Sofya's Exodus | Passover haggadah by Serena Jake

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Sofya Levitzy-Weitz is a current Core Writer and a 2018/2019 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center, where the second seder play referenced in this book ("Cannabis Passover") was included in PlayLabs for their public season last fall.

(read the bolded sections aloud)

this morning I woke up to a text from my mother that said: feel that in a national crisis you should be with us. & never mad just sad. & I miss you terrible. Terribly. & I can’t get you here fast enough. & a text version of a poem she’d written about all the small moments my family is having right now, without me. laundry & baking & muffins & the smell of the house. & in this poem she accidentally set a small fire and it reminded her of me at three years old, my long hair accidentally caught on fire from the Hanukkah candles. I didn’t feel it, but remember the terror on her face before she launched on me to put it out.

a thought that happens more than most any in my mind is why am I not with the people I love the most?

in a line in my play about my family’s Passover, the mother who is based on my mother says – why do my children want to leave me? and the line gets a laugh because – Jewish mothers! – but this morning on the phone she cried and she was really scared and she is really scared and that scares me.

my Passover plane ticket – purchased months ago, purchased before this – keeps getting pushed. one day, then the next, then the next. I will already miss the scheduled seder. my mother tells me: It will get cancelled. It is going to get worse.

Inertia is the tendency to do nothing. Or to remain unchanged.

I stare at flights until my eyes blur. I stare at the map. The unfathomable difference, made small, made graphic. The google earth image, from almost a decade ago, but still my heart, it aches.

Los Alamitos, California is 2,802 miles away from Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.

19 S**** St, Apt 3, with its very recent outfitted balcony patio, with an herb garden, with little lights, with two cats staring out the screen, is 2,802 miles away from 11542 D***** Road, where I learned to ride a bike, where I had family dinner every night, where I cried listening to music in my bedroom, where I ate and slept from age 4.

two weeks ago, I imagined putting my cats in their carriers, renting a van, and just driving and driving west. to the pacific, which is always stamped on the inside of my eyelids. I imagine this so hard it was as though it was already happening. it was as though I was already there.

go, go, go.

when the Israelites left Egypt, the only home they’d known, what did they think of the horizon? what did they think of the purpose of their lives, the ones they were leaving, and the ones they didn’t know yet?

the Israelites walked for forty years. many of them died, grew up, made new families. the generation that reached the Holy Land remembered little of what they had left.

today in yoga, live-streamed from my studio in Brooklyn, the teacher said: we often think of home as a place we eat, we sleep, the walls around us. but our real home is our body.

and at the end, in savasana: most of us are uncomfortable being at home in our bodies. But we are all we have.

& I felt comforted. & I cried.

when Moses first saw the burning bush, did he think: am I going fucking crazy? or: am I alone in this message? or: it’s too much pressure.

he was already exiled. he could have just left.

growing up, we had family dinner every night. we spent time together. we are a family that hangs out, a family that spends time in common areas. these past few weeks, with my roommates (my “isolation pod”) – I have felt like a family. we cook every night, we cry, we talk. it doesn’t matter how many people I see in my normal life, I realized, almost stunned. this is what makes me happier.

Moses didn’t know his family. his mother, hiding him in a basket in the reeds, to save his life, hoping the Pharaoh’s daughter would find him, and she did, and his sister watched to make sure it would be okay. the faith, it rocks me.

in a poem I wrote almost 2 years ago, about my grief, about my heartbreak, I wrote of unpacking my little suitcase between any four walls. I wrote of home. I wrote four walls is a body.

one time on a plane ride from Chicago to LAX, watching the little virtual map as I always do, I watched as the unincorporated area known as Rossmoor, the neighborhood I grew up in, appeared on the screen. even now, I think I’m making it up. why would it be there? it has never been there again, never was before. but the boy I loved was with me, and he saw it too. How did it know, I was going home?

one Thanksgiving, he and I were alone in New York, with the cats. I like it, he’d said. Our little family. But I longed to be home, for the kitchen, for the kitchen island, for my brother’s jokes, for my dad’s quiet puttering, my mom’s laugh, the smells, the warmth, this place, my home.

how will I ever make a new home, one that competes?

it was the women at the base of Mt. Sinai who believed Moses would come back. the men panicked, tore the earrings from their wives’ ears, melted them into idols. the women said, he will come back. women, used to waiting. used to fleeing.

we weren’t supposed to do this. leave communities. go off, alone.

for what?

today, my friend said: you are leaving one family to go to the other. both can exist.

but I still don’t know if I can -

a woman I worked on a television project with– who I admire more than almost anyone – said to me: you’re always thinking about somewhere else.

this boy I loved for a long time wrote a play in which a character who was based on his sister wishes she could split in half. this was after years of me telling him I wished I could be two people. I wished I could be two places. I wish I could live two separate lives at once. I want to be with my family, I want to be with my family, why am I not with my family? When anything could happen at any point.

But what about me? He never said. Aren’t I your family? But of course, eventually, that would be part of why we never would be.

In that same play, that character asked: how do you love the place you are? As though I’d spoken it.

I remember seeing the movie Sliding Doors as a child and being obsessed with the concept, something I already thought about constantly. What decisions – both tiny and large – are changing the landscape of our whole life? What infinity of tiny decisions, both in and out of our hands, are changing everything, right now, and always? In one life, Gwyneth Paltrow doesn’t discover her husband cheating on her in their bed. In the other, she cuts her hair short, does the things she’s always wanted from her life. Or at least that’s how I remember it.

god saved the worst plague for last. god warned and warned – did it have to come to this? – before the death of the Egyptian firstborns.

it is when the Pharaoh’s own son dies, that he finally says. go. defeated.

Jews are always going somewhere else. we’ve been called wandering. we’ve had to flee almost every place we lived, our bread can’t even stay in the oven, we must cook it on our backs, in the sun, eat it later, as crackers.

when the Israelites thought of the holy land, what did they see? the land of milk and honey? what is home, when you have never been there? what is home, when you have never had one? is it worse to imagine it, or to see it so clearly, in all its most distinct and beautiful details, and miss it every second?

in two days, I am supposed to fly from John F. Kennedy Airport to Los Angeles International Airport, home for Passover, where I will need to wear a mask and only see my family in the outside of our backyard. On the plane, I will sit in my own row, I will watch as the lights of Los Angeles start to appear. I will see the sliver of ocean as it unfolds. I will feel the drop. I will search amidst the tiny houses for my parents’ house, fruitless, but do it every time, nonetheless. I will hold my breath as we get close enough that tiny dots become tiny people, but this time, they will all be in the patchwork of the flicker of lights that is a house. their houses.

I will leave, to go home.

haggadah Section: -- Exodus Story

Source: Sofya Levitsky-Weitz