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Bitter Herbs
Contributed by Miriam Pinon

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

Maror

We eat the bitter herbs.  As we eat the horseradish or other bitter vegetables, we remember that the struggle for liberation is not a party. If we insist that it always must “feel good,” we will remain stuck in the oppressive reality of today, because the 1 percent and those who work for them can always guarantee (through their armies, police forces, homeland security, and spying forces) that there is much pain in store for us, including loss of livelihood, jail, or assassination.

Say the following blessing and then eat the horseradish or other bitter herb by itself, without anything mitigating the experience, and through eating this bitter herb symbolically allow ourselves to experience the pain of slavery: Baruch ata Yud Hey Vav Hey, the Transformative and liberating Power of the universe, who leads us to acknowledge the bitterness of slavery in all its many forms – asher kidshanua be’mitzvotav, ve’tsivanu al akh’ee’lat maror.

Jews are not the only ones to have suffered oppression and violence. We think of the genocide against native peoples all around the world, including in the United States. We think of the historical enslavement of Africans and the oppression of Armenians, LGBT people, women, people of color, and many others. We mourn the suffering of the people of Tibet struggling under the cruel occupation by China. We mourn the suffering of the Syrian people struggling to free themselves from the oppression of the Assad dictatorship without allowing a cruel version of Islamism to take its place. We mourn the suffering of the millions of children subjected to sexual slavery. We mourn the suffering of the 1.5 billion people living on less than a single dollar per day and the many who are slowly dying of malnutrition or related diseases. We mourn the suffering of the world’s estimated 80 million refugees desperate to escape oppression in their home countries yet finding no welcome elsewhere. We mourn the suffering of young girls kidnapped from their own families and forced to marry Islamic jihadists. We mourn the suffering of people who have lost friends or family members to the drones and other forms of bombing that the U.S. continues its misguided war on terrorism, in the process creating ever more jihadis. Yet, tonight it is appropriate for us to focus also on the suffering of the Jewish people and to affirm our solidarity with victims of anti-Semitism through the ages.

Anti-Semitism persists in our own time in the use of double standards in the judgment of Jews, in acts of violence against Jews, and in refusal to acknowledge the history of Jewish suffering as equal to the suffering of other victims of oppressive social regimes in Christian, Islamic, and secular societies. Meanwhile, we Jews need to acknowledge the ways that this suffering has at times distorted our consciousness and made it hard to fully grasp the pain others feel. That distortion, being acted out by the government of Israel in its treatment of Palestinians as well as in its treatment of refugees from Africa, might, for the first time in history, create an antagonism toward Jews based on the actual behavior of those Jews who allow Israel to call itself “THE Jewish State” while simultaneously violating the command of our Torah to “love the stranger” (the Other). To counter this, we must evolve a global Judaism that compassionately embraces the Jewish people and all other peoples.
haggadah Section: Maror

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