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The Brick: A Seder Symbol for Trans Women in Our Community
Contributed by Noraa Kaplan

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

The brick was used to oppress us, as it is written: “They embittered our lives with hard labor, with mortar and with bricks.” (Exodus 1:14)
Brick was a weight on our backs and a stumbling block at our feet. We built great cities and temples to glorify our own domination.
Today, bricks build the walls of prison-houses, just as in Mitzrayim they built monuments to slavery. 
There they built cities, and here they build border walls that divide nation and nation, people and people.
There is a brick on our table tonight to embrace our unity. We struggle against walls that seek to keep us apart. 
We must dismantle barriers, divisions, and binaries wherever they stand and have stood.
If we are to be free, we must tear down dividing walls at the borders of our nations and the mechitzas of our synagogues.
‘Brick’ is a slur for some of our world’s most vulnerable. It is used to keep down trans women who don’t or can’t or don’t want to pass.
Some trans people build walls between themselves and their sisters. Like the wicked child, they cut themselves off from the collective.
All of us are built, and build ourselves. No one is born finished. Each one of us is a project that we must complete.  
“We come from the earth, and to earth we return.” (Ecclesiastes 3:20) If all we are is earth, we can sculpt ourselves in our own image.
“Like clay in the hands of the potter,” (Jeremiah 18:6) in our own skillful hands, so our bodies can be. 
There is a brick on the table to remind us to shape our bodies in holiness, when it is safe to do so.
Our struggle in Egypt ended when we put down our bricks and left. Another struggle began at Stonewall when we picked bricks up. 
No one knew that night that bricks would be thrown. No one brought them in advance. 
They simply saw them on the street, and saw an opportunity. They picked the bricks up where they lie and the rest is history. 
There is a brick on our table tonight to teach us to look for radical possibilities everywhere. Miracles happen amidst desperation.  
Tonight we consecrate prophets like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major who fought for all of us.
They saw a piece of the world that was broken, and knew how to fix it. Hashem called them to justice and strengthened their hands. (Isaiah 42:6)
In every tool of construction, there is potential for destruction. In every act of destruction, there’s potential for liberation.
Let every border wall, every prison house, every Pitom and Ramses be torn down brick by brick. 
Let a plague of bricks rain down like hail upon the heads of unkosher pigs. Let every window be shattered until prisons can no longer be. 
Let every shard of broken glass be gathered together into a prism. Let every broken heart be made whole.   
Let every body be sculpted into our own divine image. Let every incarcerated soul be set free.
Ken yehi ratzon. So may it be. 
 
haggadah Section: Introduction
Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan

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