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Again.
And yet brand new.
We have arrived at our
freedom story once more.
Are we free?
Are we still asking questions?
When is a seder only a
meal and when is a meal a seder?
I recommend two books to help renew each
seder. The first came out a number of years ago
and I have used it ever since: A Different Night:
The Family Participation Haggadah.
The second just came out this year: A Night To
Remember: A Haggadah of Contemporary
Voices.
Let me share a tiny sample of this new rich additional
resource to our yearly, foundational story
“Being Poor”
by Janet Rosenberg
Being Poor is ...having your heat shut off in the
winter because your parents can’t pay the bill.
Being Poor is ...wishing you could eat in a
restaurant.
Being Poor is ...wearing shoes that someone
else threw out.
Being Poor is ...waiting all day in a clinic to see
a doctor you don’t know.
Being Poor is ...always feeling a little mad
because you never have what you need.
“A Turtle’s Memory”
Every year, hundreds of giant green sea turtles
swim hundreds of miles from their natural habitat
on the Brazilian coast to tiny Ascension Island
in the Atlantic Ocean in order to mate. For
years, researcher and pioneer conservation biologist
Archie Carr tried to understand how the
turtles found their way to the island from so
great a distance when even airplanes had trouble
locating it. Carr’s conclusions were fascinating.
He claimed that the turtles navigate using genetic
memory. Every year they return to perpetuate
the species and the memory. |
"We Women are Still Slaves”
by Tanya Zion Waldoks
To our body image - guilt eating into our bodies
and souls.
To our “super woman” ideals that scatter our
energies everywhere.
To a selective memory of history that erases our
foremothers.
To recalcitrant husbands who imprison us in
dead marriages.
To our desire to be considered good little girls.
To society’s concept of success - competitive,
autonomous... and lonely.
To our misconception that feminism is just for
and about women, that it denies deep and
healthy relationships with the men in our lives.
“A Legacy of Luggage”
by Rabbi David Hartman
Judaism imposes a vital task on the parents: to
tell the children their people’s story. What the
child does with this past, no parent can decree.
Parents provide their children with luggage.
Whether the child will open up the suitcases and
use their contents is beyond the reach of parents.
They have no right to enter the child’s
future. Parents must err at instilling memories
that haunt the child an entire lifetime; their
bequest is a weight of generations, an awareness
that one’s biography began with Abraham and
Sarah.
Passover 2007.
Again.
And yet brand new.
If we embrace the opportunity to renew it and
ourselves.
Hag Sameach.
May this be a Pesach filled with more than food
and matza.
May this be a beginning, again. |
