Now we are here | Passover haggadah by Serena Jake

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Shara Feit is a New York-based writer, performer, and dramaturg. She makes sad/funny work about messy, wild, virtuosic, women+ and queer folx of all ages.

Ha Lachma Anya’s parallelism equates now and here with enslavement, next year with Israel and freedom. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that maybe the thing that this truer about ha lachma anya than how it parallelizes is how it juxtaposes. Hashata hacha, l’shanah habaah b’ara d’Yisrael. Hashata avdei, l’shanah habaah b’nei chorin. Now we are here, next year in the land of Israel. This year we are enslaved, next year we will be free. Two sentences, twenty seconds max (if sung slowly), that leap across and back and forth, through space and time, oppression and liberation, with so little distance between them.

7PM applauding, pots and pans. Isolating. Making small, lovely plays on the internet. Not sleeping. Being so fucking scared. Watching so much West Wing that Josh Lyman and CJ Cregg appear in my dreams, streaming and streaming and streaming. Walking five miles through Riverdale Forest Park. Screening movies on a projector in my childhood home. Taking good classes. Taking boring classes. Staring at screens. Buying peppermint oil. Buying blue light glasses. Phonebanking. Helping with Shiva for my Saba. Needing grad paper extensions, really needing them. Dancing in the street when the election was called. Feeling so tired. Feeling so scared I’d always be so tired. Lighting candles. Watching a friend save a mouse stuck to a glue board (helping?). Celebrating a Zoom birthday, crying good tears. Redecorating my childhood bedroom. Eating so much sugar my teeth hurt. Screaming bad rock songs a capella with my siblings on a quiet day, including guitar solos. Collecting unemployment. Not writing and not writing and not writing. Writing, a little. Buying plants. Killing plants. Buying other plants. Not texting. Not calling. Taking meds. Gathering on Zoom with artists. Looking for jobs, losing jobs, finding jobs. Filling cavities. Doing dance fitness with my parents. Throwing a Zoom birthday party. Throwing another Zoom birthday party. Freaking out when family and friends get sick. Preparing a multi-course Italian dinner with my siblings for my parents' anniversary. Somehow, making a few new friends. Moving apartments. Mourning. Protesting. Carrying a 10-year old tiny dog in the deep pocket of my denim jacket. Talking with faraway friends. Talking with my aunt on the phone. Missing the people I can’t talk to anymore. Riding the subway, seeing unmasked people (scream). Racing through the Upper West Side at 12:30AM to find an antique fainting couch from Instagram with strangers, friends, a dog. Losing a friend. Getting vaccinated at 1:30AM at Yankee stadium with my brother. Hugging an immunosuppressed friend for the first time in a year.

This Pesach, this Maggid, I am thinking about the human insanity of holding freedom and loss, joy and tragedy all at once, and how last Pesach I was so sure all this would be over and we would have made it to our proverbial Israel, our proverbial freedom, whatever that is, and would find ourselves leaving our homes, blinking because we’re not yet used to the brightness, holding each other.

Hashata hacha, l’shanah habaah b’ara d’Yisrael. Hashata avdei, l’shanah habaah b’nei chorin.

Being free, or maybe I just mean being okay, is not linear. It is a back and forth toggling between two sentences over the course of days, sometimes hours, sometimes minutes.

But this year, I'm noticing the part that gets left behind on the race to freedom. Hashata hacha. Now we are here. We are here. We are here. We are here.

haggadah Section: Maggid - Beginning

Source: Shara Feit