art by Gloria Abella Ballen
Introduction
The promise of freedom is the engine of human progress. People seek it at every turn, at any cost, no matter what. This makes the Passover story endlessly resonant. The biblical Moses is a greater than life mythical figure. The depiction we get of him is of an imperfect, reluctant leader who kills an Egyptian in his youth and runs away soon after, who is miserable at public speaking and suffers from an irate temperament, and who, more than anything, is ambivalent about his relationship with the Divine. Yet, in spite of himself,
he frees the Israelites from slavery, guides them out of Egypt, and takes them through an odyssey in the desert that tests them at every turn and ultimately defines them as a nation. No wonder the heroic achievement of Moses and the Israelites has been celebrated in song and story throughout history.
I remember with affection the Passover dinners in my native Mexico. My ancestors were immigrants from Poland and other parts of the "Pale of Settlement.” They had arrived at the dawn of the twentieth century, settling in a mestizo country deeply rooted in the Catholic faith and radically different from the place they had left behind. They crossed the Atlantic escaping poverty and anti-Semitic persecution because they wanted a chance to prosper and to practice their religion without fear. In the Seder, Moisés, as he is known in Spanish, was a lionhearted leader compared to Christopher Columbus, to Ernesto Ché Guevara, to Nelson Mandela.
We were a large number of relatives who would congregate around a table for almost four hours, eating food from the Old Country and delicious Mexican dishes. On occasion we would have Sephardic foods as well. Adults would drink four cups of wine, each representing an aspect of the inner and outer journey of the Jews. At the center of the table we had a plentiful supply of unleavened bread, matzah, which I liked to spread with cajeta, a soft caramel paste special to Mexico. There were pillows all around for sitting, and as children we loved pillow fighting before the Seder began.
On the Seder plate we had matzah, maror (bitter herbs), symbolizing the harshness of slavery; charoset (the mix of chopped nuts, grated apples, cinnamon, and sweet red wine), representing the mortar used by the Jews to build the storage cities of Pithom and Raamses; karpas (a vegetable dipped in salt water); z’roa (a shank bone, usually from lamb or goat), to remember the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem; and beitzah (boiled egg), as a springtime motif.
The adults told us that another guest, Profeta Elías, could arrive at anytime. The door would be open for him, and there would be an empty seat at the table with a wineglass filled to the brim. A portion of the matzah, shown to all by the leader of the Seder, became the afikoman, from Greek for afterwards, and it was eaten at the end of the meal. The afikoman was hidden for the young to look for when the proper time arrived. Whoever found it was awarded ten pesos and a trompo, a Mexican top.
The storytelling was filled with references to the Holocaust, where a part of our family had perished and references to Zionism as the dream of the homeland that could bring us back to Israel, as Moses had once done.
Our daily life in Mexico had an important presence in the Passover story. There were anecdotes about la convivencia, when, between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisted in the Iberian Peninsula. And about the plight of the conversos and crypto-Jews escaping the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Likewise, indigenous tales were told. And children heard about Cuauthémoc, the last Aztec emperor, who resisted the merciless soldiers of Hernán Cortés. And about Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José María Morelos y Pavón, who led the Mexican movement for independence in 1810. I remember being enthralled by the richness and variety of these stories.
Then, in my mid-twenties, I became an immigrant to the United States, leaving Mexico because it wasn’t open and democratic, and I didn’t feel I could explore ideas in public, fully and without intimidation. I wanted to live in a free country, but the odyssey wasn’t easy. My English was precarious, and I constantly felt like an outsider.
By happenstance, my first Passover in this country, which was in New York at the house of a rabbi-in-training, was one of the earliest moments when I felt at home here. In this Sephardic Passover ritual, I heard an African-American spiritual, “Go Down Moses." It was totally new to me, and I was asked if I could say a few words about the desaparecidos in Argentina’s Dirty War and their struggle against oppression, which I related with my limited vocabulary.
Then my host recited Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “The New Colossus" from memory. I had never come across the poem before. Its meaning was stunningly relevant: it spoke of a Mother of Exile who welcomed the huddle masses yearning to breathe free. I asked who she was and was told it was the Statue of Liberty, in whose pedestal the poem was engraved. “She is a Jewish mother,” my host said.
The statement suddenly made me realize the extent to which the content in my family’s Seder in Mexico had been defined by our historical and political circumstance and how each Passover is experienced in its own unique way by its participants. I mentioned this to my host, who answered: “Yes, each of us adds to that difference.”
My intention in The New World Haggadah is to make Moses emblematic of today’s complex world. Not too long ago, I discovered another poem by Emma Lazarus that in my eyes is quite similar to “The New Colossus.” It is called “1492” and it looks at that annus mirabilis as a fracturing moment, a kind of Big Bang that gave birth to a cornucopia of Diaspora events, each with its own metabolism.
The Jewish Diaspora across the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East, and the Atlantic Ocean to what we call the Americas is exemplified by a plethora of languages and traditions. I want to bridge the gap between North and South and between East and West, between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and between Africans, Europeans, and mestizos. 1492 is the year that changed the world. For better or worse we were all born from the common wellspring of those events.
What makes this a new Haggadah is its multicultural—and multilingual—qualities, like growing up Jewish and speaking Yiddish in Catholic, Spanish-speaking Mexico. Even today, sitting at the Seder table looking at the matzah, maror, and other ubiquitous culinary ingredients, my mouth still salivates thinking about the cajeta in our Seders in Mexico.
I have reconfigured the liturgy to be more embracing, inserting voices seeking freedom through renewal. Among others are the Ladino cumulative song Un Cavritico, a chant used during the Civil Rights Movement, a protest song, a traditional Judeo-Spanish song about Moses leaving Egypt, and a disquisition about having one’s heart divided by the medieval poet Yehuda Halevi. The gorgeous art of Gloria Abella Ballen enlivens every page.
Like Moses, each of us is a symbol because others see themselves reflected in us. Others live their lives through ours. To me, Passover is about realizing that we are at once imprisoned in our moment in time and space and simultaneously free to wander to other times and places through the power of our imagination. This Passover story transports us to a time long ago when great men and women and great events led a people to freedom.
The story of Exodus is a human story. It is universal. My dream is that the diversity in this narrative will make all of us feel that it is ours. The act of repeating the Exodus story is liberating and gaining freedom is a continuous process. We might not be fully free, but each of us is in the process of breaking from our slavery, our "Egypt".
The promise of freedom keeps us alive...
ISBN: 9781935604440. 88 pages. $18.00
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