Words of the Spirit
Passover Reflection 2022
At any given moment, I have an extensive and quirky playlist rotating in my head. It works like a jukebox on autopilot, selecting a platter and dropping the needle without any direct input. I can wake up to Dean Martin singing “That’s Amore,” to the opening of a Mahler Symphony, or to the new Gesher Tzar Me’od I just learned.
Sometimes there is a traceable impulse for the tune, and the week before Passover is a likely time for the playlist to originate in my childhood seders. The entire seder was sung by my zayde, my grandfather, who had a beautiful voice. Even little toddler me was enthralled, “recording” those melodies and cadences onto my personal hard drive, and passing some of them along to my children and seder guests over the years.
Like any good playlist though, it wants continued refreshing. For example, our Reconstructionist movement hagaddah, A Night of Questions, inserts three different versions of a Miriam song – the beloved contemporary classic by Debbie Friedman, and two others crafted by Reconstructionist rabbis Geela Rayzel Raphael and Margot Stein. You can hear or upload a playlist of songs from our hagaddah from you tube (all of the recorded selections are marked in the text with a g-clef symbol).
Two notable songs in our hagaddah appear without that symbol – Let My People Go and O Freedom. On the Sources and Permissions page, the former is reprinted by permission from the publisher Simon & Schuster, Inc. No attribution or permission is provided for the latter. For that matter, it’s certain that no publishing company was the actual source for Let My People Go.
The textual “hook” of the song’s refrain is of course from the Book of Exodus, Moshe’s demand to the intransigent Pharaoh who would not release a captive people from bondage. Mordecai M. Kaplan, recognizing the relevance to and resonance with American history, included the text in his 1941 haggadah, the first in a series of innovative and transformative Reconstructionist publications. After all, a key element of his project was to acknowledge that Jews were living “in two civilizations,” and he and his team of editors would go on to include liturgies for key American observances in their subsequent prayer book series.
There are many reasons to interrogate and update the impulse to include these song texts or to sing them at the seder table. Writing in an essay published in Tablet Magazine in 2014, Anthony Russell begins:
The first time I heard a live rendition of “Go Down Moses” was at the first Passover Seder I ever attended. Somewhere around the third cup of wine, a room full of Jews sang the classic negro spiritual in lively fashion, followed almost immediately by “O Freedom,” another classic negro spiritual.
A feeling of bewilderment and paranoia began to steal over me: Why are they singing these songs? Are they looking at me? Do they expect me to know these songs?
Russell goes on to explore the expectation that as a black, classically-trained singer he should close out his recitals with encores from precisely that repertoire, along with resonances he discerned from discovering and studying Yiddish song repertoire. Returning to the hagaddah, he reflects:
The meaning of these traditional African-American texts to me as a Jew has become intensely personal, nuanced and idiosyncratic. Let me clarify: The meaning of these traditional African-American texts to me as a Jew – to me, and not necessarily to you, to paraphrase the Haggadah. I haven’t necessarily lost all of the bewilderment I felt hearing “Go Down, Moses” at my first Seder. Some additional questions I might add to the Seder would be: Is it strange that some Jews have decided to use African-American religious expression in the privacy of their domestic rituals to tell their own story? Why is it that “Are you Jewish” and “How are you Jewish?” have oftentimes been the first things that I hear from Jews I meet for the first time? If I walk into a Seder and find Jews singing negro spirituals, may I ask, “Are you black?” and “How are you black?”
For Passover this year, Russell joined in expanding and refining these questions for a Haggadah supplement with the Passover Song Acknowledgement Project (which you can find on Facebook). It probes some of the unprobed and unacknowledged factors in the use by (mostly) white Jews of these texts and melodies at their seder tables, while offering some information about their origins, and suggesting some new questions:
How are the two stories of slavery and liberation – the Passover story and the African-American story – alike, and how are they different? In what ways are the descendants of those who wrote this song still experiencing oppression? How might making a yearly Passover acknowledgement contribution make a difference to you and to those who receive the contribution?
There are three years left in the United Nations’ proclamation of the International Decade for People of African Descent. In recent years, the Canadian government has offered apologies to Chinese-Canadians, Japanese Canadians and the LGBTQ communities for past discrimination. It continues to struggle with the necessary task of providing reparations for its devastating and ongoing role in institutionalizing Indigenous people through the residential school system. And just a few weeks ago it announced that this summer it will publicly apologize for its discriminatory treatment of Number 2 Construction Battalion members, an all-black unit that served in World War I.
It's not clear how or if reparations will play a part in the public apology. In his important essay in The Atlantic, The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks of reparations as something more than financial recompense for past – and ongoing – injustices, but as a reckoning, as well as an opportunity for spiritual renewal. Of the three new questions offered for our seders this year, the invitation to contemplate the impact of making a “Passover acknowledgment contribution” helps create a ritual pathway for meaningful RDEI (racial diversity, equity and inclusion) in our homes and our communities.
Imagine if along with the traditional as well as updated songs we cherish and pass along to the children at our seders we also embedded an action that did more than symbolize our hope and vision for an anti-racist, inclusive and ever-evolving sacred community.
That would be a song I want to keep on listening to, and singing.
Enjoy a meaningful, safe, and joyous Passover.
Rabbi Liz
