A hard day to be Jewish (Passover preparation)

I love Passover. It is, hands down, my favorite part of being Jewish. For those that don’t know, Passover is a holiday that commemorates the Jewish Exodus from Egypt, our freedom from the bondage of slavery. I went abroad a couple years ago to the land of my more recent ancestry, Greece, and it turned out that there were a few Jews in the already very small group, and we decided to make our Passover there. The celebration of Passover includes a ritual dinner called a “seder,” which consists of 14 different steps, four cups of wine (or more), the invitation of a long-dead ghost into your home, questions, answers, a hide-and-go-seek with a brittle cracker, and other hijinks. Making the seder in Greece was an interesting experience. We had to make our own Matzah (the aforementioned brittle cracker) because we could not get it there. And while we were inside doing this:

the Greeks were outside doing this:

…many of them literally weeping about their role in the death of Christ.

The next year, I made the seder in New York, on the floor of my tiny living room with my closest college friends. It looked like this:

Both seders were different and wonderful experiences. Because the seder is made up of so many different parts, there are so many customs that come from all over the world. Jews from different backgrounds have different takes on the traditional foods. There are so many interpretations of the best way to relate the story of Exodus, and on Passover, every household around the world is presenting the story through their tiny little lens– reflecting their own values in the retelling, and projecting them on our ancestors. Because of this, there are many, many different versions of the Haggadah, the book that is used to officiate the seder.

Of course, for my seder, I wanted a Haggadah that reflected what this holiday means to me. I am not particularly interested in god as much as I am in people and in histories. I wanted a Haggadah that was inclusive as opposed to exclusive, especially as most of the people at my seders tend to be non-Jews. I wanted to take the story of tolerance and freedom and relate it to our world, to use the seder to begin a conversation about how we can counter the oppression we see all around us. And therefore, both years, I created my own Haggadah, drawing from a multitude of different sources, including the traditional, the secular/humanist, the scientific, and even Wikipedia. It looks as you would imagine, like a literal cut-and-paste job photocopied together. This text has grown from the first year to the next, to further reflect the development of my thinking about this holiday.

And so it is no surprise, then, that the South should be an influence on this year’s seder. I began by wanting to reflect the Southern-Jewish tradition in the menu, alongside my more traditional Mediterranean one. There is a history of Jews in the South, though small, and they have continued to find their own ways of assimilating to life in the Bible Belt. Some byproducts of this are Matzah-Ball Gumbo and Passover fried green tomatoes with matzah meal.

It occurred to me that if there were Jews in the South during African slavery, and there were, then it was possible that their histories collided in some way. I decided to do more research. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for– I know now that I was looking for some peace of mind, something that might tell me that Jews did not fully participate in African slavery. How could they? They sat around the seder table every year and celebrated freedom, they ate things that made their throats burn and their eyes water to remind them of the bitterness of slavery.

What I found was unnerving. There were very few Jewish families in the South, but comparatively, Jewish families were much more likely to own slaves than the general white population. What’s more, there were at least a half dozen Jewish families who were influential in the slave trade in the New World– many of the ships who brought the slaves from Africa were Jewish-owned and were run by Jewish crews. This was not a New World phenomenon, either. Jews were the principal slave traders in Suriname and Brazil.

The more I read, the worse it got. I found pieces of sermons from rabbis in the Confederacy around the time of the Civil War speaking passionately about the Bible’s defense of slavery. (I suddenly remember parts of things I “studied” in Hebrew school, ancient laws from the Talmud regarding how you should value the worth of your slave, and what you should do if your slave runs away.) I found evidence of Jews trafficking human chattel all over ancient history, sometimes even introducing the practice to their non-Jewish neighbors.

(It was a rough experience in and of itself to even look for this information, as most of what I found fell into one of two territories: anti-Semitism or overly-defensive Jewish people accusing everyone of anti-Semitism, which seems to pretty accurately summarize the cloud over honest Jewish discourse today. This turned out to be one of the best sources I found, even though it was pretty harsh and obviously had an agenda.)

I was deflated and embarrassed. My Haggadahs have always contained an appropriated passage about the bond that Jews and Blacks share over slavery. It asks the people at the seder to join in singing, “Let My People Go,” an African slave tune inspired by the Exodus and often recycled back into American seders, thereby highlighting the connection and showing solidarity with all others who are or have been slaves throughout history. How naive I had been!

I was horrified to think of this tune wafting through the open windows of Southern-Jewish households on particularly hot days. A still more horrifying reality– that throughout history, in different parts of the world, Jewish seders must have been attended to by slaves– that while we rejoiced over the story of our redemption, a slave cleared the table of our celebratory meal. It is almost too unbearable to think about.

It is not that I ever held Jewish people to a higher moral standard than others– people are people, and they are all essentially rotten*. It just seems that a Jew’s charge down through the ages is to remember his history, no matter how hard he tries to forget. It seems impossible that while remembering– each year, remembering– and reminding our children, we were turning our backs on it all the same.

The children are a particularly disturbing element to this equation, because while the adults could likely “rationalize” away the difference between the Jewish slaves of Egypt and the modern, darker-skinned slaves in their kitchens, the children, most likely, were confused. On Passover, a time when the children are invited to ask questions of their parents, it is sickening to imagine what they must have answered to explain away the inconvenient similarities. It reminds me of the sentiment I so often hear in connection with the Holocaust, the disbelief expressed when people see pictures of SS officers with their families, right outside the camps. How could they do this to other families, to other children, people ask, and then go home to their own? The answer, of course, is that you can only do it when you cease to see humanity in a certain kind of person.

Several issues come to mind here

*Why can’t I stop referring to the slave-owners of yesteryear as “we” and “us?” I have no Southern-Jewish ancestry, half of my family did not even arrive until after WWII, the other half only a few decades before, and yet I feel the burden as if it had been my own parents. The answer to this one is simple– it is embedded in the Passover ritual. We are required to say that “we” were taken out of Egypt, not “they,” when referring to our ancestors. It is a way of feeling connected to our history and to our people, but now it also seems a way of taking responsibility. It a valuable lesson: “we” are all responsible when oppression occurs.

*A particularly sinister thought continues to assert itself, challenging everything I have ever thought about the beauty of Passover and I can’t seem to shake it. I have never thought about Judaism as a religion as much as a culture. This is what allows me to hide god under the table at my seders, while instead creating a love-fest of touchy-feely liberal ideals. I enjoy this method– it makes me feel more Jewish while simultaneously connecting me to all of humanity. But what if I’ve got it all wrong? When I think now about the Biblical references to sanctioned slavery of others, I must face the fact that maybe the story of Exodus really is about god, and as such, maybe it is about god’s salvation of us, in particular, at the expense of everyone else. Maybe in order to participate in Passover, we must actually believe that we are chosen, for we were freed even though slavery was still a-ok. I can’t believe that and I won’t, but then how do I celebrate the holiday in good-conscience? I have sent my rabbi in Miami this question, along with the task of reconciling the biblical view of slavery with Passover and I am awaiting his reply.

*The worst thought of all is sparked by the coincidence of my beginning this journey into Jewish slave owning history on the same day that the Israeli government has announced expansion plans for Jewish settlements in the West Bank. I strongly support Israel and have always believed firmly in our right to exist and make our homeland there, but I have never supported the settlements. It always felt to me like running over to your neighbors yard, pulling down your pants and yelling “na-na-na-boo-boo” while you mooned them, and then staying in that position FOR-EVER. It’s extreme, it’s provocative and it shows no good faith in the peace process. The settlers, mostly fundamentalist Jews, feel as far away from me and my life as the fundamentalist Christians in this country, or the fundamentalist Muslims in the Middle East, and yet, in some ways, I am being forced to take responsibility for them. This recent development in Israel along with my Passover crisis frightens me; it makes me feel that, like the child-victim of an abusive father who will grow up to beat his own family, perhaps all we have gotten from our history of oppression is a subconscious desire to oppress others.

That this new information will work its way into this year’s seder is clear. The question that remains now is how? I have sent it out to a few people, including my old rabbi, and I am awaiting responses while I ponder the question myself.

I am sad about this finding, about how horrible human nature is and how this conundrum born of Passover (and the many Passover meals likely served by slaves) becomes an example of just how hard all of us will have to work for freedom, whether it be mental or physical, whether it be for ourselves or for others. And yet, this is also an exciting opportunity. As I wrote to my rabbi, “Passovers of years past now feel superficial to me; there is suddenly opportunity for real and more satisfying discourse, real exploration and inquisitiveness, as opposed to a rhetoric of the example of moral superiority.”

*please see the comments after this post for a more accurate articulation of what I meant by the assertion that “people are essentially rotten.”