Scrubbing it Down & Metzora

It's a hard pill to swallow when you learn unsavory things about your people's past. The worst is when you come from an oppressed people and then you learn that they, in turn oppressed others.

I remember when I learned that Jews had owned slaves in the U.S.

Unsavory.

I was surprised to learn that there were Cherokees who owned slaves. They became slave owners in the early 1800's in an effort to be accepted as people of power by the U.S. government. They became plantation owners, along with learning English and giving up their native ways. Maybe that's partly what happened with Jewish slave owners.

Trying to fit in didn't work--for either Jews or Native Americans.

The Trail of Tears still happened.

In documentaries and photos of the Trail of Tears, we don't see those slaves accompanying their Cherokee owners, walking as the beasts of burden while their owners ride horses.

And descendants of Freedmen are still fighting to be accepted as members of the Cherokee tribe. You can hear about it in this podcast.

The same is true for people of color in Jewish American spaces; it's hard to be accepted as "members of the tribe."

This week in Metzora, people with leprosy, or plague, or whatever it was, on their bodies and in their houses must not only isolate and wash their clothes, but also scrub the stones, and re-plaster.

As we enter Passover, there are lots of preparations, including scrubbing the shelves and walls of my refrigerator and stove, washing and burning off old stuff that's collected over the year.

There is much to scrub away, from our past as a people and for each of us as individuals. It includes a history of being the oppressed and enslaved, and also of being the oppressor and enslaver.

Freedom means many things to many people.

Though I resist the deep cleaning every single year since I started keeping a kosher kitchen, resenting the overwhelm it brings me, I know that once I'm done, I feel lighter and freer, ready to see what freedom means for me--and the world.

Symbolically, I remind myself that I am coming through a narrow place (the Sea of Reeds), into the expansiveness of freedom in the desert.

May we all scrub away what needs to be scrubbed, burn that which needs burning, find light(ness) and joy in the holiday, and enter into something new and more spacious--our own version of a new level of freedom.

May we have savory meals for Passover, and may we savor this time of renewal.

And may it be so for the world as well.

And say Amen.