Almost one year ago, I gathered with my partner and metamours around a Seder plate to celebrate our first Passover in Quarantine. I set up a laptop at the end of the table and, after some technical differences, brought my chosen and birth families together. It was one of the brighter notes of the early pandemic.

This year, on the morning before Passover, I hardly have the energy to drag myself out of bed let alone put together a Seder plate. I end each week drained by hours of toiling in front of my computer screen, lonely and isolated from my friends and loved ones. With vaccines being administered, there finally seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel. But after this year, I feel more and more each day like an empty glass in desperate need of a refill.

I am fortunate enough to have (vaccinated) family nearby, so tomorrow my partner and I will prepare our soon-to-be-famous Black Bean Brisket and celebrate the holiday properly. But today I will reflect, as Passover always prompts reflections on our relationship to our freedom and the state of the world we live in. I hope that some of my reflections will resonate with you, and if so, then I hope too that you’ll share some of these sentiments with your family around your own Seder plate.

Of, if you’re not Jewish and have still read this far, I hope you’ll come away with some idea of how I relate to the holiday and its importance to my family.

On Passover we celebrate our deliverance into freedom from slavery under Pharaoh. Today, after enduring the brutality of the Shoah, our families enjoy an unprecedented level of freedom and privilege. Anti-Semitism exists today, but it is no Pharaoh. So I turn my eyes, ears and words to the peoples of the world who suffer every day under violence and injustice.

A week before last Passover, a White man slammed my Chinese-American partner against a wall, breaking her sunglasses and bruising her face while calling her a racial slur. Since then several of my Asian friends have been assaulted or harassed on the streets of my home city, and anti-Asian hatred has been on the rise. Our disgraceful president fanned the flames, but any student of American history would know that those flames have been burning for centuries.

Then, just over a week ago, a deluded White man fueled by fetishized racial animus murdered 8 people, among them 6 Asian women. These are their names:

These murders sent a shockwave of grief, anger and fear through Asian-American communities. As Jews, we know what it is like to be regarded with suspicion, treated as as outsiders in our homes, scapegoated and killed. We must recall this loss when we say our Mourner’s Kaddish, and we must remember their names.

We also remember the countless others who suffer under injustice across the world: the migrant children who remain captive at our own Southern border, the Black Americans who live under constant fear murder at the hands of armed police, the countless Rohingya Muslims and protestors killed by government forces in Myanmar, the Uighur Muslims being held in concentration camps in Western China, and many more.

These people and more continue to live under Pharaoh each day. As Jews, at this time of year it is our duty to remember them and re-commit ourselves to their liberation.

And as we call the familiar refrain "Next year in Jerusalem," we are prompted to face the injustices suffered by the Palestinian people under Israeli rule, and to contemplate whether through our desire for safety our people have taken on an aspect of Pharaoh. We remember that we must stand up to tyranny however it manifests, even and especially within our own nation. 

Moving into the Spring of Vaccination, it will be easy to lose ourselves in the simple pleasures which we took for granted before 2020. I ask you, together with me, to use this opportunity to reaffirm your ideals and decide how you will contribute to the cause of freedom this year. 

That’s all for now, but do expect more soon! Chag sameach, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Noah