Passover, Easter, Spring

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 9^th Avenue and 48^th 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