\n<\/p>\n
For our Passover Seder, we ask people to share a story from their own experience or imagination that rhymes somehow with the exodus from slavery. <\/strong>Here\u2019s how we put the prompt this time:<\/p>\n This year, we\u2019re feeling like Mitzrayim<\/em> is here and our challenge is to allow something far better to push through and be born. So whether you want to share about a past time when that happened or dream into a future time that opens out, I\u2019m sure everyone will welcome your words. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Mitzrayim<\/em> is Hebrew for Egypt, but also connotes straits or narrow places, even the birth canal<\/strong>. I wrote this year\u2019s prompt with my fingers crossed, hoping that stories would emerge to uplift us all. I thought it was my own idea, but I soon realized that something in the moment must have whispered the prompt into my ear, because it emerged directly from a bit of history that hadn\u2019t been on my mind. <\/p>\n The Passover Haggadah<\/em> is the book of prayers and instructions and rituals that guides us through the Seder. The event is at once a meal and a kind of experiential learning symposium (reportedly influenced by the Romans\u2019 habit of combining high-minded conversation with leisurely consumption of food and drink, as in Plato\u2019s Symposium<\/em>). But this way of celebrating our liberation is very different from the directions in the biblical books of Exodus, Numbers, and beyond. There, the key element is an exacting sacrifice and ritual consumption of a lamb in holy precincts, which morphed into an even larger and more formalized communal observance when the Temple stood in Jerusalem.<\/p>\n With the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans seven decades into the common era, animal sacrifice ended. It was impossible to bring gifts for sacrifice to the High Priest because the rituals\u2014even the existence of the High Priest\u2014could not continue in the absence of the Temple. The people were faced with a massive challenge: with the utter destruction of their way of life and worship, how would holiness and Divine connection be possible?<\/p>\n The first inklings of the Haggadah<\/em> emerged perhaps a hundred years into the common era<\/strong>. As time passed, elements have been added and adapted, a process that continues today as people create their own Haggadot<\/em> to reflect their kinship with many struggles for liberation, for the protection of Planet Earth, for radical inclusion. But no matter how different Haggadot<\/em> may be from each other, the underlying purpose is the same: for people in their homes, generation upon generation, to experience the long struggle for liberation as if we ourselves had been enslaved, left Egypt, and sojourned forty years in the wilderness. <\/p>\n This made me think of something I\u2019d read and written about in 2007<\/a>, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation<\/a><\/em>, a wonderful book by Jonathan Lear that traces the determination of the Crow people to renew their lives after a great change that rendered their former path impossible. Here\u2019s how I described it:<\/p>\n \u201cThe book tells of the Crow people, forced by encroaching white power a century ago to trade a way of life shaped by hunting and battle for settled life on a reservation. A powerful account from the great Crow leader Plenty Coups says it all: \u2018When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Just as the story of the Jews 2000 years ago could have ended in extinction and erasure, the story of the Crow people could have ended that way<\/strong>. Instead, writing about Lear, Charles Taylor describes how Plenty Coups offered his people a revolutionary path to renewal:<\/p>\n \u201cPlenty Coups was able to help bring about this kind of redefinition for his people. He drew on the established practice of going into the wilderness to seek a revelation through a dream. The dream he reported foretold in thinly veiled terms the end of the Crow way of life, but it also promised a kind of survival for the Crow, provided they could listen \u2018like the Chickadee,\u2019 that is, observe others, and find new ways of going on. These were, of course, at that stage wholly unknown, but the dream was the basis for the hope that somehow, beyond just biological survival, the Crow way of life might continue in a yet to be defined new form.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been pretty demoralized by the scope of wreckage and total absence or conscience or compassion Trump has left in his wake in so short a time<\/strong>. I don\u2019t have a lot of ideas about how to pick up the pieces and somehow restore the imperfect order of a few months ago, how to have a starting place where the people in charge haven\u2019t cut off lifesaving aid, thrown children and elders to the wolves, pillaged the economy so that the richest few could profit at the expense of everyone else\u2014and much more. <\/p>\n But I find myself thinking with a newly rediscovered freshness about the subject of Lear\u2019s boo<\/strong>k. I want to be inspired by both these stories to wrench my thoughts away from restoration to true renewal. It isn\u2019t that the loss in either story is insignificant. In both cases, it was massive, encompassing a way of life, a self-understanding, all sense of value. It isn\u2019t that each people\u2019s renewal of vision and understanding didn\u2019t entail conflicts, contested lands, negotiation and compromise. It did. But it also led to the possibility of survival and self-determination.<\/p>\n\n