Exodus 2021 | Passover haggadah by Serena Jake

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Sofya Levitsky-Weitz is a writer based in Brooklyn and originally from Los Angeles. Her play “Cannabis Passover” (the second pesach play referenced) is a finalist for the O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference.

What does it look like to tell a story in which the narrative hinges on violence
without the violence?

How can we demonstrate liberation without breaking something open?

I just got out of a workshop with the Playwrights’ Center in which I started a new project, one where I am trying to recreate a story I wrote when I was a child that hinged upon violence towards women, while also examining my own and society’s fascination with a trope that hinges upon violence towards women.

By the end
with everything happening in the world
still happening
this week
this month
this year
last year
the entirety of my life
and humankind
all of it

We all decided – the actors, director, stage manager, and me – that we didn’t want to tell a story about violence. We were simply tired of it. It bored us.

So what does Exodus look like without violence, I wondered.

Just searching for a refresher of the Exodus Story at Passover, I found a rabbi (Rabbi David Fohrman) who posited that another story from the Torah, when examined, closely resembles the Passover story. This story surrounds Joseph asking Pharaoh to honor the death of his earthly father, Jacob. By the end, the Egyptians and Israelites go further in unity, chariots accompanying the Israelites, not chasing them. This provides another model, and yet every year, the Passover story persists, with its plagues, with its gore, with this action and drama and lamb’s blood and bodies washed up on the shore.

Many – especially those not in the Jewish faith – like to call the Old Testament God a “violent” God, a “punishing” God. I disagree with this assessment, or the binary it suggests, and prefer to think of the stories in the Torah as instructions, as lessons, as metaphor, power imbued to people to consider the consequences of our actions, to continually strive to be better and better and better.

So I take that as a challenge, and this challenge is thus: I will write the Exodus Story with No Violence.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I don’t believe in that either. But I will try to pull apart the pieces, leave blank what must be blank, in effort to learn about what remains. And what constitutes violence? Am I the one to decide that? Is anyone? I will simply remove what makes the pit in my stomach grow a little bit deeper. I will search for lightness, for joy. For liberation.

Because maybe what remains can teach us even more about what we are, who we are, and what will be.

Maybe.

…

A little baby floats on a River in a basket. He feels the wind above him, the floating of a current of water feels not so different from the womb. He watches the clouds above him. He’s calm. He is not aware of the tears behind him, the hope, the longing, the speeding up of the river, its precarity. He bumps calmly into the reeds, they welcome him.

A woman lifts him out, more like a girl. She doesn’t see the girl her own age on the other side of the bank, holding her breath, or a younger girl watching her little brother as he’s scooped up into royal hands and cooed at. They let their breath go when the woman – adorned with necklaces and bracelets and skin that has been pampered her whole life – nuzzles into their boy and brings him inside. He is chosen, saved.

The boy grows up. It isn’t without challenges. He spends his time looking out the window, wandering around. Something doesn’t feel right, even among it all. He knows he is different. It’s written in his bones, in the contours of his mind. He spends his childhood ignoring it, as many of us do. But when he cannot ignore it anymore, when he cannot look away, the sensitivity rippling on the surface of his skin and the skin of others, he knows he must take action.

This results in his departure from the palace he’s known since infancy. The only place he’s known, the only place he remembers in his conscious mind. But his body remembers something else, as bodies do. Wandering in the desert, he speaks to God. A bush on fire, it speaks to him. Or maybe he eats something, a plant that talks to him, or maybe the bush really burns. It doesn’t matter, either way. God, or the plant, or his own mind tells him who he really is. And what he must do.

He must help his people be free.

First, he asks. A boy with a stutter, from a trick played on him as a baby. He is scared, but is driven by something larger than him, something he doesn’t even understand. He reunites with a brother, someone who can help speak with him. Together, they raise each other.

The answer is no. He urges, calmly, but the answer continues to be no.

He needs help.

The help comes in the form of transformations from above. Scary things, one greater than the next. The water turns to blood, for instance. Locusts in the sky. A total blackness. All temporary, the man urges. If the Pharaoh lets them go. All will be maintained. Well, not all. There are some things that need fixing. Pharaoh stays firm. Or, he changes his mind. Again and again. The Israelites prepare to flee, and when it finally happens, it is from a severing. Something so dark it is darker than darkness. In grief, the Pharaoh says: go.

Their bread did not even have time to rise. They carried it on their backs and it burned and hardened. They started their wandering, which started as a hurrying. A flee. A don’t turn back. A keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. The sister of the little boy, now grown, leads the group with her tambourine. She dances, sings, and the singing continues.

For some reason, Pharaoh changes his mind again. We will not know why. He has lost so much, he does not want this final loss. God wants lessons. God wants stories. And so do we.

So they keep coming, and the Israelites keep moving. They will move past the water, through the water, into the desert, through generations, up a mountain, down again, into the new world, and onwards.

We all came from the sea, and the sea will cover us all one day.

haggadah Section: -- Exodus Story

Source: Sofya Levitsky-Weitz