earth itself and many of its peoples, suffering from an flood of suffocating gases that are bringing on a global climate crisis.
On behalf of Tibet, Rodger Kamenetz, author of "The Jew in the Lotus" that chronicled the unprecedented meeting of the Dalai Lama with a dozen rabbis and Jewish teachers in 1997, has proposed placing a symbol on the Seder table that authentically echoes the nonviolent resistance of Tibetans themselves:
Tibetans, he explains, are forbidden to have photos of the Dalai Lama in Tibet. The Chinese government confiscates them. So the Tibetans took to hanging empty picture frames. The Chinese police confiscated them as well.
So Kamenetz suggested placing an empty picture frame beside the Seder plate on which traditionally rest matzah, bitter herbs, and other symbols of the ancient Exodus -- and taking time to consider the current oppression in Tibet.
Besides echoing the action of Tibetans, this symbol is wonderfully "Buddhist" and wonderfully "Jewish" in spirit. As the teaching goes, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The empty frame can remind us that holiness cannot be confined to a single space or person. The Holy of Holies in the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem amazed the Roman Empire because in it was no statue of a god – only empty space, the wind, the breath of life, the Spirit.
So in that sense, the empty picture frame is more deeply free than the photograph was. It is more deeply a challenge to every Pharaoh, every Caesar, every Empire.
Which brings us to the wounding of our earth. Big Coal, Big Oil, and their governmental allies have in their arrogant, imperial power – like the Drug Lords of heroin or tobacco -- addicted us to overuse of fossil fuels. As Pharaoh's arrogance toward human beings brought the earth itself to rebellion -- what we call the "plagues" – so we are suffering plagues today at the hands of these modern "pharaohs." Where the biblical plagues included the rivers becoming undrinkable, frogs and locusts swarming beyond all previous history, a hailstorm bringing unprecedented disaster – today we face unheard-of droughts, insects and diseases moving into new territories, ice caps melting, seacoasts rising.
If in our generation we were to broaden Passover to celebrate its earthiness, we would be renewing some of its most ancient meanings – even before the Exodus. For close reading of the Bible (especially Lev 23: 4-8 and Num. 28: 16-17)) makes clear that there were originally two earthy festivals at the full moon of spring:
• One was the shepherds' festival involving the sacrificial broiling of newborn lambs and a shepherds' skipping, stumbling dance called "pesach – skip-over" that imitates the skipping, stumbling newborn lambs.
• The other was the farmers' festival of the spring barley harvest, celebrated by baking the simplest, most primordial of all breads, the unleavened matzah of flour, water, fire – scouring out all yeast, all rising from their homes.
And these two spring festivals themselves were baked, broiled, in the intense heat of a social transformation – their symbols and practices preserved but transformed -- turned into marking a new festival of the birth of the people itself.
Says God against all history and logic, Israel is "My firstborn."
• And the story brings moments of birthing to bear: The first liberators, long before Moses, are two midwives who refuse to obey Pharaoh's command to murder newborn Israelite boy-babies.
• The people are taught to smear blood around the doorways of their houses, to come forth from them as from a blood-smeared womb to their new birthing.
• And it is God's own Self Who does the skip-over pesach dance of lambs and shepherds, skipping over the houses of these newborn Israelites while striking dead the firstborn of the society that had enslaved them. (The Bible reminds us that when tyrannical rulers bring ruin on their own country, it is not only they but the poorest, the weakest, who suffer.)
As today we seek to move beyond the plagues of climate crisis, to bring a new birth of freedom to our wounded earth, we can act in many spheres against the pharaohs that enslave us.
Some are within us. We can clear out from our homes not only the physical leavening that swells our bread, but also the spiritual swelling of our own egos. Is the climate-wounding over-use of coal-fired electricity "eco-leavening" for us, to be cleared out and replaced by wind-stirred electricity? Which chemicals for the spring cleaning are eco-leavening, to be replaced by agents that are biodegradable? Is our own addiction to the over-use of oil, coal, gasoline, a kind of swollen leavening?
How did tradition turn the bread of the poor -- matzah -- into the bread of liberation? How do we turn the moment of darkness into a moment of joyful liberation and community?
If we see in Passover a teaching toward the liberation of all human beings and all earth from top-down exploitation by Pharaohs in every generation -- can Christians and Muslims and other religious and spiritual communities join in new kinds of Passover action-celebration?
As the Seder begins, we dip green sprigs of parsley and mint into the salt water of earth's primordial ocean. Can the Seder celebrants not only bless them in words – but vow to protect them? Can these greens inspire efforts during the rest of Passover to work for earth-healing change by letter-writing and phone calls to legislators, political candidates, and newspapers? Can the celebrants agree to demand improvements in the Warner-Lieberman Climate bill, which should be coming up for congressional votes after Passover? Can the recitation of our generation's plagues, alongside the traditional ten, rouse us to action?
Beyond the conventional home and community Sedarim, could we do Speakout Street Seders for the Earth at some key public places that have become the palaces of Pharaoh -- like EPA regional headquarters and Exxon-Mobil offices? One possible time might be late afternoon on Tuesday of Pesach itself, April 22 -- the third day of Passover, especially appropriate since it is also Earth Day.
All this is in our hands. According to an ancient legend, God would not break the birthing-waters of the Red Sea until one activist, a tribal community organizer, leaped into the waters till they reached his nose; not till he was on the verge of drowning did the waters break open.
Just so for us today. The Passover Haggadah itself teaches that in every generation, all humanity must free ourselves from the Pharaohs of our epoch. Not only during the week of Passover, but in the months and years that follow: We who are on the verge of the drowning of our earth, we who hear the drumbeat of the Pharaoh's army chariots behind us -- can we free ourselves, leap forward into action?
It is not only from specific Pharaohs of top-down, centralized, unaccountable power that we need to free ourselves, but also from the Pharaoh of habit, the constriction of mind and heart that has taken Passover as a narrowly Jewish moment. From these Jewish roots, can we grow a new spring of universal fruitfulness?
Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center www.shalomctr.org and the author of the Freedom Seder (1969), the Shalom Seder (1984), the Seder of the Children of Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah (1997), and Seasons of Our Joy, among many other works on Jewish practice and public policy.
