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Garoongelman Hagaddah Companion 2020

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Garoongelman Hagaddah Companion 2020 Finding (an) order in pandem(on)ic times We’re thrilled you’ve joined us for this second seder of Pesach 5780 (2020). Our family accepted an invitation from our shul and rabbi to host a traditional seder that would speak, broadly, to social justice, for folks of every age. To that end, we’ve assembled this companion to your own Haggadah. We’ll move through the seder traditionally, yet pause before each step to read reflect on, and respond to selected texts. We hope they’ll spark conversation! The texts feature a range of themes: liberty, bondage, power, and oppression; silence, voice, language, and narrative; boundaries and our passages through (and over) them; brokenness and repair; imagination, dream, and reality… … but our overarching theme is time. Time is of crucial importance to the seder. There’s the rabbis’ extended commentary on the time it should be held; there’s also its stress on timelines, lineages, ancestors, and generations. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic has turned our sense of time upside down. It’s difficult for many of us to keep track of what day it is, never mind what hour. קֶדֶ֥צ קֶדֶ֖צ ,How do we continue to pursue justice (per the Torah’s injunction in the midst of such troubling times? How do we find the time for ( ֹדְּרִתּ ףְִֹ֑ advocacy and action? And when we do find it, how do we best use it? And we’re (even more) interested in themes you see and want to discuss, especially in the face of the many challenges of life in a time of pandemic. Speaking of time: we’ll go as long as people choose to stick around. For those of you who have younger kiddos, you might (like us!) need to take a break to put them to sleep. Feel free to duck out (and back in) as you like. And yes, seder literally means “order,” but there’s no reason why we can’t double back to selections you’ve found interesting, but at the time found yourself not quite ready (or quite too hungry!) to speak to. Please participate however you like. This is your seder every bit as much as it ours! Chag Pesach Sameach! Josh, Michal, Ziv, & Stav Kadesh (Sanctification): Even in Isolation, Solidarity May our Seder be Joyous and Soulful May it have moments of loudness and moments of quiet May it create space to feel the pain of our own oppression and that of others And may it create space to celebrate the liberation we have won, and the liberation we will win May our seder lean to the past and branch out to the future But may it be rooted in the present May it be Diasporist May it be revolutionary And may it not last too long because the food is getting cold and we don’t want to delay the revolution any longer Welcome comrades to our Seder! [For Jews concerned with social justice] Pesach is naturally the highlight of the year… the chag of liberation. It is a festival of both celebration and mourning and struggle. The Seder takes us through the story of the oppression and the liberation of our ancestors. We are invited to rejoice in our freedoms, while holding close to the stories of those who are still not free and the ways in which we are still not free. If Pesach is the essence of our Jewishness, the Seder is the serum: Diaspora Jewishness in 2020, reduced down into one evening of song, bruchos, stories, and food. Each year during the Seder we tell a story. In fact we tell the same story every year. Year after year after year, we tell the story of the liberation of Jewish slaves from Egypt. But why? Why has this story been passed down to us, and why are we here tonight retelling it anew? Why should we remember that our ancestors were slaves in Egypt? (Adapted from “A Jewdas Haggadah”) st Cup of Wine): On Liberty 1) א Kiddush [As we prepare to drink our first cup of wine]: T]o understand the meaning of this evening, let us compare it to… the Japanese tea ceremony. People gather to drink tea according to a very precise and well organized ceremonial order. The way the water is heated, the number of tea leaves placed in the water, the order of the repast, the walks one takes before and after drinking the tea, the placement of the flower decorations and the plates in the room, the words that one says, and so on. Everything possesses precise significance that must be respected to make the ceremony succeed. Numerous works, guides, and manuals exist to allow the perfect execution of the tea ceremony, by which initiates enter “The Way of Tea,” the Tchai-Do. Similarly, the Seder is a ceremony by which the “initiates” enter “The Way of Liberty,” by which they accomplish a passage: Passover. This ceremony, whose form lies somewhere between theater and liturgy, is an apprenticeship in liberty and creativity through play, questions, mime, song, and an ensemble of symbols. The Seder ceremony is very structured. It follows an exact plan of words and gestures that must be spoken and performed according to a certain order, which is the meaning of the Hebrew word “seder.” It is a paradox of liberty that it can only be attained within the framework of order, of rules, of words and symbols of extraordinary precision. (From the commentary to the Assouline Haggadah by Marc-Alain Ouaknin) Urchatz (1st Handwashing): Silence & Voice “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Ludwig Wittengenstein wrote complicated philosophy. He was also a complicated person with a complicated lineage. Three of his grandparents were Jewish. But his mother’s mother was not one of them, and he was brought up Catholic. He wrote about himself as a Jewish thinker. But he did so self-deprecatingly, even, to some critics, antisemitically. In this respect, he echoed his more-famous predecessor, Karl Marx. So why bring Wittgenstein (or Marx) into a social-justice seder? Because we Jews, qua Jews, cannot wash our hands of them. We can’t ignore them. We can’t pretend they were not who they were, or that they didn’t say what they said. They are too easily demonized. And they are a reminder of how our past has so often been silenced, and our identities held against us. And so, as we wash our hands this first time, in silence (i.e. saying no berakha), it’s worth taking time to reflect on the tension held in these Jewish non-Jews, these non-Jewish Jews, and to give it voice. Isaac Deutscher spoke to this in an essay appropriately titled, “The Non-Jewish Jew”: “They are all determinists because having watched many societies and studied many ‘ways of life’ at close quarters, they grasp the basic regularities of life. Their manner of thinking is dialectical, because, living on borderlines of nations and religions, they see society in a state of flux…. None of them believes in absolute good or absolute evil. They all observed communities adhering to different moral standards and different ethical values…. [They] have yet another great philosophical idea in common – the idea that knowledge to be real must be active…. Finally, [all] believed in the ultimate solidarity of man; and this was implicit in their attitudes towards Jewry.” These non-Jewish Jews force us to think about what it means to be Jews who believe in the ultimate solidarity of all people, and how our attitudes, and our actions, reflect this. They force us to consider the obverse of Wittgensetin’s famous aphorism: “Whereof one can speak, thereof one must not be silent.” Karpas (Dipping Vegetables): Passing Fancies Here, in the midst of our Pesach Seder, we find a reference to Purim! What does it mean? “[T]o understand the meaning of a word, one must see in what context if first appears… That is the rule of first appearance…. [W]hen a word appears only once, it is designated by the Greek term ‘hapax legomenon.’ ‘Karpas’ is such a word. It appears just once… in the Book of Esther (1:6). [It] is a Persian word designating a sumptuous cloth…. Esther is also a name derived from the Persian, ‘Astarte.’ In Hebrew, it is understood as ‘concealment’ (Talmud, Hulin, 139b), because in Hebrew ‘aster’ means ‘I will conceal’…. This invitation to pass from the text of the Haggadah to that of the Book of Esther by this intertextual play is in itself the first commentary on karpas. This ‘passage’ from one text to another is the very meaning of ‘Hebrew’ (ivri), which comes from the root, ‘la’avor,’ ‘to pass.’ The Hebrew is thus a ‘passer.’ For the Hebrew, to be is to become. The Hebrew is in a constant becoming, a be-coming that is a future, a to-coming…. In Hebrew, the word for ‘river bank’ is ‘safa’ which also means ‘language.’ Passing from one bank to another is to pass from one language to another, translating into an action that karpas is a Persian word…. Another word for river bank is ‘gada.’ The direction of movement toward a bank, the opposite bank, can be called, ‘haggadah’…. Two Talmudic sages, Rabbi Chiya Rabba and Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta, discuss whether one should consider the karpas-veil as the curtain of a theater or as the sail of a boat. Karpas is… a theater curtain that hides and unveils… [and] a sail [that] allows the boat to move forward thanks to wind power.
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