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As the days get longer and we are awakened in the morning by the songs of birds newly arrived from points south, we are looking forward to all that spring brings to our community.

This guest post is the D’var Torah that CBI member and cantorial soloist Ziva Larson offered at Shabbat and Pesach Morning Services on Saturday, April 8, 2023.

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I am writing to you from Hong Kong, where Roger and I are spending a delightful month visiting our daughter, son-in-law, and young grandsons. After a 4 year pause in being able to travel here, it is wonderful to spend time with them and to celebrate Passover together. We look forward to being part of their synagogue’s Community Seder at the same time as we will miss being with you at the CBI Seder. Happily, our enduring Jewish traditions bind us all together, wherever we may be across the globe.

Counting the Omer: 49 days of reflection & growth

This year the month of April opens with Pesach. I love all of the shining moments around the wheel of the Jewish year, but ever since I was a kid, Pesach has been one of my favorites. (And it still is.) Studies have shown that the Passover seder is the one Jewish ritual most commonly celebrated in this country — from Jews who aspire to experience Shabbat each week, to Jews who may only engage in one avowedly Jewish celebration per year, this one is always on the list.

“…Granted, change may not be easy. Our spiritual ancestors went from Pharaoh’s frying pan into the fire of forty years of wilderness wandering. But the fact of a new path is hopeful even if the path is hard. Because nihilism and despair and paralysis say: nothing’s ever going to be different. What’s broken will always be broken and can never be mended, so it isn’t worth even trying. But it is worth trying…”

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Though winter has not yet lessened its grip, we know that under the snow and ice, early flowers are popping up and foreshadowing spring.

Haggadah for Pesach

This year April overlaps, more or less, with the lunar month of Nissan. At the full moon of Nissan we retell our people’s core story as we celebrate Pesach, festival of our liberation.

As it says in the traditional haggadah:

We were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Holy One brought us forth from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm… Therefore it is incumbent on each of us to see ourselves as though we, ourselves, had been brought forth from Mitzrayim.

Dear all,

I’m looking so forward to celebrating with you at our Second Night Community (Zoom) Seder. Like last year, our seder will be co-facilitated by me and by R. David Markus, and we’ll share it with Temple Beth El of City Island, the community with which some of us journeyed to Cuba before the pandemic began.

During the pandemic I know it isn’t always easy to find the groceries we’re looking for. If you don’t have or can’t find these items, never fear: we will make it work and seder will be beautiful even without these things! But if you can find these things and have them on hand, they will help make the night more special and more real.

Things to have on hand for seder, if you can…

Please remember to RSVP by Wednesday to the synagogue office so we know you’re coming. (The Zoom link will not be the one we use for services, and it will not be posted anywhere, in order to prevent zoom-bombing.)

See you at Seder!

Blessings to all,

Rabbi Rachel

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A slide from Bayit’s Pesach offerings this year.

Many of you have heard me say that on Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach, it’s customary for the rabbi to give a sermon about how to prepare for Pesach. Traditionally speaking, I’m supposed to give you instructions on how to prepare yourselves and your homes for Passover. You know — here are the five “leavenable” grains, here’s how to remove them from your homes for a week, here’s the halakha on how to properly clean to remove every last scrap of hametz.

As we approach our second pandemic Pesach, the idea of preparing for Pesach feels different than it ever has before. I mean, if you remove hametz, you can do that the same as you always have. And even if you’ve never followed that tradition, you can mark the week by making a conscious choice not to eat bread. A week of mindful eating is a valuable experience and a deep way to connect with our traditions. But that’s not the kind of preparation with which I’m grappling this year.

It’s the inner preparation that’s challenging me. Because the pandemic continues. Last year who could’ve imagined that we’d be here now: preparing for another Zoom community second night seder? Still staying apart to protect each other and ourselves. Many of us still in lockdown mode, or sheltering in place, to prevent the spread of a virus that’s still killing 1200 people each day in this country — about three times as many as last July 4; the equivalent of a 9/11 every three days.

There are three excellent vaccines out in the world now. There is reason to hope that once the population reaches a certain vaccination threshold, we will be able to be together safely again. Elementary schools are even about to re-open! But we are not “there yet.” What does it mean to prepare ourselves for liberation when many of us may still feel constrained: by pandemic, by economic challenges, by racism and all the harm it creates, by the reality of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers?

The haggadah teaches: in every generation one must see oneself as if one had been liberated from Mitzrayim / the Narrow Place — from tzuris / suffering, from meitzarim / constrictions. How can we see ourselves as if we were going forth from those tight spaces when we are still manifestly living in them? We aren’t liberated from COVID. We aren’t liberated from racism and hatred. We will celebrate Pesach as a community again via digital means, not “in person.” What kind of liberation can this be?

Earlier this winter I worked with a group of poets, artists, rabbis, and liturgists to co-create new materials for the start of seder, recognizing the meitzarim that still bind us so that we can prepare our spirits for the liberation that is not yet quite here. (We’ll use those materials at our community seder on Zoom with Rabbi David and the TBE community — please sign up now, we need your RSVP by Wednesday!) And, there are things we can do practically to prepare our hearts to go free.

Set your seder table with a white tablecloth, if you have one. If not, use a bedsheet… or whatever festive cloth you can find. Make it feel different than on a regular night. It’s too early to have spring flowers where we live, but if you can pick up a bouquet at the grocery store, treat yourself: a symbol of spring, something beautiful and festive. Put candles on your festival table: we’ll light them to bring the light of the festival into the room and into our hearts.

Create a second seder plate memorializing this COVID year: hand sanitizer, a face mask, a vaccination card if you’re fortunate enough to have had a shot. We’ll light a memorial candle for the half a million who have died as we move through the door into this year’s community seder. And you’ll also want a “regular” seder plate symbolizing our ancestral story of freedom: an egg, a roasted shankbone or beet, a sprig of green, haroset, maror. Maybe an orange and an olive.

We’ll harness our sensory experiences to bring us into the festival of freedom. The crunch of matzah, the taste of parsley (or whatever you use for karpas, the green vegetable dipped in salt water tears), the sharpness of horseradish and sweetness of haroset… all of these will spiritually hyperlink us with seders past and seders to come. Our people have celebrated Pesach in narrow straits before. Our rituals give us strength, and they connect us with each other and with our Source.

The journey to Passover begins where we are. Not in some imagined reality where the pandemic never happened, but right here and now. And I know with all my heart that when we gather on Zoom for second night seder, the words and the tastes and the rituals will lift us out of where we are and prepare us for the unfolding of something new. The journey to Sinai. The journey to togetherness. The journey to the better world we’ll build together on the far side of the sea.

This is the d’varling that Rabbi Rachel offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services (cross-posted to Velveeteen Rabbi)