Daiyenu: What is Sufficient?
A Jewish UU's Struggle with
Passover
River Road Unitarian Church
Sunday, March 24, 2002
Lori Rottenberg
Rev. Lynn Thomas Strauss
Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door
posts and the lintels of the houses...and when I see the blood, I shall pass
over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the
land of Egypt.
-Exodus 12:7 & 13
Reading:
Passover
by Lynn Ungar
They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.
But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.
Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.
Reading:
Glasses and Plates
As she left home,
she packed them
in a careful, slow panic-
did she know then her world was to end?
And my grandmother came here,
lived a life here,
and died here,
and what she brought, she passed down to me.
She left me glasses-
glasses and plates-
all that's left of meals eaten, those who ate them, times they shared.
Glasses-
windows on a world long gone.
She would only use them for special times,
meals made sacred with love.
I could never see the place she came from,
but her tables brought me closer.
Now they stand
in my curio,
all arranged like an altar,
colored glass and the gold, like a church.
And I wonder
if one day
an unknown child of mine will
look at them and try to know me?
She'll just see glasses-
glasses and plates-
all that's left of meals eaten, those who ate them, times we shared.
Glasses-
windows on a world long gone:
All that will be left of my world and me.
-Lori Rottenberg, February 2002
Daiyenu: What Is Sufficient?
A Jewish UU's Struggle with Passover
by Lori Rottenberg
One night, I dreamt that my grandfather, whom I've missed dearly since he
died, was coming to visit me. In this dream, I was running around getting
everything ready and urgently telling my husband Chuck, "We need to put out the
bread that my grandparents gave us. We need to put out their bread!" But this
bread was kind of old and stale and only had a few slices left in the loaf. I
wanted to use a new loaf of bread that we had instead, which was fresh and full
and looked delicious. I woke up from this dream feeling very confused and torn,
and I didn't know why a dream about bread would affect me this way. As I told
Chuck about it, we both realized what the dream was truly about. The old, stale
bread given to me by my grandfather represented Judaism, and the new fresh loaf
represented Unitarian Universalism. Despite the contribution that Unitarian
Universalism has made to my life, I often feel guilty about my activism in
something called a "church," and apparently felt I had to hide it and trot out
the old stuff, the Judaism given to me by my grandparents, to make them happy.
Although my grandparents died before I joined RRUC, and I miss them every day of
my life, I am also often relieved I never have to explain my involvement in
Unitarianism to them.
My ambivalence about being Jewish by birth and Unitarian Universalist by
belief is at its strongest during Passover, which will be starting this
Wednesday night. Passover is both the central celebration of Jewish identity as
well as a holiday of deep gratitude, kind of like Christmas and Thanksgiving
combined. (As many of you may know, Passover is far more important to Judaism
than the more widely known Hannukah, which only became important in the U.S.
because of its proximity to Christmas.) Passover refers to the final plague that
befell the Egyptians when Pharaoh refused Moses' request to free the Jews from
slavery. After locusts, rivers that ran red with blood, and other terrible
events refused to melt Pharaoh's heart, the Angel of Death killed the first-born
children of the Egyptians, including the Pharaoh's son. The Angel of Death
passed over the homes of the Jews because God had wanted them to put lamb's
blood on the doorways.
Through the use of a little script book called the haggadah, the
Passover celebration allows Jewish families to personally reenact-in their homes
during the seder dinner-their ancestors' struggle to be freed from bondage in
Egypt. It marks the first step in their historic covenant with God, the
beginning of their chosenness as a people. According to Rabbi Irving Greenberg,
author of The Jewish Way, when we "observe Passover, [we] are
commemorating what is arguably the most important event of all time-the Exodus
from Egypt. If for no other reason than the fact that the Exodus directly or
indirectly generated many of the important events cited by other groups, this is
the event of human history." (The Jewish Way, p.64) Throughout
the ages, both Jews and other groups have used the timing, imagery, and language
of Passover as tools to gain freedom from oppression-from the desperate Jews of
the Warsaw Ghetto who revolted against the Nazis during the holiday to Martin
Luther King Jr. and others in the civil rights movement who saw American racial
segregation as the modern-day remnants of Pharaoh's cruelty.
But no matter whether it's important just to Jews or to the rest of the
world, Passover is a holiday that I've always been uncomfortable with. As a
child, I first experienced the holiday as a minor inconvenience. The seders were
interesting, but I used to wonder why it was really so important that we not eat
Oreos, Apple Jacks, or bagels for the full week afterwards. Later, as an older
child, these superficial concerns gave way to questions about the meaning of the
story we were celebrating. Did the first-born children of Egypt really deserve
to die, and should I be happy about that? Was there really a God who looked out
only for my family and other Jews? What was so special about lamb's blood that
made the Angel of Death magically pass over houses with it smeared on the
doorways? As a know-it-all teen and college student, I also started to question
the form of the ritual itself. Why did my grandfather always have to be the one
to lead the seder while Grandma worked hard in the kitchen? Why was God always a
he in our haggadah and seemingly everywhere else? Why did we ask the four
questions every year, even though a few seemed to make no sense, like the one
about reclining while we ate? Why did we bother pouring the cup of wine for
Elijah and opening the door when we knew full well nobody was coming in or
drinking the wine?
But now that I am an adult, the biggest problem I have with Passover is that
it places Jewish people at the center of a world view, closest to God. To go
back to Rabbi Greenberg again, Passover teaches three things: 1) that human
beings are meant to be free (no problems there, obviously!); 2) that God is
concerned (this is okay if you believe in a personal God, which I don't); and 3)
that through this holiday the Jewish people are set apart. (p. 35-36) In this
third point, Greenberg captures precisely why this holiday is so difficult for
me. I do not experience myself as set apart, a member of a "chosen people," nor
do I wish to be. I am no better and no worse than any other human being.
Although Jews have suffered severe and special persecution throughout
history-and while this always gives me a certain pride in our unlikely
survival-to believe in the chosenness of the Jewish people is to quickly descend
into tribalism. If we look at the current situation in Israel, in India, and in
countless other places around the world, we can see just how dangerous it is
when people use their chosenness by God to divide themselves along tribal lines.
Although the deaths of the first-born children of Egypt are presented in the
Passover story as a last resort to melt Pharaoh's hardened heart and were a type
of payback for the murder of the Israelites' first-borns years earlier,
celebrating this form of eye-for-an-eye justice has little place in a world
plagued with war, religious hatred, and ethnic cleansing. If Passover serves
merely as a birthday party for the Jewish people, in which we are to celebrate a
bloody triumph over another group and honor a God who will smite our people's
foes, it is a holiday that is completely inconsistent with my humanist values.
Others Jews have felt a similar discomfort with the holiday. Ira Steingroot,
author of Keeping Passover, notes that "Many Jews today are
uncomfortable keeping Passover because they do not feel, or are bothered by, the
concepts usually assumed to be religious. These 'cultural' Jews do not identify
with a particular organized wing of Judaism.but have racial, ethnic, and
historic feelings about being Jewish, growing up Jewish in a Jewish family..."
So it is thus a great but common irony that I stand before you this morning
as a representative of Jewishness, for although I am a "full-blood" who would be
accepted by any synagogue by virtue of my mother's Jewish ancestry alone, I am
not terribly well educated about my Jewish roots. I attended Hebrew school for
several years, but was not bat-miztvahed because our small-town synagogue would
not support a girl doing it, even in 1978. My young, hippie parents thought
little of the traditions that their own parents and grandparents had risked
their lives to keep by coming to this country, and so I was raised by my
immediate family in an almost entirely secular context, save for an occasional
lighting of the menorah during Hanukkah.
The bulk of whatever Jewishness I have comes from my father's parents, who
helped raise me after my parents were divorced. Refugees from Nazi Germany, my
grandparents arrived in this country in 1935, met and married here, and
assimilated quickly. They learned English and read The New York Times
from cover to cover every day, and looked down on those refugees who continued
to speak German and go on about the old country. My grandmother was a
gentle-hearted seamstress for a modeling agency, and my grandfather was a
hot-headed, larger-than-life Fuller Brush salesman. He in fact broke tradition
himself when he chose to go into business rather than enter rabbinic studies as
his father had hoped he would. So my grandparents were not villagers from the
shtetls of Eastern Europe, hopelessly tied to tradition. They were cosmopolitan
Berliners, accustomed to urban life and its attendant tolerance for diversity
and personal choice.
And yet, they bore a fierce loyalty to Judaism and a deep distrust of the
predominantly Christian culture of the United States. My grandfather once became
furious with me because he heard me hum an arrangement of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer" I was singing with the school chorus. He had a sister he disowned and
refused to talk about because she married a Christian back in Germany. My
grandparents paid for my Hebrew school and took me to Israel when I was 12,
hoping that Jewishness would take root in the fertile soil of my young mind. And
while they were not regular synagogue-goers except for the high holidays, they
did hold a Passover seder every year, which was really in many ways my deepest
connection to the Jewish religion.
And despite the many questions I had about the holiday growing up, that
connection still remains to this day: my memories of drinking syrupy
Manischewitz wine in my grandmother's jewel-toned hock glasses that were
carefully (and miraculously) brought intact from Germany. Of stealing the
matzoh, the afikommen, from behind a pillow when my grandfather got up to
go to the bathroom and "ransoming" it later for money and gifts. The seder plate
filled with its mysterious and largely indigestible items: the horseradish, the
lamb shank, the salty egg, all symbolizing hardships that my ancestors had to
bear. Passover, my strongest link to thousands of years of Jewish history, of
which I am a real if improbable result. Reform Rabbi Ben Kamin understands this
emotional connection to the holiday and how in Judaism the memories of home and
religion are inextricably linked. In his book Thinking Passover he
writes, "in the end.[Passover]'s not about the matzoah or the shimmering
pieces of gefilte fish in white gelatin and red horseradish. It's about people,
and feelings and laughter and tears. It's about remembering what your house used
to smell like at this time of year, what certain people looked like and how they
sounded and felt, and how that resonated through and around you. As Elie
Weisel.has asked, 'What significance does Passover have, if not to keep our
memories alive?' "
I have tried attending a large-group seder here at RRUC, and even though it
was lovely in its own way, I will always long for the seder that is celebrated
at home, led by and shared with family. Herman Wouk writes that "almost
all living Jews stem, at a remove of no more than 4 or 5 generations at the
most, from observant Jews." This is certainly true in my case. Who am I
to throw such a history away, for the mere reason of my utter disbelief in Jews'
uniqueness as human beings? I worry about my daughters not even having the
choice to disregard the memories of seders past, as I have done, because I am
too torn to run a seder in my own home: I am trapped on the one side by my
inability to believe in and honor the holiday in the traditional way and trapped
on the other by my memories of what I remember Passover to be and my subsequent
unwillingness to turn the holiday into something that my grandparents would
never recognize. Through my inaction, I often feel I am letting an important
candle burn out.
During last year's Easter service, I listened to Scott and Lynn's wonderful
sermons about how to reclaim the difficult holiday of Easter by making it a
metaphor for spiritual rebirth. I listened to Collins's powerful rendition of a
song from Jesus Christ Superstar, and I realized this is how Unitarians
keep a foot in both doors: they can use the rationalism of their current faith
to help them make sense of their first religions. The service was lovely, yet I
squirmed and squirmed and squirmed. I felt like my grandparents were watching
me, rolling in their graves as I sat in a "church," participating in an Easter
service, during Passover, no less. I realized that I needed the same help to
make sense of what Passover means to me, and since then I've learned I'm not
alone in this need. As a major piece of Unitarian Universalism's Judeo-Christian
heritage, Passover should be a regular part of the interpretive dialogue of this
congregation.
So how can we interpret Passover in a UU context? I obviously will never be
comfortable celebrating Passover in the way my grandparents did. But perhaps if
we overlook Passover's problems as mere examples of Old Testament-era political
incorrectness and view it instead at its cleaned-up best as an allegory for
freedom from oppression, we can use this holiday to free ourselves from the
oppression and guilt of maintaining religious traditions that no longer resonate
in our lives. Just as my grandfather risked his own father's wrath from Passover
to Yom Kippur for not entering rabbinic studies, and just as my grandparents
felt free to observe Judaism in ways that were different than their own parents
did, perhaps I, too, can use Passover as an opportunity to celebrate my own
religious freedom, and to incorporate the new realities of my family's life in
America into my religious outlook.
I may always be a hyphenated Unitarian, someone who cannot give just a
one-word answer when someone asks what religion I am. I know many Jewish
Unitarians who share this problem, and even if you are not Jewish, maybe you,
too, carry similar complexities with you from your home religions. Maybe you too
feel the guilty pull of emotional connections to a faith in which you no longer
believe. Yet as I prepared for today's service I realized with irony that I am
now better educated about Passover than I ever was before I stopped officially
being Jewish. And while I do not yet have all the answers I crave about how to
reconcile my ancestors' traditions with my personal beliefs, the distinctly UU
process of finding one's own truth requires that we become educated in this
fashion, that we hold each holiday, each ritual, up to the light, for
examination, for study, and for eventual reintegration into our lives. Perhaps
it is enough just to remember, to engage in this process, and to try to add what
was best about our home religions to Unitarian Universalism's big tent. Perhaps
is it is enough merely to struggle to integrate what we remember in our hearts
about our home faith with what we believe in our heads. And because UUism is
about constant struggle to understand your own beliefs, about engaging in a
process rather than finding a goal, that alone should be sufficient. Daiyenu.
Freedom
A Passover Homily
by Reverend Lynn Strauss
I love the Passover Seder.The telling of the Freedom story of the Hebrew
people serves as a metaphor for all liberation stories. To tell it over a meal,
through the sharing of bread and wine gives the message substance; allows me
really take it in.
It is a reminder that religion is meant to confront the powers and
principalities.to upset the status quo, and open us to new ways of being.
Religious practice and ritual is meant to free us all from our prisons, our
oppressions, our fears. Religion, the best in all religions, is meant to set us
free.
My husband, Dave is Jewish. Dave comes from a secular Jewish home. He was
never taught to believe in God. He was never taught that God had chosen Jews for
special protection. The Judaism that Dave learned was of a legacy of oppression
and struggle, and hope in revolution. He was taught a cultural Judaism that
emphasized a way of living righteously that focused on freedom and justice for
all.
When Dave and I met we were in our 20s.we discovered we held the same
values.even though we came to them from two different sources. His source was a
secular Jewish tradition of working for change from the grass roots-giving power
and resources to the have-nots. My source was a liberal Christianity that
focused on the transforming power of love and personal and communal
accountability for changing the world.
The intersection that we found from our different backgrounds-the -
connection that has been most meaningful for us - has been in the movements for
freedom.
Like many of you we have found Unitarian Universalism to embrace our core
values. We have been able to bring the best of Dave's Jewish secular learning
and the best of my activist Christian learning to fruition within Unitarian
Universalism.
Freedom stories continue to be our common source.
In the first Unitarian congregation to which our family belonged, we shared a
Seder meal every Passover. The basement fellowship hall was filled and the meal
was long and rowdy. There were years when our children got to ask the first of
the four questions. "Why is this night different from every other night?"
I am always moved by this question. Because the gathering for Seder is so
different from every other night..so different from what Dave had experienced in
his non-traditional Jewish family; so different from the spaghetti suppers of my
church-going childhood.so different from the isolated nuclear family diners of
most Friday nights.
There was power in the tradition that we shared with our UU friends. The
power of naming the plagues and the oppressions that peoples in all times and
places have suffered, the power of children asking questions, the power of the
empty place at the table, the power of food that tells a story, the power of
remembering, and the power of hope that some day, perhaps next year, freedom
will be realized somewhere in the world.
When Dave and I moved from Chicago to Knoxville, Tennessee we were welcomed
into our neighborhood by several families from the Temple and the Synagogue.they
knew we were Unitarians and were therefore likely to be liberal in our ways.
About the second or third year, they invited us to a neighborhood Seder. It was
wonderful! The whole living room was taken up with tables lined end to end. I
remember we could hardly get in the front door. The meal went on for hours. And
there was so much laughter. They didn't bring the intensity to the ritual that
our UU congregation had, they were simply having fun together, telling the
age-old story. The host had a collection of Haggada from all over the world, in
many different languages, some secular, some religious. All told the freedom
story.
It isn't necessary to believe in God to find meaning in the Bible or in
religious parable and story. The metaphors of place used in the Exodus story can
hold meaning for all of us. We have all lived, at some time, in a kind of Egypt,
a place where our ideas, our beliefs, our difference was oppressed. And we must
not forget those in America and around the world who still live bereft of
freedom.
Most of us in this room, still live in the wilderness, in the desert where
freedom is a privilege, and a right which we must learn to share, and use well.
We have been brought to a place of crossing over, the journey is still before
us, we have not yet come to the promised land.
For Unitarian Universalists the promised land is that place which Dr. King,
dreamed, where all would be judged by the content of their character.and it is
that place called the Beloved Community, where love guides relationships of
equity and compassion. In The Promised Land there would be peace in the Middle
East, an end to terrorism, no more AIDS, no more domestic violence, no more
hunger, no more disparity of wealth, no more killing, no more children on drugs,
no more schools that don't teach, no inequity in health care. Passover and
Easter, remind us to hold on to the vision of what is possible.
Few if any of us will see the Promised Land.but it is up to us to keep hope
alive..to be on the journey.as Lori said, it is sufficient to struggle with our
beliefs, and our traditions..to struggle toward meaning..
And it is a blessing and a responsibility..to remember..the struggle of
others.and the hope that lies deep in all hearts.a hope for freedom, freedom for
all. Freedom now.
Amen.
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