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Passover’s 4 cups of meaning
What if the answer to the ‘Meaning Crisis’ is sitting right in front of us, around our Passover tables?
The Meaning Crisis is a term coined by philosopher John Vervaeke to discuss the constellation of mental health, political and cultural crises that, in his words, derive from people “feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future.” It is, Vervaeke argues, at the root of such seemingly disparate phenomena as the opioid crisis, the rise of right-wing nationalism, and off-the-charts reports of despair and anxiety, particularly among young people.
There are at least two meanings of ‘Meaning’ in this context.
First, over the last few hundred years — but especially in the last few decades — there has been a rapid erosion of the structures and communities that gave human lives meaning for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Traditional religious values and structures are far less coherent, attractive or attainable. Familial and communal structures have rapidly shifted. Fewer and fewer of us live in the places where we grew up, surrounded by extended family. The civic bonds many of us once took for granted are frayed as we fundamentally disagree about what American democracy even means. And in the last few decades, the atomizing effects of technology have made us more isolated from one another, with less in-person human contact and even less physical intimacy.
This is also a literal crisis of meaning: who we are, how we understand our world, the concepts by which we organize our lives — all of these are rapidly changing, and with the potential of AI to reshape our economic order and wipe out half of white-collar jobs, it’s possible we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Some of these changes are for the best. To take one personal example, the word ‘marriage’ connoted a very specific form of social arrangement for hundreds of years: a man, a woman, a lifelong union blessed by a religious authority, and the raising of children. The parameters of marriage were never as stable as traditionalists like to claim — just look at our biblical ancestors polygamous marriages, or the deeply unequal access and expectations around extramarital sex stretching through the Mad Men 1950s. But with the progress in women’s rights (e.g. not being considered the property of their husbands, being able to have careers) and LGBTQ equality, obviously the nature and rates of marriage have changed significantly. As someone in a same-sex marriage, I’m very grateful for that.
But it is still a change, and, together with other transformations, it has challenged some traditional notions of masculinity, leading to a resurgence of misogynistic, hyper-conservative models in the so-called ‘manosphere.’ And that’s but one example of many.
In this context — the meaning crisis and the reactionary responses to it — I find the observance of Passover, and the Passover Seder in particular, to be a much-needed antidote to disorientation on one hand, and oppressive traditionalism on the other.
Fittingly, for a holiday obsessed with the number four, I want to explore this in four ways — if you like, the Four Cups of Meaning that can be part of the Passover Seder.
1) Community
For many people, gathering with families of origin can be extremely stressful in our politically polarized time. It was bad enough when it was just the proverbial ‘racist uncle’ we had to endure at Seders. He might’ve been annoying, but he could also be ignored. Now, however, even well-meaning, sincere and committed Jews passionately disagree over a number of subjects, especially a certain country (or two) in the Middle East.
Yet there is a profound value gathering as a family — even as a tribe — and feeling a sense of kinship and belonging to it. Despite real and painful differences, Jews congregating together are connecting to a heritage and an ancestry that cannot be taken away by those who seek to put us outside the tent. That is something very old and very rich. You are not an atomized, isolated individual, separate from a history and a people and a tradition — a tradition which specifically includes the value of disagreement, argumentation and wrestling with the divine.
2) Centering our core values
Within the Jewish family, there are radically different iterations of core values. For me, the meaning of the Exodus is that oppression, slavery and injustice are morally wrong in the highest possible sense. As Exodus 23:9 teaches, “Do not oppress the stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” From our experience of oppression — real, imagined or historically projected — we extrapolate the emotional and ethical value that it is wrong to oppress those who are different from us.
I know others have different views — for example, that the story of the Exodus is centrally about something that happened to our tribe, and that our group must never allow to happen to us again. But in terms of the meaning crisis, the debate is part of the solution. We are called at the Passover Seder to discuss the meanings of freedom, to reenact in our lived ritual experience the passage from servitude to liberation.
And not only that. We are invited to cultivate gratitude — in the Dayenu song and elsewhere — for all the blessings around us. We are invited, over and over again, to value questioning, curiosity, even challenging the texts of the Haggadah that for many are the very foundation of the Seder. These values are placed at the center of the Passover symposium. And while we disagree about how these questions are to be answered, just asking them is a retort to the emptiness and nihilism of so much of online culture and political cynicism. Values matter.
3) The power of myth
Human beings are creatures of story. Some linguists believe that it is in the telling of stories that human language itself — and thus human consciousness — evolved. Personally, I don’t regard the biblical narrative as a historical document; I see it as a shared myth of national self-creation, one which we can embody in ritual — in what the scholar of religion Clifford Geertz called “deep play.”
Sometimes the play is quite literal. Last year, my friend Shoshana Jedwab, a marvelous Jewish educator, led a bibliodrama performance in which, drawing from Sephardic traditions, we whipped one another with scallions to mock the servitude of Egyptian slavery. It’s fun (and worked really well with my eight-year-old) but it’s also a way of making myth into embodied, living experience. The myths, and their reenactment, bring us into intimacy with the past.
But ritual play may take many forms. Why do we dip our vegetables twice? Why the charoset? Why the orange on the seder plate? Why this? Why that? The inquisitiveness of the Four Questions is modeled by the youngest participant of the seder, but is invited on behalf of all of us. These often inscrutable, embodied, crunchy, weird rituals connect to the myth of the Passover story and make it alive in a way that mere retelling could never do.
As you prepare for your own seders, I invite you to create your own questions based on the themes embedded in the order of the Seder. And to lean into the weird. Which brings me to the final cup of meaning:
4) The non-rational
Passover, like many Jewish holidays, has multiple layers — seasonal, agricultural, mythic — and they all mash together in an often strange, and often charoset-like, mixture.
Particularly this year, the non-rational, emotional, and spiritual content of the Seder feels resonant for me. I cannot sequester the grief I feel at the crumbling of the American experiment in multicultural democracy, or at the ascendant far right in Israel. I feel perhaps a little closer to that pre-redeemed consciousness of my mythic ancestors in the land of Egypt. I am certainly not enslaved, but I do feel the sense of precarity that the Seder invites us to cultivate.
And so I find myself yearning for a miraculous deliverance — maybe not one involving frogs, lice, and boils, but from some unknown, mysterious, sacred source. Perhaps salvation will come from what we do not know. Perhaps there is room for a desperate hope, despite ample reasons not to hope.
As the Hasidic masters noted (and for a wonderful presentation of this, consider downloading the ‘Four Cups of Consciousness’ Haggadah supplement created by the Jewish psychedelic organization, Shefa), the Passover Seder is in large part about consciousness change: using the four cups of wine, the emotional arc of the seder, and the long night of singing, arguing and talking over a festive meal that stretches to midnight to shift our consciousness and open us to the possibility of internal freedom, even when external circumstances are antithetical to it.
This is the freedom of which Viktor Frankl wrote. And while we are a long way from what Frankl endured, I would submit that part of the invitation of the Seder is to imagine the consciousness of freedom even when that freedom is threatened — to be in solidarity with those being oppressed as we gather for our lavish meal, reclining on real or metaphorical cushions and drinking cups of wine, and to hold those two sides together. To know that, as the Haggadah relates, there have always been threats to our physical and spiritual safety. And while our physical freedom can indeed be restricted — and has been — we retain the capacity for ethical and spiritual freedom even in circumstances far worse than our own.
This is the ultimate meaningfulness: that in a time when the structures and language that give our lives meaning are threatened, we can resist the slide to nihilism and despair. And the Seder is a celebration of doing so.
The post Passover’s 4 cups of meaning appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention
(JTA) — Local and national Jewish Democrats say they are sympathetic after Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would skip the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention over concerns about antisemitism and harassment.
“I don’t blame AG Nessel for not wanting to go and basically put herself in situations that feel untenable in this moment of time and don’t add any value politically, personally,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
Alexander’s comment came a day after Nessel announced during a televised antisemitism roundtable that she would be skipping the convention next month, where party leaders will finalize the state’s Democratic candidate for Senate following a divisive primary that has focused in part on Israel and antisemitism.
“I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” Nessel said during the roundtable. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She said she had filed a formal complaint within the party about a party official who had called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs. “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” she asked without naming the official. Her office responded to a request for comment by referring to the recorded livestream of the antisemitism roundtable.
Nessel’s declaration comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel. El-Sayed is surging in polls despite a reported $30 million spent against him by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and its supporters, whom he has made a target of criticism from the campaign trail.
Nessel’s comments also follow turmoil at the Michigan Democratic Party’s endorsement convention in April, where Stevens was booed by attendees. A third primary candidate who later dropped out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, said a convention attendee had targeted her Jewish husband with an antisemitic slur.
The incident has fueled alarm among Jewish Democrats, according to Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“She’s not alone,” Soifer told JTA about Nessel on Friday. “We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.”
Nessel has raised the alarm about antisemitism within the party for years, alleging in 2024 that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice, had been antisemitic when criticizing charges Nessel filed against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan.
For her part, Alexander said she would be participating in the nominating convention and said she believed the chair of the state Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, had been “very accessible and very open to making sure that we, including our Jewish elected officials, feel safe in that space.” But she said she understood why Nessel was staying away.
“It would never even occur to me, but I’m not an elected official,” Alexander said. “It’s a different stake for me than it is for Dana. I understand her completely.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’
(JTA) — Every congregational rabbi in Maine has signed onto a statement calling for peace and urging the state’s political leaders to stop using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza, following a Democratic primary in which several candidates used the label for the first time.
But the rabbis also indicated that they, too, were unsatisfied with conditions in the Middle East and called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work toward a peaceful future.
“We call upon Maine’s leaders, and particularly its political leaders, to reject the irresponsible usage of the term in describing the Israel-Hamas War,” said the statement released on Friday. “We also call upon Israeli and Palestinian leaders to end the cycle of violence and to create a better world for both Palestinian and Israeli children.”
The statement, titled “A Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric,” argues that using the term as a “political slogan does not advance peace in the Middle East.” The term “erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the rabbis say.
“Compassion for Palestinians does not require the adoption of hateful and misleading language,” they continue. “Advocating for peace does not require participation in a ‘Holocaust inversion’ against the Jewish community. And political leadership does not require demonizing one community in the service of another.”
The statement comes days after Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Saturday at the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic who dropped out of the race earlier this month. Platner faced a sexual assault allegation, which he denies. Jackson now faces Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November’s general election.
Platner’s romp to the primary victory featured routine use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. And ahead of the convention to replace him, Jackson and several other Democratic hopefuls who later exited the race began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza for the first time, a shift that drew scrutiny from some Jewish leaders and voters in the state.
The use of the term has become a “currency for acquiring power and position in Maine’s Democratic party,” Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, the leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, who also signed the statement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Too many Maine Democrats are cynically willing to trade in that currency at the expense of our safety and dignity,” she said in an emailed statement. “We decided we needed to say something collectively, both about the specious and dangerous nature of the claim, and about how much damage has been done to our families and congregants.”
The statement Friday was spearheaded by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and signed by every congregational rabbi in the state, including Rabbi Bill Siemers of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor and Rabbi Erica Asch of the Reform Temple Beth El in Augusta. (Rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement in Maine did not appear on the signatory list.)
Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said the federation hoped the “unity displayed here in Maine can inspire Jewish communities across the US to also unite against the extremist rhetoric harming our community and our children.”
Rabbi Josh Stanton, the associate vice president of interfaith and intergroup initiatives for Jewish Federations of North America, also hailed the joint statement.
“Maine’s Jewish clergy are setting an important example with their call to put aside inflammatory rhetoric and look to the common good,” Stanton said in an emailed statement. “At a time of rising polarization and declining civil discourse, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s efforts to unify the community around this important message are a mark of true leadership.”
Isaacs told JTA that she hoped Jackson would “support, understand, and advocate for all of Maine’s citizens, including the totality of Maine’s diverse Jewish community.”
“Work with us to figure out how to express outrage and legitimate critique of Israel’s government without succumbing to language that you might not know is an ancient antisemitic trope, or dismissing the security needs of Israel’s citizens,” Isaacs said of her message to Jackson. “Please have the courage to forge your own path, and not follow in the footsteps of Graham Platner, a man who should have never been normalized, endorsed, or empowered.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song
(JTA) — Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel.
The 80’s pop star was scheduled to appear at London’s Palladium starting Monday as part of the production’s rotating cast playing King Herod, the Judean king who is best known by Jews for his expansion of the Second Temple and to Christians for his efforts to stave off the arrival of a challenger — the story of which is reflected in the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Boy George will be replaced by actor Richard Armitage in the London production.
In announcing the cast change, Paul Kelmsley, the singer’s manager, did not directly mention the blowback the former Culture Club frontman was receiving for releasing a pro-Israel song but alluded to it.
“George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that,” he said. ”In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”
Boy George is defending his decision to release the song, saying he believes artists should be free to express their views even when they are unpopular. In “We Will Dance Again,” the singer rejects claims of genocide against Israel and proclaims, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.”
Earlier Friday, Boy George lashed back at the vitriol he was getting online. “What is most shocking is the amount of gay folk attacking me, ” he posted on X. “If you support terrorism you can in the words of Divine ‘Take your toolkit and go f—_ a garage,’” he said, referring to a quote attributed to the taboo-breaking transgender artist.
“When I say ‘they want to kill every last one of us’ I am also talking about us queers, not just the Jewish community,” Boy George said. “When will you wake up?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song appeared first on The Forward.
