Reflecting on Passover
What a glorious week it has been in the Flathead Valley to celebrate the Festival of Freedom (the seven days of Chag ha’Matzot that follow the first night and day of Passover). The enormity of the sky is a well-known gift of living in Montana, and this week in Whitefish and Kalispell and across the Valley, we have experienced bright sunshine and blue skies, a tremendous variety of clouds bringing a variety of precipitation, and wind that has allowed for quick changes to inclement weather and a significant fluctuation in temperatures. In keeping with the holiday motif, I have been calling the big puffy clouds “chameitz.”
What a glorious week it has been in the Flathead Valley to celebrate the Festival of Freedom (the seven days of Chag ha’Matzot that follow the first night and day of Passover). The enormity of the sky is a well-known gift of living in Montana, and this week in Whitefish and Kalispell and across the Valley, we have experienced bright sunshine and blue skies, a tremendous variety of clouds bringing a variety of precipitation, and wind that has allowed for quick changes to inclement weather and a significant fluctuation in temperatures. In keeping with the holiday motif, I have been calling the big puffy clouds “chameitz.”
Our GJC seder was resplendent with beautiful tables filled with community members from near and far, all delighted to see one another and to celebrate together. In true Montana style, while our annual seder included words from Song of Songs, filled with appreciation of spring’s return, we also experienced one of the ten plagues — barad/hail — with significant realism from a passing storm.
As we, together, turned off our cell phones and tuned into the voices of readers throughout the festive room, we also listened to the voices of the generations past, sharing memories of Passover moments that we remember with fondness as part of our Hallel (gratitudes that are one of the fifteen steps of the Passover seder).
With the challenges of living in a time of political and environmental chaos and tensions within the broad Jewish tent, as well as in our various communities, my kavanah/intention as we began our communal seder was as follows:
May this year’s experiences around our seder tables renew our connection to the values at the core of our ancient story.
May our annual Passover ritual of storytelling and questioning inspire compassionate curiosity about how we see today’s human stories against the backdrop of the Haggadah’s mythic journey from slavery and narrowness to freedom and expansiveness.
How might listening with genuine curiosity help us to ask our questions differently and without a specific answer in mind?
How might we strengthen our ability to imagine a greater multiplicity of answers?
How might we soften our hearts to sit with a narrative that is different from our own?
How will we contribute to the resistance of pharaohs? And how will we open our doors for Elijah — for a time of wholeness and peace.
May we gather with joy and hope even as we hold the great helplessness, pain, angst, anxiety, and anger of a litany of destructive behaviors, power misused, hateful acts, truths distorted, and lives destroyed. May we share the complexity and capacity of a tradition that spans generations and continue to find new truths within.
As we move forward into the 49 days that we count as the Omer, may we continue to consider the spiritual journeys we all take to make ourselves free and to be a part of the larger struggles for freedom and justice and shared abundance. Each year, we have the uniquely Jewish opportunity of daily practice around noticing spring’s unfolding and the growth of the surrounding flora. From the evening beginning the second day of Passover, seven weeks of counting until we reach Shavuot — from the barley harvest to the wheat harvest of the ancient land of our ancestors. I have been watching the growth of Montana spring with awe and appreciation, which mixes with my great appreciation of the many GJC folks who have come to meet with me or invited us to dinner or to connect in some deeper way.
There is a freedom here in the vast and rugged nature of this land that feeds the people who live or who have the privilege to visit. This freedom is a gift that one can actually feel and even smell with a deep breath. I took a moment in preparing for our seder this year to research the words of the well-known Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus, famous for her poem — The New Colassus — which is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. She wrote another statement (that is often attributed to others) to her fellow Jews which she titled, Epistle to the Hebrews, in which she famously reminded us that “None of us are free until all of us are free!”
Freedom is not something you arrive at with no responsibilities.
Nor is freedom a fixed state of being.
Rather, freedom is an ethos, a value, a moral imperative we aspire to obtain not merely for ourselves, our family, our people.
Freedom, especially in the human reality of nation-states, is interwoven with all of humanity, all animals, all land and water, and the air we breathe.
Each year, we begin our seder with our own Jewish sacred story and we end our telling with the universal aspiration of freedom. May we move forward from the joys of Passover, to embrace our families, our community, and our world with the inspirations of sacred stories and a refreshed vision that grows our creativity, passion for justice, and capacity for different perspectives.
Rabbi Jessica
