Passover and Beyond

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Can Passover become a flagship festival for not only remembering a liberating transformation in the past, but actually creating a liberating transformation in the future?

And not only Passover. We have learned that Passover was only the first step toward liberation – the step of freedom from. At Sinai we learned freedom for. Judith Plaskow called us to transform Judaism by transforming the relationships between women and men. She named her call Standing Again at Sinai.

Is it time to stand anew at Sinai to hear and heal the outcry of a suffering Earth? In the last few centuries, Earth has been invaded and enslaved by human technology so as to endanger human and more-than-human life throughout Earth. Could Shavuot become once more the beckoning to a new society?

Can Passover and Shavuot become flagship festivals for creating a liberating transformation in the future?

Photo: "St.Peter am Wimberg (Upper Austria) Parish Church, Baptismal Font - gothic revival relief (1917) showing Moses crossing the Red Sea.” by  Wolfgang Sauber, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Possible answers to that question:

There is one aspect of Exodus that has rarely, if ever, been invoked as a guide to the future:

Exodus 12:35-36: “Now the Children of Israel had done according to Moses’ words: they had asked of the Egyptians objects of silver and objects of gold, and clothing;
YHWH [Yahhhh / Breath of Life] had given the people favor in the eyes of the Egyptians, and they let themselves be entreated. So did they strip Egypt [of its excess wealth.]”

This action in modern clothing would be named “reparations” for centuries of slavery. That makes sense, and we should think anew about this aspect of liberation. In 1865, enslaved Blacks who had freed themselves during the Civil War or had been freed by the Union Army celebrated a free mind, a free heart – and “forty acres and a mule.” Freedom needed free arms and legs, economic wherewithal, the productive means to make their own way in the world. But that “reparation” for centuries of unpaid labor happened only in a few places – chiefly the Sea Islands off Georgia. At a most crucial moment of our history, the United States of America backed away.

So is the teaching of the Bible that just as the Egyptians owed enslaved Israelites gold and silver and more “ordinary” stuff, clothes to wear in Wilderness – so today the affluent of America owe the heirs of enslaved Blacks the reparations never paid them?

[For related thought, see “The Economics of Exodus” by Arthur Waskow].

Is no one else owed reparations? The Torah story was written by the heirs of those runaway enslaved Israelites, and they focused on their own ethnos long before. But – what about the Egyptians who suffered from the plagues brought on by stubborn Pharaoh, cruel Pharaoh?

Were they owed reparations? Are the suffering victims of the Carbon Pharaohs of today owed reparations? We who write this story today are a broader people. Should our story be a broader story? Take a deep breath before we answer, pause at our Seders to ask a deeper question.

1. We suggest a year-long process, beginning during the seven-week period between this coming Passover and Shavuot (May 25) or Pentecost (May 28). Please notice our word "suggest." You may feel encourages by these suggestions to use other dates, rituals, events, During the next few weeks, wherever you sense enough energy to make an action happen, a group of organizers comes together to plan. Each of them opens a new credit card (perhaps through Green America or a local credit union – in any case, from/with an institution that does not invest in the Carbon Pharaohs). That is so they will feel able to destroy their old credit cards backed by Chase, etc.

2. These organizers schedule an Earth and Freedom Covenant Sinai Seder (perhaps the second or third or seventh night of Passover or perhaps – an innovating possibility – on Shavuot, Thursday evening, May 25, as part of the midnight Gathering when the Heavens open for Shavuot to bond as a community and bind with a covenant: to resist the Fossil Fuel Pharaohs by leaving their domineering network.

The twin goals would be (a) creating an independent energy source – a solar neighborhood, and (b) challenging the banks and bank-like institutions that invest in burning Earth, demanding they create Reparations Escrow Funds. At that Covenant Seder they cut their ties to the Fossil Fuel Pharaohs by cutting their previous credit cards that feed their money to a carbon-serving bank. The Shalom Center is providing an Earth and Freedom Covenant Seder at https://bit.ly/TSCEarthSeder.

3. At the Earth and Freedom Covenant Seder, the participants set up two committees: a Solar Co-op Organizing Committee with a target date for actual founding of the Co-op, and a Pesach 2024 Organizing Committee to plan a step-by-step process toward a larger activist Street Seder in 2024.

4. The committees prepare spiritually, intelligently, emotionally, physically to challenge a local branch of a major national bank in 2024. (Passover next year begins Monday evening, April 22, and ends Tuesday evening, April 30.)

5. On one workday that week – perhaps Thursday – a multireligious crowd that is committed to nonviolence would approach the local branch bank to demand its national officers publicly agree to end all investments to the fossil-fuel industry and create a Reparations Escrow Fund for loans or grants to grass-roots economic development with money that would have gone for fossil fuel Pharaohs to burn Planet Earth.

6. Each local Covenant Seder group will do this planning on its own. The Shalom Center will develop materials for local groups to use and modify as they wish and to develop their own instead, if they wish. Here we offer some ideas for what Passover 2024 might look like:

7. On a workday during Passover, protesters, matzah in hand with signs saying “Fierce urgency of NOW – MLK” gather at local branches of major banks like Chase and Wells Fargo and bank-like institutions like Vanguard that make major investments in the Fossil-Fuel Pharaohs (Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Unnatural Gas) that are burning Planet Earth.

8. They carry out a Street Freedom Seder (no longer than 45 minutes) that includes references to the ancient and modern plagues, the gold and silver given over by Egyptians to Israelites as material reparations for centuries of unpaid work, etc . (The Shalom Center will provide a model Street Freedom Seder for use or modification.)

9. The demonstrators demand that those banks “Move Our Money” so that all investments in all parts of the Fossil Fuel industry end.

10. Demonstrators demand the banks move the previous Fossil-Fuel investment total to a Reparation Escrow Fund governed by a mixture of local grass-roots Black community leaders, and leaders of other communities that have been tormented by fires, floods, famines, cancers, asthmas brought on by the Carbon Pharaohs.

Undoubtedly, as local groups work out their own values, strategies, and tactics, these events in 2023 and 2024 would look different from each other. That is fruitful, not frightful.

With blessings of shalom as we all try to walk or dance our path of healing in this world of earthquakes

— Reb Arthur