The following is a transcript of Episode 183 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Tuesday, April 9th, 2024. 

I love the Jewish calendar, and I tend to believe, I think I’ve shared this on the show before, that our holidays come along at the right time. Sometimes that means that they come around when we need them, sometimes because the meaning they provide is obvious, and sometimes because they elevate our fears from the human to the supernatural. 

Stephanie and I have built our household around the Jewish calendar. I think our strategy in raising Jewish children has been largely to lean into the calendar as the best possible tool for all of the gifts that it provides. It gives us milestones, easy memories, hands-on activities, a sense of order, a community, a sense of belonging. It definitely helps that both Stephanie and I work in Jewish jobs, so that means we’re never taking vacation for the Jewish holidays. And often it means that our organizations are also pivoting intentionally in a variety of ways into the holidays whenever they come about. I know that there are no shortcuts or tricks in raising Jewish children, but I think we’ve strived to just create a Jewish atmosphere that is our home, which inevitably means centering Shabbat and holiday observance as the anchor of how our family marks time.

For a while now, that’s included making Pesach for my whole extended family. Pesach is a lot of work, and I get cranky like everyone else while doing it, but I do try to make it a labor of love. I even wrote something a few years ago about how entering the seder exhausted after days of cooking and cleaning and squeezing too many people into the house might be the correct way to do it. It’s a way of identifying with the harried Israelites as they fled their homes in the middle of the night packing on the fly hastily baking bread that didn’t have time to rise, so it’s only when you actually sit down for the first time all day at the Seder you drink a little bit of wine, you tell some stories, you make jokes. In that moment you experience the elevation in the story from frenzy to freedom. 

But then this year came along and I just couldn’t do it. It’s the first time I felt in a long time that this holiday is not coming at the right time. I couldn’t host Pesach this year. I couldn’t for two reasons. The first is that I’m simply exhausted. For six months now, the existential concerns of the Jewish people have gone from being the regular stuff that fuels our organizational work, it’s a growth industry all the time, and since then it’s been a source of immense personal, collective, and communal anxiety. It’s been nonstop since, traveling and podcasting and writing and more.

So usually I find cooking for holidays or for Shabbat to be a kind of release. It’s a way that I get to do work that doesn’t involve talking. It’s tactile. You don’t need to wait months or years or for a longitudinal qualitative evaluation to know if your work has been successful. But it hasn’t been this year. A few weeks ago I told my siblings, my parents that I needed a year off. And so I’m grateful to be a guest this year, hopefully a good one, first at my parents and then for a week at camp.

The second reason why Pesach is coming at me hard this year, I’m sorry to be so bleak, is that I cannot, I really cannot fathom the thought of reclining in freedom, celebrating our people’s escape from dark places while our hostages are still below ground. Egypt is Mitzrayim in Hebrew, which some of our famous Midrashim repunctuate as Metzareem, the narrow place.

Our festival celebrates our emergence from narrow places to the vast expanses of our homeland from darkness to light. Even after all these years of saving a seat for a refuse-nik at the Seder table or other symbolic ways of expressing that because not all of us are free, none of us are free, there’s just something too literally wrong right now, too unfair in celebrating this festival with over 100 Israelis and Jews still captive underground in Gaza.

There’s so much more than that that’s wrong with this Pesach right now. It broke my heart for the last month that so many Muslims in Gaza were hungry throughout the Ramadan festival. I know that their relatives throughout Israel and the West Bank and across the world actually couldn’t quite muster the celebrations of years past that Ramadan deserves knowing of their plight. 

A redeemed world for the Jews doesn’t mean that we are redeemed and others are oppressed and subjugated. And even as I still do think that Israel had just cause to go to war in Gaza, there are so many millions of people right now on the precipice between life and death, between light and darkness, that a full festival of freedom just doesn’t feel fully coherent. I’m not genuinely sure how to relax right now without guilt, much less how to recite a full Hallel. 

And to be clear, for me at least, these are not theological questions. Honestly, if you believe in God, and if you really believe in the promise of the covenant, well, then you might be mad at God or frustrated why redemption is taking so long, but you know, you believe that the arc of redemption is long and that you’ll one day find your way there. And you might also believe that there’s something you could do right now differently, some act of piety that would close the gap between the world that we have and the world that we want. 

These are not theological struggles for me. They’re peoplehood struggles. And I think that there’s probably a link between being physically tired and being emotionally spent.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin, Hersh’s mother, put her head down on the podium at Sunday’s massive rally outside the UN commemorating the six months since the hostages were taken, I think a way of showing how little she has left and trying to draw our attention to our people, invisible below ground in Gaza. 

I’m not her. I don’t stand in her place. But I’m feeling more drawn right now to that symbolic act of putting her head down than I feel to the hustle and bustle of the kosher supermarket right now. Pesach is near and redemption seems nowhere to be found. And I don’t know what to do in moments like this, but you can do worse than calling your rabbi, who also might not know what to do, but who hopefully will not know what to do wisely. 

So for me, that’s Rabbi Sharon Cohen-Annesfeld, president of Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, has been president of Hebrew College since 2018, previously the Dean of the Rabbinical School for 11 years. Prior to that, working for 15 years in pluralistic settings as a Hillel Rabbi at Tufts, Yale, and Harvard universities, where she no doubt experienced many young people trying to figure out how to return home to complicated Passover celebrations. She’s also been a regular summer faculty member for the Bronfman Youth Fellowship since 1993, which is when we met in the summer of 1993, over 30 years ago, and perhaps, most relevant for this particular episode, the co-editor of two volumes of women’s writings on Passover, the Women’s Seder Sourcebook and the Women’s Passover Companion, both of which we’ve used at our Seder and recommend. 

This is also in her bio online, but it’s so nice that I’m going to read it: She writes and teaches widely, weaving together Torah, Rubinic commentary and contemporary poetry and literature in her wise and compassionate approach to the complexities of the human experience and the search for healing and hope in a beautiful but fractured world. 

Over the years on this show, we’ve done wonderful pre-holiday episodes with Benay Lappe Lapie, Zohar Atkins, Dovid Bashevkin, Mishael Zion, and others. And I’m delighted to spend a little bit of time with Sharon today, preparing with you for this holiday that is coming, ready or not. 

Sharon, thanks for being here. Thanks for being on this journey. And maybe I could start just by asking you how you’re feeling about redemption right now, and can you redeem it for us a little bit.

Sharon: Oh my goodness, Yehuda, thank you so much both for having me, for opening up this conversation and opening it up with such an honest and powerful reflection. You know me well enough to know that I’m not going to at least begin by offering anything easy in terms of redemption. In fact, I can’t resist, just to give you a sense of where I’m at today, I can’t resist sharing with you the way that I opened my blessing for the month of Nissan that I sent out this morning. And I opened it with, actually, words from a message a friend wrote to me yesterday in which she said, I’m quoting now from the beginning of her message, which is how I began my blessing for Nissan, kind of unexpectedly, she wrote, “I mishandled a glass bowl this morning in my kitchen. It shattered, immediately and with stunning force. I was surprised that this shattering felt like nothing to me, as if shattering is something I have grown so accustomed to these days and months.”

So that’s where I’m starting in terms of your question about redemption. I think it just has to be said this has been such a shattering year for our people. And not only for our people, but I know we both begin there.

I mean, I’ll say a couple of things, just sort of searching toward what I’m reaching towards as I think about redemption this year and Pesach. And it’s certainly not about, doesn’t feel like it’s about reclining into freedom, that’s for sure. One is that I have not been able to shake for the last several weeks the verse from Malachi that we read on Shabbat Hagadol right before Pesach and the line, you know, behold the day is coming when Elijah will turn the hearts of the fathers or the hearts of the parents toward their children and the hearts of the children toward their parents.

And I think the reason that’s been sort of reverberating for me so much over these last several weeks is that among the many aspects of shattering or places of shattering that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and it’s been weighing heavily on my heart is just the ways in which so many families here are struggling sort of with ruptured relationships as people grapple with the war in Israel and Gaza and sort of what the moment demands of us as Jews. 

And I am pretty much daily having calls with people who are reaching out, friends, colleagues, community members, acquaintances, saying, you know, first of all, I don’t know how my family is going to do a Seder this year, but also, you know, just saying, like, I don’t know how to talk to my kid or my kid’s not talking to me or my kid doesn’t want to invite his cousin to his wedding, or, you know, whatever it is, just the ruptures that I had been thinking about on a communal level, it’s sinking in for me that there we’re actually living them on a familial level. 

And I don’t think that’s the dominant thing for you, as you’re thinking about, I’m guessing, that’s not the dominant thing for you and thank God, it’s not the dominant thing for me within our family but I’m just aware of all of that pain. And so I’m kind of, I’m thinking, wow, what does it mean, both that we go into Pesach with that verse echoing for us, of, yeah, what does it look like in this moment for the hearts of parents and children to be turned towards each other, to really take that seriously? 

And then it somehow struck me for the first time this year that we kind of begin there and we end with the Afikomen and the children kind of bringing back or revealing this hidden broken fragment of the matzah and sort of what the children are offering back to us in that moment. So that’s one place that I’m feeling some, it feels like a place of a lot of hard work, kind of turning towards each other rather than away from each other and asking honest questions. But it also is a place where I’m feeling some redemptive possibilities.

Yehuda: It’s a particularly evocative line because it suggests that you actually need Elijah to do that work. It’s like when you say I need a messianic figure to solve it, it’s a way of saying I probably can’t do it by myself. So the idea that we’re longing for Elijah to restore the relationships in our families that are so ruptured is both validating, you know, we’re not the first Jews in Jewish history to struggle intergenerationally, but also very haunting to say that it might not be doable on its own. What are you telling people?

Sharon: I love that you found a way to make that darker. 

Yehuda: To make it worse? I see you and I lower you. What do you tell people? Because I’ve heard, I’ve gotten this question also, a friend of mine recently said, I’m in Israel and my kids are really mad that I went and I’m trying to figure out how to get on the phone with them. So, you know, part of the reason I’m struggling with this, personally, I don’t have a pastoral role, but I kind of do sometimes, is also I have really strong opinions right now. And it’s like, nobody wants your opinion about the war or about which side is right, that’s not what they’re asking you for. They’re asking like, I wanna have a family through the midst of knowing that my parents or children are wrong. I just wanna figure out how to love them across that divide. So what are you reaching towards for that?

Sharon: Well, let me respond to that and I also want to respond to sort of what you were saying about, you know, the verse from Malachi and the World of Eliyahu, because I think you’re touching on something, you know, that’s a really important tension throughout, in life and in Torah, but particularly in relation to Pesach, sort of this issue of what’s in our hands and what’s not in our hands, and sort of with the whole journey, the whole story. 

I mean, this is something, you know, and I don’t know how deeply we want to go into this, but I, first of all, in terms of what I tell people, you know, a lot of it’s just about, obviously, just about listening and, you know, sharing in how painful this is, but I have a pretty bottom line, orientation, posture, which is like, within families, the goal is always to keep the door open and the responsibility of parents is always to keep the door open. Which, by the way, sometimes is a very, you know, that’s a hard thing to say to people when they’re feeling hurt and you know, but I really, I feel that pretty strongly. 

So, you know, one of the things that that has, it’s something I’ve actually been wanting to talk to you about, Yehuda, because one of the things that means is, as I’ve been thinking about the issue of communal red lines and boundaries, you know, we don’t need to go there totally, but when I’ve been thinking about the issue of communal red lines and boundaries, I’ve been realizing more and more, oh, wait a minute, when we’re talking about communal boundaries, we’re also talking about relationships in families. And I will never ask parents to disown their children, teachers to disown their students, but certainly within families, the keeping open of the door. 

And I will say that over these last several months, when there’s been so much about the communal discourse that has felt disheartening, and particularly in, I mean, not even going to talk about social media, but even in large settings when there’s a lot of performativity going on. The thing that has pretty reliably been a source of little bit of hope for me have been the conversations one-on-one, very small groups, you know, when people are able to stop performing and be a little bit more honest about their own. You know, basically when we’re sharing the questions we’re asking ourselves as opposed to just asaulting each other with the questions that we have for the other person. So, um…

Yehuda: Yeah. I guess I will answer the unasked question, which is, I have been thinking a lot about red lines in the community since October 7th. And I believe that we’ve actually crossed some red lines, which I think is at least interesting. Right? Like, it happened. It’s like, oh, this is like a remaking of the map. I think it’s like a little bit of the metaphor of the big tent, which, by the way, when I went to dig into the text about the big tent that’s open on four sides. It’s widely thought to have been Abraham’s tent, but in the Mishnah it’s actually Job’s, which is amazing. It means the tent is open on four sides because people have an obligation to come in on all four sides to offer mourning to Job. 

And when you have a metaphor of a tent, it’s actually very useful because then there are people who are like, I don’t want to be in your tent anymore. So that’s fine. That’s why I feel like when I say it’s interesting, I’m not just being coy, it’s like, well, sometimes it’s just a good description of a reality. And I think that that reality changed this October 7th. I think there are a set of institutions in Jewish life which basically said, I don’t want to be part of your camp anymore. And where that camp is also saying, we don’t want you part of our camp either. 

At the same time, I’ve been trying to be really insistent every time I’ve written or spoken about this that our community has to be really careful about the distinction between drawing lines between organizations and people. And that like, I don’t care whether you belong to organization X, people are not, organizations, not people, corporations, not people, people are also like people belong to one organization at this time in their life and then a different at another time. And if we do all these acts of excision on all the people affiliated with all sorts of institutions, you’re never going to be able to constitute any, you’re preventing people from having the fluidity in their lives to evolve and move. 

And so, I don’t know, maybe our Seder table should be easier in the sense that we’re just sitting around the table. It’s just one table. It’s not the Federation boardroom. It’s not the synagogue policy. I know it’s easier said than done. 

I wrote about this, by the way, in the Hartman Supplement based on Mishael Zion and Noam Zion, they put out a supplement. And I drew on Kol Dichfin when we say at the beginning of the Seder, all who are hungry come and eat, as an analogist on Yom Kippur when we say we give ourselves permission to pray with the sinners. And it’s a way of saying we actually kind of all need each other to get through this ritual. So let’s let go just for the purpose of accomplishing the ritual of Jewish peoplehood, which is either Yom Kippur or the Passover Seder. Like, what would it take to just not let each of our Seder tables be a referendum on the status or a microcosm of the status of the Jewish people, and just a bunch of people having dinner together.

Sharon: Yep, that might work. No, I think it depends, and I think actually that’s probably an approach that a lot of folks will take and it’s wonderful if it does work. And I think there are ways, I 100 % agree, chas v’chalila, God forbid that our Seder tables would become referendums and Federation boardrooms, but this is where the centrality of the question at the Seder just feels so critical.

So if people can’t just go through the ritual and feel like, hey, we’re just doing this, you know, we’re off the table and we’re just doing this thing, and there’s enough heartache that people feel like they need to have, you know, some hard conversations about things they’re wrestling with, then letting questions stand at the center of that feels really important. 

You know, what are the questions you’re asking yourself? You know, I love the fact that the Mishnah already says, right, you don’t start telling the story until a real question has been asked, and all of the things that we do differently at the night of the seder are meant to prompt a real question. The four questions are kind of a fallback in case nobody asks a real question. But that’s actually how we’ve been starting our family seders for a number of years now, is just to go around and everybody share kind of a real question they’re bringing with them this year. And I imagine this year, you know, a bunch of those questions will be reflective of this moment that we’re in, in the world. 

Can I go back to the issue of needing help? 

Yehuda: Yeah, please. Yeah.

Sharon: I think you’re touching on such a beautiful and important theme in the whole thing. And I feel like I grew up with sort of this tension between, I grew up kind of on liberal haggadot and then when I was in college, on radical haggadot and stuff that were all about sort of the human dimensions of this story and, you know, Moshe as sort of a radical activist, or, you know, and then at some point I learned that in the traditional Haggadah, Moshe’s not mentioned and that this is all, entirely, 

Yehuda: Yeah, it’s all God. 

Sharon: This is all god. 

Yehuda: So you followed the journey, like any person, from liberal to progressive to republican.

Sharon:  Exactly. How did you know that’s where the story was going? What I’ve become really just intrigued by and sort of enamored with over the last, I don’t know, couple decades of living with not only the story, but a lot of the Midrashic literature on it and stuff, is that I think the Midrashic sort of themes and texts that I have been so drawn to are ones that really tap into this sense of just how deeply human action and agency is needed in this journey. You know, needed for what has to happen, needed by God, even, in some cases. You know, so that tap into just how much that human dimension is needed, and then in the next breath say, and we cannot possibly do this alone, this kind of radical interdependence between human and divine just feels like so much a part of the story. So I feel like you’re bringing that out. You’re kind of eliciting it in that verse from Malachi also.

I was hearing, so what does it mean for us to kind of be turning towards each other? And I do think that’s part of it. It has to be summoning that from us. But then with this reminder that, you know, there are going to be times when we’re just going to have to pray for some help with that.

Yehuda: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think thinking this year of the Seder as an elongated prayer has its own power, especially because if you want to advocate on behalf of the Jewish people, sometimes you rally and sometimes you say to Tehillim, say Psalms, and also maybe you go to a Seder. Maybe you enact the Jewish people’s redemption in microcosm and then we visualize it. 

I think there’s something powerful about saying that this is a long prayer and I think maybe, you know, I’ve never had a Pesach like this. And the fact that I’ve never had a Pesach like this, because I’ve been alive for 47 of them, makes me still hugely anomalous among Jews in Jewish history, for whom Pesach was always rooted in vulnerability. And I’ve never been able to kind of access that side of Pesach, of real vulnerability. 

In fact, I think for many of us, next year in Jerusalem, sure, but, mostly next year here, like in the Steve and Cokie Roberts Interfaith Haggadah, which ends with next year in Virginia Beach. It’s like, why would I do it in Jerusalem when I could do it here? In other words, there’s something strange about Pesach as being rooted in mostly fulfillment, and the imaginative leap is towards that which is unredeemed. 

And of course we can come up with a list of things that are unredeemed, but most of the times it feels we’re mostly, most of the way there. I don’t know, maybe this is a generational moment of, look, this is what Pesach is supposed to feel like. You’re supposed to recognize that the world is deeply broken, that your people are actually of the oppressed. And go through the routine anyway.

Sharon: Right, right. First of all, I’m wondering if, I’m just trying to listen for whether it feels true to me that I have always experienced the side of Pesach, which is, we’re most of the way there. So not that I, I mean, I certainly haven’t experienced the kind of sense of Jewish vulnerability that, you know, that you’re describing and that we’re experiencing now. And I’m few more sedarim under my belt. 

But I feel that that, you know, the paradox of the Seder, right, the way in which we say, Avadim Hayinu, you know, we were slaves and we also say, Hashatah Avdei, you know, that we’re still slaves. And yeah, sort of the fact that we say, right, we were once slaves, now we’re free. And we say, now we’re slaves, next year may we be free. And we say both of those.

I actually feel, maybe because I tend to, you know, I also tend to personalize and psychologize some of this language. So I feel like if I think back on different Sederim in my life, which of those lines has really resonated and kind of grabbed hold of me has depended on not just what’s going on for the Jewish people, but what’s going on in the world and what’s going on in my own life. And so I would not say I have always felt at the Seder that, yeah, one side of that.

Yehuda: Yeah, that it’s all working.

Sharon: Yeah, that it’s all, yeah. And I’ve definitely never said next year in Virginia Beach.

Yehuda: Yeah, no. It’s not even the first place I would pick in Virginia. But now I think the place where the idea of Seder as prayer works for me better is in the line where we say, v’hi shaamda, that which stood for our ancestors, that in every generation they rise to destroy us, v’hakadosh baruch hu matzileinu m’yadam, which have, God saves us from their hands, which I find to be the biggest lie of the Haggadah.

Sharon: Second only to Dayenu. That’s the biggest lie.

Yehuda: Yeah. So what happens when we read that, not as a description of Jewish history, which is a terrible way to describe Jewish history, and you just read it as a prayer? We pray that in every generation we’re going to be threatened and we are ultimately dependent on God’s radical intervention in history, which, and that’s what the Seder describes, the one time where it actually happened, the radical intervention in history. 

And we kind of know secretly that we may still be in the same bleak state the day after Pesach, because it doesn’t always happen. But it’s a prayer. Then it enables me to make it as a prayer, as opposed to as some sort of weird descriptor of Jewish history, which is sometimes how it’s represented.

Sharon: Yeah, I love the idea of reading that as a prayer and even of, yeah, experiencing the whole Seder as a prayer. You know, my own relationship to prayer and to redemption is, you know, it’s a little bit less about that sort of radically interventionist God and a little more about this complicated partnership that I am trying to figure out how to give expression to. But it’s somehow, it’s just so important to me, the summoning of our own capacities alongside the asking for help as both of those being what’s happening in prayer.

Yehuda: Let me ask you about some radical politics in the Seder, because the Seder has been the anchor of both the now politics and radical politics. It’s all of them. They’re all there. The hardest thing about this Pesach is not that Jews disagree. Jews always disagree. The hard thing about this Pesach is that the disagreement is on who is Pharaoh. That’s the real disagreement, right? 

It’s not we agree that we’re the Israelites and we disagree on strategy in the war. It’s that there are of our people who believe that we are Pharaoh, that our actions are the actions of Pharaoh, and that the liberation that is meant to happen is against the state of Israel and the Jewish people. And I guess one of the places where this locates itself the most, because we don’t really tell the story of the Exodus, but this locates itself the most in the four children, the four sons, where, you know, I feel like when I was growing up, like the rebellious thing would be that someone would say, I identify with the bad son, which is useful narratively, because we’re like, we agree, you’re the bad son. 

But now the reverse is, what happens when everybody thinks that the political other to them is the one who needs to be rebuked, set out of community, the one who’s incapable of seeing that they’re the one who’s left out of our redemption story. That’s the thing that feels most hard to heal about this. 

And I am really struggling with not just at individual tables, but collectively what happens when we decide that some of us believe that we’re the Israelites and we deserve to be redeemed and some of us believe that our people have become Pharaoh.

Sharon: Yeah. I think I want to try to tease apart two or three threads that I’m hearing in what you’re saying. And first I want to say that you’re taking me back a little bit to Purim this year, when I actually felt for the first time, it felt like I had a different relationship to the phrase, you know, we should, we should become so intoxicated that we can’t tell the difference between, cursed-be-Haman and blessed-be-Mordechai. 

And I felt such a strong sense of, oh no, we’re already, that’s the morass that we’re in right now. It’s like we can’t agree on or even figure out, you know, who’s good and who’s bad. And it somehow felt like we were already in that, in that Purim world in such a painful way. And so that’s what I’m, hearing echoes of that in what you’re saying about, you know, we can’t figure out who Pharaoh or we’re disagreeing about who’s Pharaoh or whether we are Pharaoh in the story.

So the two threads I want to tease out, one is that I actually remember years ago hearing someone, I wish I could remember who it was, but a rabbi talking about kind of a Jungian approach to the Exodus story in the sense, what do I know? 

Yehuda: It’s gotta be Jim Ponet. 

Sharon: I don’t think it was Jim. It could easily have been, but, but in the sense that a Jungian approach to dreams, I guess, is you see yourself as every character in the dream. So what would it mean to take? This was years ago, long before the current situation, that, you know, what would it mean to read the Exodus story that way and to see ourselves as every character in the story. 

And so I know you’re talking about this in a, there is a way in which it is true in extremis, in a way that is, I agree, you know, very hard to, not just negotiate, navigate, but just live with, right now. And I also, I do feel that having the capacity to not just see ourselves as victims or not just see ourselves as the good guys, you know, moving beyond, that simple reading of the story or simple reading of the world does feel, it feels scary to me to really take that seriously. But I think for me that is certainly part of what I’m bringing to the Seder this year, one of the questions I’m bringing to the Seder this year, is what does it mean to face moments in which, or ways in which it does feel that we are sort of partly inhabiting the role of Pharaoh. 

Part of what makes it painful is that we’re, right, when you’re describing the fact that we’re disagreeing about who’s Pharaoh, we’re also talking about a political discourse and a communal discourse in which everybody’s kind of colluding in the fact that there’s the oppressor and the oppressed, and it’s just gotten flipped as opposed to, everybody colluding with a deeper shared understanding of, we can be both oppressor and oppressed at the same time and we can both be causing harm and be being caused grave harm at the same time and that is extraordinarily painful and difficult to reckon with, but if there’s not room for that in

Yehuda: Right, then we get trapped in their boxes.

Sharon: Yeah, and it’s just not true. And we know somewhere in our kishkes that it’s not true, right? So then we’re kind of fighting to protect something we know is not true. So that’s, yeah.

Yehuda: It’s true, in some ways, it’s inevitability of war, right? It polarizes us, it’s like you have to choose a team, am I on this side or on that side? But I also, I hear the way you’re describing it and I’ve felt it. You know, I felt it when, on October 9th, the language of genocide as being committed by Israel was first uttered. And I was watching it and I was like, I’m in a fun house room. It’s like a fun house mirror. And my colleagues helped me understand what was going on, which is like, there’s been a rhetorical push for years now. First, it was criticism of the occupation, legitimate, then it was apartheid, and then it went to genocide. 

And all of that is about changing the framework within which the world understands the state of Israel more than it was a direct response to particular actions or set of conditions. And even as I say that, I know that someone will come along and say, well, look, let me show you how two different legal systems in the West Bank accurately can be characterized as apartheid. And what I’m saying is, emotionally, you’ve pushed me now to the wall. Where you can say, because once I’m on team genocide, I have to make one of two choices. Either I can flip to the other side and say, oh my God, I can’t believe I’m complicit in it. Or I can reject the totality of what you’re giving to me, kind of classic cognitive dissonance stuff, and say everything that you’re associated with is now morally corrupt, and now I’m also up a tree, morally speaking. 

And I felt it happening. I felt it like over the last few months. I don’t want to read that news story. Partly because I know who’s sharing it, but also because I’m scared of where it’s gonna push me. And by the way, then what political community do I have?

Sharon: Right, right, yeah. Oh my God, well, we talked not too long after October 7th, October 9th, you know, some, who can remember it? And, you know, I also, that feeling of being pushed up against a wall, you know, which has continued, I mean, it has softened for me, but that was so much the feeling, I think I told you when we talked then that, I write some poetry, and I was having a very hard time writing in those weeks and months after October 7th. And the only poem that I did write was I called Cornered, because it was, that’s what I was, it’s that feeling you’re describing of being pushed up against the wall, it just felt like we are all cornered and there is no way out.

And I think I mentioned to you, or maybe I said to you, you know, one of the lines in the poem was, I’m angry at anyone who’s speaking in full sentences. And you wrote, yeah, we did talk about this because you wrote back, no, I’m definitely speaking in full sentences.

Yehuda: Run-ons, even.

Sharon: Right, but, you know, I guess this is part of what I’m feeling going into this Pesach is can we at least, you know, I can’t shake the feeling that part of what’s been going on in the Jewish community and in the Jewish people is that we’re all so terrified and we are taking it out on each other in ways that are very painful to me. So I am really looking for ways for us not to be backing each other into corners and up against walls.

You know, my brother Steve, a few weeks ago I was visiting in Santa Barbara and he was teaching a Torah study session and he opened it by saying, the Jewish definition of redemption, I should have quoted that when you asked about redemption, he said the Jewish definition of redemption is when you feel, when it looks like you are completely trapped, right, cornered. You know, you’re completely trapped. And there is no way out or forward or just, right, the Israelites at the sea with the Egyptian army at their back. 

And the Jewish definition of redemption, there’s some opening. Something opens up and it’s like a little bit of a way forward. And whether that happens through our own, whether we help out in that, or it comes as a gift, as an act of chesed, as an act of grace. That feels to me like the redemption I’m praying for. This Pesach is, may there be some opening.

Yehuda: Some little opening, like the feeling watching those hostages return that we got a little bit of. The feeling that something might give. 

You wrote a beautiful piece that’s on Sefaria now, I think it was in the Hebrew College Pesach Supplement, I don’t know which year it was from, about karpas. And you tie between karpas and nature as also a source of hope and optimism. How do you see that playing into this story as well? It’s also Chag HaAviv. It’s also the holiday of springtime. And I’m curious how you’re thinking about that story. Maybe you could flesh out the karpas metaphor for us a little bit and how nature or the world around us might also be a source of some hope or resilience or something.

Sharon: Yeah, well the connection I made there, first of all, I, you know, for as long as I can remember, my mother has been reciting the verses from Shir Hashirim at our Passover Seder, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away, for love, the winter’s past.” And I started thinking about it, you know, not that long ago. Why were those verses, you know I think she just loved the poetry of it. But it’s such a loving and hopeful passage and so, you know, so much tying that sense of sort of possibility to spring and the coming of spring. And I felt like I had been raised with a much more austere understanding of hope from my mother, which is, it’s a discipline. It’s an obligation. It’s hard work, but it’s, you know, asur l’hityaesh, like, it is forbidden to despair. 

And I realized that part of what I heard in her reading those lines at the Passover Seder was like, yes, on all other nights, it’s a discipline, it’s a practice, it’s an obligation. But sometimes it doesn’t always have to be such hard work. Sometimes it just comes. And to me, that is what the metaphor of Chag Haviv is about, and why karpas is such a beautiful moment of the Seder, because it’s a way of saying, you know, sometimes, spring just comes, right? We’re not, you know, and that feeling that, we just had that, we just drove up to Vermont for the totality, you know, to see the eclipse. And I don’t know, I will never cease to sort of have my kind of heart skip a beat and my breath catch when I see those first streams in the spring, you know, frozen streams sort of starting to flow again, right? 

So just sort of, that’s the other part of the promise, right? That, yes, there’s all this work we need to do and yes, there are things we’ve just gotta pray for God’s help. There are also these things that are just kind of built into the rhythm of our world, which kind of remind us of… 

So that’s the connection for me. I will say it’s been a little bit harder for me to connect to that quite as deeply this year, honestly. I was kind of hoping for that and I think there’s something. It’s still really important to me and there’s something really beautiful about it, but there’s, you know, there can also be something cool about it, right, that’s happening and as you said, you know, the hostages are still in tunnels and yeah, people are still starving.

Yehuda: It’s not fixing the world, right?

You know, yeah, when I was in Israel in December or Jan, it must have been in January, I don’t remember which trip it was. It was right before, there’s usually a whole stream of Israelis who go south to see the kalaniyot, to see the red poppies. And it’s a whole festival. And there was this like, people were like, hmm, I don’t think this is the right year to go do it. 

And it’s exactly that, it’s things, hanitzanim niru ba’aretz, it’s you see things just emerge and it can’t help but change your disposition. And I would say a few people I know snuck down to see it. Maybe they just, they just needed, and I don’t blame them, they needed it. I’m happy, the tulips are coming up in our house too, and you need it, and it does give you a sense of, maybe sometimes just things move in the world. Sometimes it’s human agency. That’s a piece of the story that you said before about the radical politics of Pesach. And sometimes it’s like hope against hope, which is the theological piece. And then sometimes it’s, you know, olam k’minhago noheg, sometimes the world unfolds the way it’s supposed to unfold. And that also brings about maybe some piece of redemption. 

Sharon: Can I just say one thing about the natural world? Just, since I just experienced my first total eclipse of the sun yesterday. 

It was a different experience, but it was a powerful experience of the natural world, not exactly, actually not exactly of hope, but of a kind of deeper humility than I can always… not even humility, just such a sense of smallness, you know, as things got dark. And even more than the darkness for me was the hush, the still, the birds stopped chirping. Everything got totally quiet. And it just was this feeling. 

So the reminder that we are teeny tiny part of this, you know, unfathomably vast creation, that also, it’s not hope, but it’s something else that feels important going into it.

Yehuda: Do you know that that’s a citation from the Book of Exodus?, the dog, dogs, lo yecharatz [kelev] leshono, dogs wouldn’t bark. There’s a freezing, kind of a freezing of time in that moment.Singularity is here. 

Last question. Again, we talked about redemption all along. I was tempted when you started with the story of the bowl. I was like, I envy that bowl. There’s like a gift of being fully shattered. Tell me, last thing, what something else, some place where you’re drawing some spiritual will of resilience. You’re doing so much to teach your own students and to put them out into the world as rabbis. What are you going back to? Anything that you’re reading or learning that you keep going back to that’s helping you and might help all of us?

Sharon: Well, the first thing that’s coming up, it’s not exactly going back to it, but it’s, I’ve been spending a lot of time with it. Shai Held’s new book, Judaism is About Love. I have this very strong sense of that I will be going back to it for a long time. I said that to him the other night. We were talking about a little thing at Harvard Hillel. 

There’s been something powerful about being anchored in that during this time. Just, I don’t know, is that also a prayer or, you know, an assertion? But just at a time, actually both in the world and in certain ways in my own world, that feels like it’s been cast into doubt, ot has meant a lot to me to kind of reground in that, and in the Torah that sort of supports that, and to reground in my commitment to fighting for that Torah. I guess that sounds a little paradoxical fighting for the Torah of love. But, you know, so that’s the first thing that comes to mind. 

The other thing I’ve been drawing a lot of nourishment from is both conversations, but also I do some shared writing with students. I have a weekly Tefillah group where we do writing together and teaching my class in homiletics, the art of giving divrei Torah, and just sort of, it appears I will never tire of kind of, just the beauty and mystery of hearing people and eliciting people’s voices as they kind of figure out their own relationship to Torah and what it is they want to be teaching. So that’s kind of a well that keeps getting. 

What about you? Can I toss that one back to you? 

Yehuda: Well, the podcast actually helps. I get to talk to people like this, it’s cheaper than therapy. It’s pretty great. You know, Pesach notwithstanding, given the opening that I said, I have a couple of teenagers growing up in my house, and that’s been a source of a lot, a lot of spiritual inspiration, also watching them get ready to leave. 

I’m thinking about what it means to, it’s like one of these moments where you’re kind of forced to codify what did you do, what did you give, and then what’s gonna emerge. And I find it to be just an incredibly optimistic thing. Just watching somebody get ready to leave, I think it’s like, I’ll do a whole thing on that, but it’s just incredible to watch.

Sharon, Chag Sameach, thanks for being with us.

Sharon: Chag Sameach. Thanks.

Tessa: Thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest this week, Sharon Cohen-Anisfeld. Identity/Crisis is brought produced by me, Tessa Zitter and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Sarina Shohet and edited by Gareth Hobbes at Silver Sound NYC, with music provided by so called. 

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