Honoring Passover as a Feast of Freedom for All Souls

“Holy force of blessing…your presence fills creation..who has intermixed spring with tears…as we remember our own birth and suffering…let us bless the flow of life…that revives us, sustains us, and brings us to this time”—from the feminist Haggadah authored by Doug and the late-Sandra Golvin in 1997 for the annual Multicultural Passover Seder at Highways Performance Art Space in Santa Monica, California

Because Passover (or _Pesach_ in Hebrew) takes place around my birthday, the pivot from Aries and Taurus, the holiday has always carried uncanny feelings of joy and sexual awakening for me. The holiday (also called The Fest of Freedom) arrives with the burst of light and warmth sometimes in April based on the lunar calendar (the 15th day of Nisan in the Jewish calendar, to be exact), an end of March’s brutal cold winds. For Jews, in part, because the High Holy Days of the Fall are so overwrought with prostrated begging of God for forgiveness for the past year’s sins, and Chanukah is considered by mature adults a children’s holiday disgraced by the consumerism of Christmas (feh), Passover is THE time get down for some singing and drinking, and also often a _bissle_ philosophical reflection on the precarious meaning of freedom. And when you are a teenager trying to figure yourself out. raging with _Portnoy Complaint’_s hormones, trapped in a four-room, smoke-filled, scream-accentuated Bronx railroad apartment (Co-Op City, the Utopia turned dystopian), it was my private FREEDOM time for exploring some of the darker sides of Manhattan life, if you know what I mean. Thanks to the long Passover holiday extending though eight days, with the NYC Borough schools closed, I recall taking the risk of hanging out with the curious Puerto Rican kids smoking and flirting in the books stores of Times Square, but, oops this blog is supposed to be about a sacred Jewish holiday!

For those of you who may not know: Passover is a MAJOR FREAKING DEAL, probably our equivalent of Christmas in terms of the week’s long lead-up and total immersion. The holiday’s mixing laughter with sorrow tells the story of the Jews's freedom from centuries’-long slavery in Egypt around 1200 BCE, how tough it was to get the hell out of Egypt, the tears, the bitterness, the saga, the running smack dab into the Red Sea: Oy, what a Megillah. Once Pharaoh realized that this Bad Ass Invisible God was evolution’s clunky new invention (a God you can’t see, what kind of mishigas is that?) and could wreak havoc on Egypt with those God Awful Plagues, not to mention the slaying of the firstborn, he told the Israelites (ganug already) _get the hell out of Mitzrayim_ (Egypt). _Zei gezunt_. And like all refugees, they were given no time to pack and charge their phones. In other words, they had no time to leaven the bread (takes time to make bread, right?). So they mixed water and flour and let that gluten stomach bomb bake in the hot Egyptian heat until it turned into hard cracker shit, also called “Matzah.” So the enslaved Israelites, apparently two million of them, packed up the Matzah, and then, one out of the whipping and the schlepping blocks to make the pyramids, it was no picnic either, as they were cursed with wandering in the desert for forty years until all the slavish people died out, including their fearless leader, Moses. (We shall write an entire blog on Moses, but that’s for later).

So for the next several thousand years, Jews, wherever they can be found in the “diaspora,” spread throughout the globe, commemorate their struggle for freedom every year by telling this story, a major ritual.

The week is proceeded by a major spring cleaning and jovial feeling: I remember my mother, in her Sophia Lauren bun, skinny pants, and elegant cigarette, getting organized with her sister Helen (my “tanta”) and their heavy-set mother Ida rolling up their sleeves and scouring the house with Mr. Clean a week before, and getting rid of every last hint of bread. My father, a blend of Marlon Brando from a “Streetcar Named Desire,” and Willie Loman from “Death of a Salesman,”  cheerfully went shopping for all the Matzah and Manischewitz wine, not to mention delicacies like cashews while sipping his schnapps.

The first night of Passover, that’s when the relatives (even the ones who aggravate a closeted gay person by asking when he is going to get married), gather for meals and stories for two nights in a row, as of gorging on the first night wasn’t enough. Jewish holidays always begins at sundown, so everyone is already famished. But even though the relatives and friends of all shapes and sizes (some rather large shapes and sizes) show up starving (Jewish uncles and aunts, literally, after they smother you with a kiss, scream that they are “dying, dying from hunger”):, Sorry, you have to starve for hours! No, no, no, get your hands away from the Gefilte Fish, get your fingers OFF the chopped liver. Sit your sorry sketchy ass down, and let’s get organized, we got a long narrative to go over!

FIRST we MUST tell the STORY of the Festival, in Hebrew and in English (and Yiddish mutterings). This ordeal (and it’s supposed to be an ordeal) can go on for hours. This involved event is called “The Seder,” which means the order of things, and there is a rather strict order that hardly anyone follows, but we try! That is why we require a book that will help us tell the story, called The Haggadah.

You got the FIRST CUP OF WINE for starters (the KIDDISH); the whole FREAKING STORY (also called the MAGGID, see below); then the SECOND CUP OF WINE (we are getting, yes, tipsy); then we go over the SYMBOLIC FOODS (which include the crackers we call Matzah, also bitter herbs, the shank bone, a boiled egg, Salt Water and the AFIKOMEN); the THIRD CUP OF WINE; then the HALLEL (the Psalms) and then, finally the FOURTH CUP OF WINE (and everyone is plastered, and either singing, or fighting, or both at the same time).

There are a lot of other details, the Matzah hidden for the kids, and the Big Glass of Wine laid out of the Prophet Elijah to visit when no one is looking and also get plastered, as he is the person Jews expect will be the Messiah (that is NOT Jesus, Jesus, who?, no one remembers that Jesus was actually Jewish and the “Last Supper” was actually a Passover Seder, but whatever), but of course, the Messiah never comes! And most Jews don’t fuss too much over the Messiah because workaholism often takes the place of the coming of the Messiah (I am going to get myself in so much trouble for making these generalizations; hello, my name is Doug, and I am a Jewish workaholic).There are the Greatest Hits, too! You totally dip the greens in salt water.; then you make a sandwich of horseradish (bitter herbs), choroseth (the sweet sugary stuff) and the matzah. There is the egg symbolizing new life. And everyone loves the FOUR QUESTIONS (Why is this night different from any other night), chanted usually by the youngest person at the table.

There are as many different Haggahdas as there are Jews (a slight hyperbole), but we know have feminist and queer versions). That’s a good thing.

I didn’t realize it at the time but I am sure that one of the reasons that I LOVED Passover, the Seder and the Haggadah, was that the story of freedom was personal to me. Only in this case I was not a slave in Egypt, I was a slave in my parents homophobic home and yearned for one day finding my own Moses?  Where, by the way, is the gay Moses? Or the gay Jesus (even though Jesus was himself w Jew and the meal he was eating called The Last Supper WAS a Passover Seder), most Jews do not look to him as OUR person, perhaps that is a tragedy, because he has some GREAT SHIT TO SAY, but too many centuries of Christians blaming Jews unfairly for the death of Jesus has soured us on the once-great Rabbi). But I do digress.

The story of freedom from slavery is probably THE DEFINING STORY of the Jewish people, so the Haggadah is mean to honor the gift of freedom and to bear witness to ALL THE PEOPLE ON THE PLANET THAT ARE SUFFERING. It is the best of the Jewish tradition, this concept that “none of us is free if anyone of us is enslaved,” that informs those parts of Jewry that are informed by social justice and truth and have directed people like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein to create models of human freedom that were based in economic, psychology and physics.

I am not sure how many multicultural Passover Seders we did. I think it was at last three, maybe four. I am so sad that all this took place before the advent of social media, so there are only a few pictures and no video. Sandra Golvin, who, for all intents and purposes, might have been a Jewish Rabbi, and also a strong lesbian feminist, worked with me, at the time, as the Co-Chair of the 18th Street Art Complex, and the space that I helped performance artist Tim Miller created, called Highways Performance Art Space, founded in 1990. Also with the great help was Robin Podolsky, who would become a Rabbi and Diane Grier. We were intersectionalists before the word became popular. Native American, African American, Asian, Latin and Latino (how Latinx called themselves then) shared stories of liberation from their own culture while we wove in the Seder and the Haggadah. Sandra and I fashioned a culturally diverse Haggadah and is pictured below.

Why did I stop creating such festivals and participating in them? Well, that’s a long story. At some point, I became aware that I was also enslaved in my own mind, my own internalized homophobia, my psychological defenses, trapped in my sense of feeling unable to will into action my creativity. To be honest, I discovered that religion did not answer some of the basic questions of spiritual life. The Jewish Freud, and the very unjewish Jung, pointed to a different Promised Land, the one located in the heart, but corrupted by internal sadists and bullies. How could one free oneself from slavery, from internalized racism, internalized homophobia,internalized sexism? Not through an act of will. Not through prayer. Not through New Age affirmations. Not even through crystals. It seemed to me that the “cure” could only come by transferring all the child’s ancient suffering and despair onto the therapist/analyst, who then could, through the technology called “psychotherapy,” point out the drowning-in-the-red sea problem called “I am so overwhelmed by all this feeling I am going to shut-down.” This understanding led me to say to myself that what we today call “psychotherapy” or “analysis” represents the individual’s best chance to slough off the chains with which we have been born for millions of years. And for me, that involved honoring the special place in the heart reserved for same-sex love as an ancient spiritual tradition in its own right.

That is my story towards Freedom. But one can go too far into any one direction. I am an “out” homosexual, but perhaps you could say I am a “closet” Jew. My house is also filled with Bibles, 8 volumes of the Zohar, and Talmud, as well as novels and poetry related to the Jewish question. Freud did not totally renounce his Jewish tradition even though he called himself an atheist. I am no antheist and I am sure my God is not Yahweh, but the prayers  still make me cry, so maybe that is also the feminine personification of the God-image, the Shechiknah?

I think we are all still waking up to these matters of spiritual truth separate from received religion without throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

Happy Pesach Everyone, Chag Sameach, Good Yontiv, and let us remember that none of us is free if anyone of us enslaved.