Jonathan Ofir at a family seder in Israel, hearing the old stories of genocide: “You don’t want to throw away everything because some of it is rotten, you don’t want to make a family gathering political, but it’s hard to be part of it and reduce it to mere ‘tradition’. You’re wondering what you are enabling, indirectly, by not speaking out, or by saying too little, or by not opposing things more clearly.”
“Sometimes I am asked where would I begin if I were to write a Jewish Theology of Liberation today from scratch?” Marc Ellis writes. “A Jewish Theology of Liberation might begin with an addition to Emil Fackenheim’s 614th commandment or, more to the point, the positing of another commandment,” he answers, “after the Holocaust and after Israel – and what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinian people. The 615th Commandment? ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder Those Who Resist Your Oppression.'”
A plan for an alternative Passover seder which is a reaction to the Israeli occupation and the Jewish religious rites deployed in its support: Ira Glunts’s Seder lo b’seder: the seder that skips the traditional seder, and supports BDS.
Robert Cohen recommends adding a recent UN report on Israeli practices of “apartheid” into the family Haggadah, writing, “Passover is the most popular and well observed of all Jewish festivals. This year’s eight day celebration of redemption, liberation and religious and political freedom begins on Monday 10th April. But long ago our uncritical commitment to the project of Jewish nationalism began to undermine it. So much so, that Passover today has become little more than an annual act of communal hypocrisy. And in this year of bitter anniversaries (Balfour, the UN partition plan, the Occupation of the West Bank, the siege of Gaza) we’ll be taking that hypocrisy to depressingly new heights.”
A Passover diary, in which a friend tells me that Jews need to forgive European anti-Semites their historical crimes because that is all that will stop Israel from reenacting the crimes against Jews