Rockin your Pesachs off, Politically

Next week is Passover, which is one of my favorite holidays. Unfortunately, the seder that I usually attend is this weekend, so I will be sulking accordingly. I'm only sort of joking. Passover is great, specifically because of its ritualized eating interwoven with stories. Our Passover (celebrated at a friend's house) is fairly nontraditional, and the stories always include a political element.

Passover celebrates Moses and the freeing of the Jews from Egyptian slavery, and our Passover Haggadah has always been edited and updated to reflect the politics of the times (Example: the Jews were freed from oppression and someday, there will be no more indefinite imprisoning of "detainees" and there will be no more genocide in Darfur and some day, all people will be able to marry those that they chose to spend the rest of their lives with, regardless of gender, and there will be no more oppression of Palestinians in Israel. This last one more traditional Jews would probably not support, I suppose), which was truly my favorite part of the seder. Not only did we celebrate our people's (and how powerful to feel that connection to a people from ages ago!) freedom, but we dedicate time to remember that there are other, parallel struggles that take place daily around the world and that as people lucky enough to have been freed so long ago, we should consider it our duty to aid the oppressed in this struggle.

The specific political examples (I suspect this year's focus will be health care as a human right) might be unique to our Passover, making these ideas concrete for us, but our people do seem to bend towards social justice issues, perhaps because of this tradition of a group retelling the story of how we once were oppressed reminds us in subtle ways that we should be trying to do the same for others. Passover doesn't say, "things were bad, but now they're good;" it says "things were bad for us, now they are better and by next year we will have made things even better for everyone."