Passover, & All Our Hopes, Dreams, Prayers…into the Ashes? (Tzav)

Earlier this week, I led a community seder at a senior center.

I started with the question of why we tell the Passover story every year and teach it to our children. And recognizing that we are experiencing very difficult times now.

I read a snippet of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “I Have a Dream” speech. Because we’re not yet “free,” and that the Passover story teaches us that we are all responsible, each and every one of us, for contributing to the creation of a free world where no one goes hungry.

Everything went swimmingly. Until, almost at the end, a woman stood up and started yelling at me.

Maybe it wasn’t yelling, but that’s what it felt like.

She said I had taken this sacred thing and turned it “political.” And what a shanda that was (I should be ashamed, is what she meant).

At the point where we name the ten plagues and take a drop of wine from our cups on our pinkies, shaking it onto our plates for each plague, I had asked for people to name plagues of today.

People said many things, like Hamas, anti-semitism, Hezbollah, hunger, homelessness, poverty, discrimination, and I repeated them all through the microphone so everyone could hear.

Then someone said, “Trump.” The woman who yelled at me—she didn’t like that (though most everyone else did). She said she was very offended, and got up and left.

I wanted to argue, to say I had only been repeating what others said. I wanted to argue that “bringing” politics feels sacred to me.

What else, after all, were the rabbis thinking of when they talked of freedom? When they had us tell the story of brave women resisting by refusing to follow through on the order to kill every first born baby Hebrew boy? Or the courage it must have taken for Pharaoh’s daughter to bring a Hebrew baby into the palace to live in a household with her genocidal father and raise him as her own?

What was the society like, after all, in which the ancient rabbis created the seder? Was it all sugarplums and fairies? Was there not an awareness of oppression in this not-so-coded story about resistance?

The message from the Torah and throughout the generations to tell this story every year to our children is a political one. Sacred, because it’s about the collective power we have to create a society that “God” wants us to create, one of freedom.

I wanted to argue all of this. But of course I simply apologized, saying I would never want to offend anyone.

This week, the week before Passover, our Torah reading is Tzav, which gives us more details about the sacrificial system.

This system is set up for the Israelites to cleanse themselves of their wrongdoings, whether committed intentionally or not. The fire on the altar is to be kept burning, never to go out. The ashes from the sacrifices are to be placed in a pile beside the altar and then taken outside the camp to a pure place.

I heard a teaching from Rabbi Tali Adler about those ashes. She said that the ashes are all the prayers and dreams and gratitude of the Jewish people all piled up together, sacred in their representation of humanity.

What are those prayers if not hopes and wishes and dreams for better times? Sacred, as the Passover Seder is with all our wishes and hopes for a better future. A reminder not to give up.

May all our hopes and dreams and prayers for a better future, and the reminder that we have the power to resist, go into our Passover seders this year.

May we draw strength from our ancestors who lived through difficult times, and let’s keep the fire burning, never to go out.

And say Amen.