Every year that I have lived outside of the American Jewish community of my birth, I have made it a custom to celebrate Passover with my new friends and community wherever I am, regardless of the presence of other Jews. I have had with my non-Jewish friends, Eastern Orthodox or Catholic or Anglican or Muslim or Atheist, from Britain and Germany and the Balkans and Kurdistan, beautiful interactions in the retelling of the story of Exodus and excellent engagement over the parallels between our cultures. This year, my family will be celebrating Passover with the refugees in our small town in Germany, and this is the most sensitive Passover of my life.
These are my friends, but that doesn’t mean that we come to this from an equal standpoint. There are always power dynamics involved when you know the songs and the prayers and your guests don’t even read the language in which they’re written. It is too easy to embrace one’s own culture as better, and to accidentally present it that way to guests in your land or your home, as I have seen many well-meaning people do in the attempted integration of refugees. I do not seek to force my customs upon my new neighbors and friends, nor to show them as somehow superior. I merely seek to welcome them into the inner sanctum of my spiritual life, to say not simply #RefugeesWelcome but “you personally are welcome with us, as both a human being and as a representative of the struggle that is being a refugee.” In so doing, this Passover service is no longer a custom merely for and by Jews, but becomes, as many Jews have always made it, a welcoming window for non-Jews to understand us.
So it is that, while normally any Haggadah from a progressive tradition will do, I have this year made my own variations and adaptations to that text to include the struggle of modern refugees in our holiest of days. To do so, I have stolen directly or taken cues from The Velveteen Rabbi’s Haggadah for Pesach by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat , plus the #BlackLivesMatter Haggadah Supplement of 2014, a masterful work by Jews For Racial and Economic Justice, as well as the resources of Jews United for Justice, on whose board I very shortly served in Maryland as we transitioned over from American Jewish Congress to JUFJ, and the resources of Jewish Voice For Peace and Rabbi Brant Rosen. In addition, my own experiences in the field of civilian refugee assistance and integration within Germany and in teaching “Jewish Concepts of Peaceful Coexistence” to non-Jews in Berlin have informed the rest.
Download the #RefugeesWelcome Haggadah Supplement here now.
I’m no rabbi, just a member of an ethnic and cultural and religious community known for an embrace of social justice and diversity. I teach on Judaism and I serve on Jewish boards and I live my own Judaism and would not dare tell anyone else how to Jew. This is, of course, merely one interpretation, and all are welcome to share it, alter it, improve upon it in their own ways, just as I have done with the works of my forebears.
Use it well. Chag Sameach! ~Zachary Gallant
