orev exodus: A New Passover Ritual
Kvutzat Orev (Tal Beery, Karen Isaacs, Michal Jalowski, Eugenia Manwelyan, Yotam Marom, Daniel Roth)
April 5, 2015, New York City
April 5, 2015, New York City
Kvutzat Orev (a group of 6 people who built a communal Jewish life, rooted in Hashomer Hatzair, together in Israel and Brooklyn over 5 years) got together to experiment with the form in which we celebrate Passover. During a group seminar last Spring we decided to start building a new, Jewish, public Passover ritual. We spent the year researching our history and tradition, and developing a common language around goals and values. As we looked for answers through collective culture we felt that the themes of Passover - freedom, justice, exile, and oppression - are too important today, our challenges so dire, that Passover should no longer be an invitation to dinner - it should be a call to action. We wanted to bring form and content together through physical engagement. Our aim was to be embodied in the learning and action. We wanted to be in it, not just thinking about it. In it, we wanted to recognize our own ongoing oppression as we connected ourselves to the world and oppressions around us.
event program
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Invitation
Documentation
written reflection
by Kvutzat Orev
The Orev Exodus was a journey into ritual. The six of us came together under the shared belief that the themes of Passover - freedom, justice, exile, and oppression - are too important today, our challenges so dire, that Passover should no longer just be an invitation to dinner. Passover should also be a call to action.
We aren’t alone. As Jewish holidays go, Passover is probably more subject to interpretation than any other. It’s kind of a big deal. Last March, jewschool.com published 2015’s Top Ten Social Justice Haggadahs & Supplements and dozens of other lists like this circulate. A quick search on Amazon.com reveals more than 2,000 kinds of Haggadahs for sale. It makes sense: such a relevant holiday celebrating such universal values is a great target for the Jewish community’s collective remixing.
And yet somehow, all these innovative Haggadahs are performed within the context of a traditional Seder (literally, ‘order’) format. Why do we really sit at a table that night, and read and drink and talk and gorge? It just so happens that a few famous rabbis almost two thousand years ago made it up. They got together for dinner, got drunk, discussed the Exodus, and thought it was awesome enough to spread it far and wide, around the same time that the Jewish people were being spread far and wide.
We think we can do better. Balancing innovation with the necessity to remain rooted firmly planted in our tradition, Judaism thrives when we make the rituals our own. Indeed, isn’t that what the Wise Child is all about?
Looking for answers in collective history and culture, we began by developing a common language around goals and values, among which was to fully embody learning and action. How we could actually perform the Seder in ways that gave us a taste of true exile? Could we do something to experience real freedom, even for a moment? We wanted to be in the story, not just think about it. We wanted our Seder to be deeply connected to the world and oppressions around us. How can celebrating a holiday while making a dent in systemic oppression?
Sequence of Events
After a full year of research, study, and debate, we came up with our answer: a new format for the Passover celebration that is both universal and site-specific: the Orev Exodus. Twelve of us - colleagues and friends - gathered at the Hanging Tree in Washington Square Park, one of the many sites in which people of color and others were lynched in New York City. We started there to remember “Egypt” - to ground our journey in the past full of trauma, and how this ancestral trauma gets passed down from one generation to the next, and is manifest to this day. We began with a question: how has the enslavement of our people in Egypt and the associated experiences of challenge, repression, and trauma create in us the tools for resilience? We expressed this using chalk on the pavement to temporarily shape that space.
We continued the Exodus, walking to Times Square, a place saturated with people, noise, messages, and media; and with buildings that in turn crowd out the sun and its light. Its bigness has weight, it’s oppressive. It represents, in so many ways, those feelings of unfreedom we have in our cities and in our lives. But, to honor the ancient Jews who threw off the shackles of their Egyptian slavery and took back control of their lives, we asserted our freedom in that contested space. Through movement, breathing, and imagining exercises we forced ourselves to acknowledge, articulate, and imagine the possibilities in our world, possibilities beyond the artificial lights and sounds. It was an exercise for us and passersby (tourists and cops alike) to plant the idea in each other’s minds that we too have weight, and power, and the ability to cast off our own personal and political oppressions.
We walked on to Central Park where we used the strong feeling of asserting power to in turn claim space for freedom, to carve out a home for the seeds of a different future. We planted vegetable seeds, which we carried with us as we reflected on the earlier parts of our journey and asked ourselves questions looking forward: What tools for resilience are embedded in us, how do they help us become powerful, and how can we use our power to create a reality of freedom for ourselves and others?
We considered the Jewish system for liberation given during the Exodus, and spoke about our own visions for liberation. We asserted Central Park’s original vision, a commons and “democratic development of the highest significance,” by planting the seeds that move us towards liberation. Finally, over food and drink, we gave thanks for our survival and for our community as a place of liberation and a tool in the struggle for freedom.
The day was a success, in part because we tried something new, we took our ideas to the streets, we enacted our Judaism in public, and we wrestled with the ancient ideas in our place, our world, our time. It was a powerful way to galvanize our community, to come together for a day of symbolic action, creative transformation, and play. But, there are a number of ways that our first attempt at a Passover action failed. We did not take full advantage of our place out in the streets, and kept the experience quite insular. We also failed to have a material impact on the world around us that reflected the values and principles of the holiday. Next time, we hope to engage more fully in the world around us, and incorporate an action that has both a symbolic and material impact. As well, it may be time to experiment with holidays, ceremonies, and rituals from Shavuot to Rosh Hashanah
If the exodus was a liberatory social movement, perhaps it is time for us to build this movement into our annual commemorations, to experience exiting Egypt as if we, ourselves, were there. There is much to build on. We will continue to rethink, update, and try new things. We hope that more will join in the process of pushing our boundaries further and developing the forms, not only the content, with which we celebrate and enact our culture and peoplehood.
The Orev Exodus was a journey into ritual. The six of us came together under the shared belief that the themes of Passover - freedom, justice, exile, and oppression - are too important today, our challenges so dire, that Passover should no longer just be an invitation to dinner. Passover should also be a call to action.
We aren’t alone. As Jewish holidays go, Passover is probably more subject to interpretation than any other. It’s kind of a big deal. Last March, jewschool.com published 2015’s Top Ten Social Justice Haggadahs & Supplements and dozens of other lists like this circulate. A quick search on Amazon.com reveals more than 2,000 kinds of Haggadahs for sale. It makes sense: such a relevant holiday celebrating such universal values is a great target for the Jewish community’s collective remixing.
And yet somehow, all these innovative Haggadahs are performed within the context of a traditional Seder (literally, ‘order’) format. Why do we really sit at a table that night, and read and drink and talk and gorge? It just so happens that a few famous rabbis almost two thousand years ago made it up. They got together for dinner, got drunk, discussed the Exodus, and thought it was awesome enough to spread it far and wide, around the same time that the Jewish people were being spread far and wide.
We think we can do better. Balancing innovation with the necessity to remain rooted firmly planted in our tradition, Judaism thrives when we make the rituals our own. Indeed, isn’t that what the Wise Child is all about?
Looking for answers in collective history and culture, we began by developing a common language around goals and values, among which was to fully embody learning and action. How we could actually perform the Seder in ways that gave us a taste of true exile? Could we do something to experience real freedom, even for a moment? We wanted to be in the story, not just think about it. We wanted our Seder to be deeply connected to the world and oppressions around us. How can celebrating a holiday while making a dent in systemic oppression?
Sequence of Events
After a full year of research, study, and debate, we came up with our answer: a new format for the Passover celebration that is both universal and site-specific: the Orev Exodus. Twelve of us - colleagues and friends - gathered at the Hanging Tree in Washington Square Park, one of the many sites in which people of color and others were lynched in New York City. We started there to remember “Egypt” - to ground our journey in the past full of trauma, and how this ancestral trauma gets passed down from one generation to the next, and is manifest to this day. We began with a question: how has the enslavement of our people in Egypt and the associated experiences of challenge, repression, and trauma create in us the tools for resilience? We expressed this using chalk on the pavement to temporarily shape that space.
We continued the Exodus, walking to Times Square, a place saturated with people, noise, messages, and media; and with buildings that in turn crowd out the sun and its light. Its bigness has weight, it’s oppressive. It represents, in so many ways, those feelings of unfreedom we have in our cities and in our lives. But, to honor the ancient Jews who threw off the shackles of their Egyptian slavery and took back control of their lives, we asserted our freedom in that contested space. Through movement, breathing, and imagining exercises we forced ourselves to acknowledge, articulate, and imagine the possibilities in our world, possibilities beyond the artificial lights and sounds. It was an exercise for us and passersby (tourists and cops alike) to plant the idea in each other’s minds that we too have weight, and power, and the ability to cast off our own personal and political oppressions.
We walked on to Central Park where we used the strong feeling of asserting power to in turn claim space for freedom, to carve out a home for the seeds of a different future. We planted vegetable seeds, which we carried with us as we reflected on the earlier parts of our journey and asked ourselves questions looking forward: What tools for resilience are embedded in us, how do they help us become powerful, and how can we use our power to create a reality of freedom for ourselves and others?
We considered the Jewish system for liberation given during the Exodus, and spoke about our own visions for liberation. We asserted Central Park’s original vision, a commons and “democratic development of the highest significance,” by planting the seeds that move us towards liberation. Finally, over food and drink, we gave thanks for our survival and for our community as a place of liberation and a tool in the struggle for freedom.
The day was a success, in part because we tried something new, we took our ideas to the streets, we enacted our Judaism in public, and we wrestled with the ancient ideas in our place, our world, our time. It was a powerful way to galvanize our community, to come together for a day of symbolic action, creative transformation, and play. But, there are a number of ways that our first attempt at a Passover action failed. We did not take full advantage of our place out in the streets, and kept the experience quite insular. We also failed to have a material impact on the world around us that reflected the values and principles of the holiday. Next time, we hope to engage more fully in the world around us, and incorporate an action that has both a symbolic and material impact. As well, it may be time to experiment with holidays, ceremonies, and rituals from Shavuot to Rosh Hashanah
If the exodus was a liberatory social movement, perhaps it is time for us to build this movement into our annual commemorations, to experience exiting Egypt as if we, ourselves, were there. There is much to build on. We will continue to rethink, update, and try new things. We hope that more will join in the process of pushing our boundaries further and developing the forms, not only the content, with which we celebrate and enact our culture and peoplehood.
