Dear community,
This year we prepare to celebrate Pesach in a very different way than we have in years past. Our seder tables will likely hold only nuclear family—but our thoughts, our prayers, and our hearts will continue to hold and gather in our families, our friends, our Temple community, and many in our world as we pray for healing from the coronavirus. Although we know that physical separation is a necessary and important choice for us to make, we also feel its sorrow. Wherever and however the nights of Pesach find you, know that you are loved and you are not alone as you affirm and commit to working for a world with more freedom in it. We are all in this together, trudging toward next year in Jerusalem!
Pesach is a holiday of opening our homes and welcoming in new faces. And so our community seder is going forward, just like our ancestors, transcending separation to meet in virtual space. On the 2nd night of Pesach, Thursday, April 9, please join me, Mike, and our kids on Zoom as we host the Temple Emanu-El Community Seder (link and details below). We are incredibly excited to welcome you all into our home; we promise there is space for all on our screen, no squishing needed! Together our community will re-live the journey from degradation to praise. We’ll light candles and bless, taste the foods of Pesach, tell the story—and, of course, wash our hands. Twice, at least. With a blessing. I want all of your voices, with your faces, at our communal seder table! Look through the Haggadah in advance, and please tell me if there is a reading, a blessing, or a song that you’d like to lead during our seder.
This email contains a number of resources: the wonderful Haggadah created by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat (the Velveteen Rabbi), which we’ll use for our community seder; a list of items for your seder plate and table; and our guide to preparing for Pesach. This is a year in which you may want to ritually sell your chameitz (leavened grain products) so that someone else owns it for the duration of Pesach, rather than eat or dispose of it before the holiday starts. If you are planning to sell your chameitz and want to authorize me to do so for you, please return the attached form by email no later than Tuesday morning, April 7, so that I can sell it on Wednesday morning
(as of 11:14 am). The buyback of chameitz at the end of Passover shall take effect at 8:28 pm on Thursday, April 16.
While we can’t directly, personally feed and welcome those who are hungry and need space at a seder table this year, we can contribute to organizations that practice such hospitality and justice. If you have the resources, please consider donating some of what you would have spent on hosting a larger seder to one of the following organizations. Jewish nonprofits that work for food security include
Mazon
,
Yad Chessed
(local to Massachusetts), and
Masbia
. To increase food security and stability here in the Merrimack Valley,
Emmaus Inc.
and
Lazarus House Ministries
are wonderful organizations to support on Pesach. And if the plight of immigrants and refugees feels most urgent during this holiday in which we remember that we are all immigrants and refugees, I encourage you to support Togolese asylum seeker Marius through the
Asylum Fund at the Merrimack Valley Project
; Massachusetts immigrant advocacy organization
Movimiento Cosecha
; or
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
.
Spring is here. Our blood is moving, just like the b’nei Yisra’eil. Let our current taste of confinement add emphasis to our experience of the Exodus story, in which the Jews were, and others are, trammeled in oppressive bondage. Together, let’s break matzoh, drink and spill wine, tell our own stories of liberation, and hear—and support—stories of liberation that are not ours and those that we may yet help to create.
Onward together!
Wishing you an early chag kasher v’sameiach, a happy and kosher holiday,
Cantor Vera
