Post-script to Passover Seder

The Seder meals are over, the morals of the story linger on.

Tell the story to your children, we are instructed: how the Israelites went down to Egypt, were enslaved and then liberated. Tell the story at the proper time: it is step number five of fourteen parts of the Seder, which translates as “order.” Tell the story as if it happened to you, we are instructed. Elaborate on the story, we are told, the later into the night, the better. `

 

Children wise and wicked: different world-views of “me” and “us”

Early on in the telling, we find there four kinds of children to whom we may be telling the story: a wise child, a wicked child, a simple child, and a child who does not know how to ask.

The wise child asks, “What are all these laws and observances God commanded you?” And he is taught all the details of Passover observance, down to the very end of the Seder – as if he had actually asked, “What are all these laws and observances God commanded us?” – including himself in the community.

The wicked child asks, “What does all this work mean to you?”  In this instance the parent takes the child literally when he says “to you, and responds with a certain harshness because the child has separated himself out of the community.

Lively discussion often surrounds this section, what is called “argument for the sake of heaven,” rather than to prove a point.

What struck me this year is how the text rewards “we” and is harsh with “me.” 

The most obvious pandemic lesson brought home to us humans all over the globe, no matter our nation or tribe, is the deep factual reality of “we,” homo sapiens. Covid-19 is a story that is happening to the human species, each and all of us. There is no “as if” in the telling of this pandemic story. And while health outcome disparities by race and ethnicity have been documented for decades, they are front and center now. There is at least some ray of hope this recognition and documentation will drive more equitable access and elimination of bias as we rebuild our civic infrastructure.

 

Daled amot: the personal space/Zoom rectangle we each occupy? God also occupies.

Rabbi Sue Fendrick wrote a wonderful piece (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/go-ahead-have-a-shvach-seder/) in which she granted “a rabbinic permission – and/or psychological and spiritual authorization” to have “a mediocre, underwhelming, unremarkable, or even kind of pathetic” Seder under the pandemic limitations that govern our lives these days.

She used a term which I had never before encountered: daled amot, which translates as four cubits, the measure of our personal space: the space that we each take up as we keep our six feet (3.81 cubits) from one another.  Rabbi Levi Cooper provided some historical background, (https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Judaism/World-of-the-Sages-The-four-cubits-of-halacha) noting that since the Temple was destroyed, God has dwelled in each individual’s four cubits. This indwelling presence is often spoken of as the Shechinah, the Divine Feminine.

Those little boxes on the Zoom Meeting screen? They are another form of the dalet amot of this pandemic time. Mostly what we see of one another on the screen is our faces. And when we take the opportunity to gaze softly at one another’s faces on the screen, we see how unique, precious, and  beautiful each one is.  To switch religious contexts, this is namaste: the God in me greets the God in you.

 

Stay in touch with what is important

May we draw ever more deeply from the well of our own wisdom and our trust in God. 

May we forgive ourselves and one another our foolishness.

May we be kind to one another, understanding how truly we are all kin.

May we be good neighbors and well-wishers.

May we be safe and protected from harm as we make our way through the unknowns of the coming days, weeks, and months. 

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Come as you are continues online, Wednesday April 15, 12-1:00 EDT on Zoom

The imperatives of social distancing invite us to co-create sacred and nourishing online refuges.

Come as you are to share an hour of nondual practice

… open-hearted and fearful,

… determined, weary and bearing gifts

Email me at ______ for the Zoom link.

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Banner photo from The Passover Haggadah, illustrated by Raphael Abecassis

 

Arrogance, humility, and the work to be done

We live in disturbingly puffed-up times.

I like to imagine myself among a citizenry seeking the justice that must come with the demise of arrogance: armed only with sewing needles, we advance on a gaggle of huge balloon characters (think Macy’s Thanksgiving parade). Punctured, they let out the sounds four-year-old boys like to make, then collapse into a wild heap on the pavement.

 

Alas, we are all subject to arrogance: Passover to the rescue!

As I prepare for Passover, chametz – food mixed with a leavening agent such as yeast – is a major focus. Any such food is to be separated out and removed. This calls for a close reading of labels on bottles, boxes, and cans.  Then there are the remnants, i.e. crumbs. This calls for cleaning.

This week I have dusted, washed, wiped, sponged, scrubbed, scoured, and swabbed. Sunday, the fridge. Monday, the bathroom. Tuesday, the guest room and my office. Wednesday the livingroom, diningroom, and bedroom. Thursday, the kitchen. It has been a sedentary winter, including several bouts of flu and extended weeks of recovery, so I welcome the activity, although my muscles protest.

I also trust that as I get into crevices and corners with dust-cloth and lambs-wool duster, there is an alchemical shift in my own fermented emotional and thought patterns.

And when all the work is done, there is the gift of this prayer:

All leaven and anything leavened that is in my possession, whether I have seen it or not, whether I have observed it or not, whether I have removed it or not, shall be considered nullified and ownerless as the dust of the earth.

In other words, I make the effort I can make. And being human, the effort to rid my house and my person of all remnants of puffery must fail. And still, my effort is good enough.

Then beginning with the Seder meal, and for the next eight days, we eat matzah, which tradition calls variously “the poor man’s bread”  and “the bread of affliction.” We literally “take in” the nourishment of humility. This is not about self-abasement or groveling. Passover, after all, is about liberation, freedom from slavery. Including all the ways that we both over-inflate and under-inflate our value.

 

This hyperbolic world has such a deep need for us to be the size we are.

May we each occupy our rightful place.

May we gather around our tables, tell our stories, ponder deep questions, and praise.

Then may we together free the still-enslaved and open our gates to the uprooted.

 

More on Passover:

We are all strangers in a strange land

Passover paradox: freedom is given yet must be earned

 

We are all strangers in a strange land

My memory of the brief exchange is so sharp that, some forty-five years later, I can picture the layout of the livingroom, just where I was sitting – a stranger in a strange land – among a group of a dozen or so women. 

The ceiling of the old Victorian was high, the walls a creamy white, an oriental rug spread out over a worn wood floor. The lighting was soft. A woman seated diagonally across from me on a damask-covered sofa spoke: “I always thought that if anyone got to know me, really know me, they would see me for the fraud I am.”

At that moment, hearing another woman speak the words I had so often furtively whispered to myself, I realized how alone I had truly felt, a stranger even to myself.

I was flooded with relief to have found my tribe.

This memory sprang back to life during the Passover Seder a few nights ago, as I reread a slip of paper I had tucked into my Haggadah – the text that tells the story of the Freeing of the Israelites from slavery.

God may have reached into history with “His long arm and outstretched hand” to free our bodies from forced labor. But our Exodus from Egypt is ultimately about getting the Egypt out of us: freeing ourselves from our sense of estrangement from one another and from God or Reality. 

It is  up to us to free ourselves of misunderstandings and beliefs that destroy the promise of intimacy.

My scribbled note lists three kinds of estrangement:

feeling ostracized in one’s environment

feeling displaced among one’s friends

feeling estranged from one’s own soul

That sharp memory of finding my tribe? Encoded within it are remnants of every one of these themes of isolation and alienation. Sometimes they still ache, like a deep old scar. Occasionally they bleed freely and bright red, as I am wounded afresh.

But this tribe around our Seder table is full of good will, deep listening, intentions for the world to not destroy itself. And full of  the wisdom of having devoted themselves to the study and practice of bench science and glass art, history and philosophy, theology and nursing, Afghani tribal and US government versions of conflict and diplomacy, helping others re-write the stories of their lives and writing for herself as a necessity, the art of guiding traumatized children and families through the education system, and the new political science of identifying two outworn regulations that can be dispensed with for each new one proposed.

So much engagement with life, so many hearts hands and feet finding ways to offer welcome and solace to the ostracized, a refuge for the displaced, and soulful connection to the estranged.

So much engagement – with one another – that our guests lingered for the better part of an hour after we concluded the Seder at 12:10am, reveling in the freeing intimacy of the evening and the nourishment of hospitable and welcoming hearts.

Even as we struggle with how we may harbor one another,  relieve the desperate journeys and living conditions of those who are even now physical outcasts, we strengthen our capacities to be of true service as we heal our own personal estrangement.

Banner photo from The Passover Haggadah, illustrated by Raphael Abecassis

Passover Paradox: Freedom given, yet must be earned

This is the season of the epic freedom story of the Jewish people: our Exodus from Egypt.

We are told: we were taken out of Egypt.

That this was an act of pure Kindness on God’s part, executed by His Mighty Hand and Outstretched Arm.

That there was nothing we had to do to earn it.

That there was no inquiry to determine that we were deserving.

That the sea parted before us and closed over the Egyptian chariots, mired in mud.

That on the eighth day, Miriam led the women in dance.

We are told: after we were taken out of Egypt, we wandered in the wilderness for another 40 years, long enough for the enslaved generation to die out.

That is how long it took to get the Egypt out of us, to gain the freedom freely bestowed.

At any given moment I can find myself the recipient of gratuitous and enormous Kindness, and slogging wearily through a wilderness, where my personal history refuses to give up the ghost.

I belong to the tribe of freed people who nevertheless have to claim liberation by dint of persistent effort, in the face of temporary defeat, in the arms of temporary refuge.

Every year we gather to tell the story.

We are advised: live the story, don’t just tell it.

We are advised: the more we elaborate in the telling of the story, the better.

Our elaborations over our family seder table have included over the years truth-tales of the Holocaust, of the Russian Refuseniks, of the lost and the survivors of the Middle Passage, of the slaughtered of Darfur, of the countless losses of Mother Earth.

At one point in the story-telling we open the door of our house and invite in Elijah the Prophet to sip at the wine we have set aside for him.

We are told: in this season it is Elijah the Prophet who may turn the hearts of parents and children towards one another, thereby holding off total destruction of the earth.

May we in this of all years take in upon ourselves to turn our hearts towards one another, both trusting in the gratuitous Kindness and dedicated to persistent effort on behalf of one another’s freedom.

 

Banner photo from Passover Haggadah by Raphael Abecassis