For years my photographer friend Matthew Septimus and I did a project for the NPR
show On BEING for Jewish holidays, and for Passover, Easter, and Spring.
Here’s one of the Passover photo poems
https://onbeing.org/blog/esther-cohen-matthew-septimus-easter-passover-spring-continues.
Most Passovers for the longest time, we invited friends and friends of friends to join
us at meal with their good friends too at Gazala’s restaurant. Gazala is a Druze
woman who grew up in Isfiya near Haifa. Many years ago, I was her very first
customer and we became friends. She has always loved Passover, and when I asked if
she’d make us all a Passover dinner, she liked the idea.
Her first restaurant on 9th Avenue and 48th was very small. We took over the whole
place and there were always Elijahs, strangers who walked right in. Over the years we
developed a brief and lively Haggadah. Mostly songs. Annie and Joe sang There’s No
Seder Like Our Seder, and different people asked a range of questions, from What
Does Liberation Mean to Can We Eat Now?
We have always played Go Down Moses, too. Sometimes Robeson. Sometimes Louis
Armstrong.
When we met, Gazala was married to a traditional religious Druze man. After being
in New York for a while, she left him and moved with her two kids to the Upper West
Side. With investors she moved to a few larger spaces. First she was on Columbus
Avenue across the street from our apartment. There she gave us a Passover room.
Then she moved to Amsterdam Avenue. We held one big Seder there, but it was
different because of the size of the space, and because the other people in the
restaurant, the other eaters, didn’t join us. Before, the whole room sang Go Down
Moses. Now the whole room was a little different.
A visiting French friend suggested we call it an Unseder. We voted and no one else
liked that idea.
Then the pandemic changed all holidays. For years none of us went inside restaurants
or had big groups in our homes.
My parents hosted an old fashioned Seder: white table cloths, relatives, light blue
Reconstructionist Haggadah, a conversation about Liberation. Dayenu.
One year my brother brought a woman who was actually in favor of guns. (I wonder
what she thinks about guns now) and we spent much of the conversation debating.
This year we will go to friends. We’ll all make part of the meal, and figure out together
what we’re going to say. The kids will cook an African brisket from a recipe in the New
York Times. Even that is a change.
The idea is still to tell a story about what it means to be free.
In the eighties I was a partner in a small publishing company in Jerusalem and New
York called Adama here and Adam there. Our books were in Hebrew, English, and
Arabic. We published about twenty different Haggadahs. My favorite then is still my
favorite now: The Shalom Seders, three haggadahs compiled by New Jewish Agenda,
published in 1984. One of the illustrators Amnon Danzinger, was a young Israeli I
met on the elevator. His drawings are beautiful still. Irwin Rosenhouse, a graceful
artist with a loose hand, drew us doves.
The whole Haggadah takes three different but compatible approaches to the call and
response Passover story. Arthur Waskow, whose legendary Freedom Seder is still
used by so many, says in the book’s introduction:
The Haggadah teaches us to rewrite the Haggadah. Arthur quotes the text:
“All who go beyond telling about the departure from Mitzra-yim – all these are
worthy of praise.”
And then he says:
“Tonight: let us tell our own story, bring about a new birth of
freedom.”
We’re a few days away from a holiday week – from Passover, from Good Friday, from
the end of winter.
Whatever you celebrate, however you celebrate, we wish you
good stories, good meals, and good conversation, and the hope that freedom is
somehow, in ways we know but don’t understand, freedom is on the way.
Love Esther
Love the phrase : freedom we know but don’t understand is on the way!