Should I Celebrate Passover?
Just how Jewish do I want to be today?
Another morning, ugh. Here we are.
Why am I not excited. Why am I not bristling with joy? It’s not only Friday, it is Passover.
Yet I don’t feel celebratory. Tonight I will not be eating matza. I will not be attending a seder nor commemorating the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt.
Most likely I will be eating tacos and drinking a margarita with my wife and mother-in-law.
It would be wrong of me to imply that my goyim side of the family is preventing me from celebrating Passover. The choice to pass this holiday over was entirely my own.
Now I have to confront that decision.
Moreover, I need to confront the complex feelings that arise when I push my Judaism to the side and pretend today is just another day.
Why Is Today Different From Every Other Day?
I wriggle in my choice to forgo a formal seder. Even as I sit in my well-worn chair with a small yoga block pushing against my lumbar spine as I like it, I feel slightly uncomfortable.
Am I disrespecting my heritage and disappointing my ancestors by avoiding a religious tradition?
To be fair, not celebrating Passover is different from not acknowledging it. I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t care enough to give it some time to rumble through my conscious.
The challenge I’m facing is part of a much larger questioning of identity. I’m not sure how to embody and express my Jewishness when my feelings are not clear to me. Even after thirty-some years, I don’t really know what being Jewish means to me.
Sure, there are the occasional jokes about large noses and miserly interest rates. There’s the kvetching about neurotic mothers and the Mazel Tov’s of congratulations.
But to be honest, my most salient tie to Jewishness is my love of lox. Fatty smoked salmon is in my blood. If I could eat it every day, I would be in bliss.
And still that leaves a lot of Jewishness to be embraced. The history, the culture, and the suffering is a pill of trauma that I don’t particularly want to swallow.
As Thomas Hubl says, a trauma response has two main symptoms; hyperactivation and numbness. Hyperactivation leads to becoming very stressed or triggered, while numbness leads to feeling indifferent. I’ve landed in numbness. I am unable to name how I feel.
Embracing all that it means to be Jewish is an overwhelming experience that my system cannot compute. My nervous system can split off a “Jewish Jeff” and dampen it down to the point of being unconscious.
Owning my Jewishness not only means embracing ancient history, but modern atrocities as well. Not only the Holocaust, but the ongoing warfare of Israel against the Palestinian people.
There is the narrative of the oppressed becoming the oppressor. There is a mutual claim to be fighting for a right to exist. There is the struggle for a minority to empower itself and sustain its traditions in spite of marginalization.
It makes owning my identity as an American-born Jew very precarious, problematic, and precious at the same time.
I’d rather bypass it all.
I’d rather pretend that the long lineage of Siegel’s and Schwartz’s on my father’s and mother’s side are irrelevant history that doesn’t impact me today. What filial impiety!
I’m completely aware of this negation, and I’m asking myself, what is the cost of disowning this aspect of my identity?
What is the consequence of not celebrating a holiday that seems so relevant in today's fractured landscape — a fraught exodus to find freedom.
The Bind of Human Mythology
I sit while my hot coffee beckons me with its aroma. It’s pleasant. It’s quiet. Only a few birds chip behind me, welcoming the rising sun. They seem chipper — always.
Do the birds know it’s Passover?
Nature doesn’t pause for human holidays. This is human mythology born from our capacity for language and meaning-making. As a historical myth, it shapes consciousness and values as much today as it did 3,400 years ago.
As the historical narrative of Passover impresses itself upon me, it disrupts my plans for the day. Perhaps this is precisely the point, to create friction.
I feel stuck in a bind:
If I deny my own feelings of ambivalence, I feel as if I’m going through perfunctory motions to appease some kind of invisible audience. Passover as a set of rituals lacks meaning. It feels performative and hallow, almost as if I need to prove my worthiness as a Jew.
If I deny my Jewishness, I feel guilty for my lack of participation in my cultural heritage. Yes, I miss the opportunity to commune with others. But to be completely honest, I do not yet feel ready to enact Judaism with other Jews.
I first need to come to a better understanding of my own Jewishness (or lack thereof) before I can participate in a communal ceremony. Otherwise, there’s too much baggage.
I recognize that forgoing communal celebration also centers my own egotistical narrative. It leaves me vulnerable to becoming entranced by hyper-individualism and self-absorption that plagues our culture.
My isolated little ego can believe it can escape these much larger socio-cultural forces and play in its own protected sandbox — how narcissistic and naive. The fact that I can even choose to turn away seems fraught with privilege.
What Does Passover Really Want For Me?
I started to ask, what does Passover want from me, but I think that might be the wrong question. What does it want for me implies a living history: a call to actively process the incredible suffering, past and present, and let it digest.
I’m not here to repent (there’s another holiday for that). I’m here to transform unmetabolized history into something new. Specifically…
To acknowledge that my ancestors struggled for their freedom and I should never take my own for granted.
To appreciate how safety, belonging, and dignity are not equitably distributed.
To never let one’s identity be a justification for cruelty.
To recognize my own responsibility in healing intergenerational trauma.
To transform hatred, greed, and domination into something that can beget hope, healing, and helpfulness.
This moment right now is as good as any to practice transformation.
So I sit where I sit each morning, and with a deep breath in, I take in my own pain as well as the pain of others. With a long breath out I send relief to myself and everyone who has, is, and will ever experience suffering due to forces beyond their control.
I let my breath transform and purify the parts of all of us that ache, mourn, and drown in sorrow.
To honor Passover does not necessarily mean attending a seder. It means to truly live the gift of freedom.
I am the product of generations fighting for and building towards the freedom to live a life free from oppression and grounded in chosen values and virtues.
Every freedom I am privileged to as an American, everything I have in terms of material comforts, everything I can do today because of my identity as a white Jewish man is a reminder that I did not arrive here without great struggle from those who came before.
These struggles go beyond my identity as a Jew but are certainly entwined with it. The matrix of intersectional affordances is multidimensional.
If There Is No Struggle, There Is No progress. I Am Because You Are.
These are great words of Frederick Douglass and the African proverb of Ubuntu.
Yet there is one last piece to acknowledge in this discussion of progress, interconnection, and freedom:
In every struggle, there is harm.
I cannot accept a single-sided story of good versus evil. Without a doubt, my history has caused harm as well as been subject to it.
There is no struggle for freedom that does not lead to mistakes and even immorality. Wielding power yields immoral consequences. It’s unavoidable.
This too needs to be included in my processing of Passover. I ask for forgiveness for the wrongs my people have done. I see my own capacity for evil and do not shy away from it. Rather I embrace it as part of my own benevolence and malevolence.
If I want to be truly Jewish today, even without a celebration of Passover, I need to embrace my ability to be a bad person despite my aspirations towards compassion, generosity, honesty, magnanimity, empathy, understanding, forgiveness, and the ability to share power rather than hoard it.
Today and tonight I will sit with all of this. It’s the least I can do to play my part in the arduous path towards freedom and wholeness.
~ Jeff