Tag: Haggadah

Making it Mine: An Un-Orthodox Passover by Joyce Zonana

Passover is a holiday of remembrance, of ritual re-enactment: this, we say, is what our ancestors experienced. This is what they felt and knew, what they tasted in their blood. The movement from slavery to liberation, from the soul’s winter to spring. We must never forget, we say, we must always remember, be thankful for our freedom, never take it for granted. “In each generation,” the Haggadah enjoins, “we should feel as if we personally had come out of Egypt.”

jz-headshotThis year, I celebrated the Jewish feast of Passover on March 31st–almost three weeks before the holiday’s official start on the evening of April 19th, the 15th of Nissan. It turned out to be my best Passover yet.

Because I’d been accepted for a residency at an artists’ colony beginning on April 17th, I had known since last Fall that I would not be home for the holiday. Given Passover’s importance for me–a Jew who left Egypt in her own lifetime, part of what some have called the “Second Exodus”–I had thought I might postpone the residency and even considered turning it down. But the colony could not change the dates, and, after much deliberation, I decided that my work as a fledgling translator was worth missing my usual gathering of family and friends. I told myself I could mark the arrival of Passover internally.

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A New Covenant by Joyce Zonana

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“The Seder Table” by Lynne Feldman

As the Jewish High Holiday of Passover draws to a close, I have been reflecting on this seasonal ritual so central to collective Jewish identity and so significant to me personally.

The Haggadah, the script for the Seder gathering, enjoins all Jews to experience the Exodus—the liberation of the ancient Hebrews from slavery in Egypt —as if it were happening to each of us in our own time.  Because I was born in Cairo to an Arab Jewish family that left Egypt when I was two, I always felt Passover to be mine.  No need for “as if”: our Exodus was all too real. Yet, from my parents’ accounts, life in Egypt had been delightful. I could not reconcile the Haggadah’s dreadful representation of ancient Egypt with my family’s treasured memories of contemporary Cairo: I could not understand why we celebrated deliverance from an Egypt we loved.

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