From: Amichai Lau-Lavie <amichai@labshul.org>
Date: Mon, Mar 26, 2018, at 7:12 PM
Date: Mon, Mar 26, 2018, at 7:12 PM
Subject: Dear Derrick
Derrick, dear brother and fellow traveler on this sacred season road,
I hope Holy Week started with intentions, and softly. I have a gift for you, and a request.
A palm weave was left on the sidewalk outside my home this morning, Palm Sunday leftovers. So I wrapped the roots of horseradish waiting in the kitchen to become the passover bitter herb for Seder – and it became this twisted beautiful icon of minor but so profound symbols of our holy seasons, and how they meet and bond. Something about bonds of our histories of bondage. Thus: Behold, image attached, as a token to this holy week ahead and the sacred days and nights of the full moon that we and our communities will honor together.
I’m thrilled and honored that you are joining us at the Sayder at the JCC Manhattan – and very excited to join you at St. James’ on Easter Sunday. I’m very grateful for the conversations we’ve been having these past weeks – got me to appreciate and understand the deeper layers of the Easter cycle, and also helped connect more deeply with more facets and aspects of the Passover story as the journey of our soul. Where Seder night meets Good Friday as it does this year, our ability to bring out stories to each other and honor them together is a profound privilege and a precious opportunity to sing the sacred together, bonded by bondage and bitter memories, our respective histories of persecutions, Christians and Jews, African American and White, we both happen to be gay… There are many narratives of liberation here to be celebrated and still fought for.
Inspired by this icon I have a request for you – as you prepare for Seder – bring the bitter. Share with us the meaning of this bitter mythic moment in Christian life, what it means to you, ministering in one of Harlem’s oldest churches, in the midst of this political moment? I know you’ll bring the song… and I say bring on the bitter, too.
Those roots in the photo get chopped up and ground up, served at Seder, mandatory eating. One teaspoon makes you cry. That’s the point. Often overlooked…
Actually tear up, for then, for now, cry, release, bring the bitter in, before you let it go. Bring bitter on.
For now the bitter is wrapped with the palm branches waved like those waved in Jerusalem on that spring day when Jesus rode into town, crowd shouting ‘Help us! Hosana!” I think of the Seder, and what you will bring to it, and how the cry for help and for justice continues, and how our sacred stories meet us at the core of our human being, the eternal return from bondage to liberation, from crucifixion to resurrection, from despair to hope. No Easter Sunday without Good Friday, no Song of the Sea without Slavery. We get to be each other’s liberators. Deliberately. Deliberators? :)
Seriously now.
Christian-Jewish relations have had their share of strains, and this season of Passover-Easter more often brought tensions and conflicts rather than shared respect and ritual observance. We are blessed to live at a moment and place enabling so many, including us, as neighbors and partners in so many sacred paths, to bring it on together in the holiest of ways. There’s enough bad blood still around. Racism and antisemitism along and plenty of fear-based religious attitudes obscure our path, dividing us in so many ways. So for us and our community to come together on these sacred days means something at this moment. A precious privilege and responsibility.
So. That’s the request. Holy week ahead. Lets’ talk or email about the bitter and the song and the details?
Thank you.
– Amichai
From: Derrick McQueen <pastor141@verizon.net>
Date: Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 1:02 PM
Subject: Re: Dear Derrick
To: Amichai Lau-Lavie <amichai@labshul.org>
Amichai, my beloved brother and sojourner on this bridge of sacred days,
Holy Week indeed started with intentions, albeit “softly” might not be the best term. Perhaps the term is forebodingly. It is always my intent to move through this week day by day in the Passion of this week without moving too quickly to the resolution and joy of Easter. It helps to put into context, for me, just how painful it is to be in a world that often painfully stifles others hopes. But each year I come away with hope undeterred for the upheaval of oppression and suffering. So, thank you for asking and really wanting to know.
The gift you share stirs something deep in me, Amichai. After having the children hand out palms on Sunday, we also marched around the church in protest not only shouting “Hosanna” but claiming “Hosanna” in it’s true sense of “Save Us”. We claimed that we would be saved from oppression, saved from injustice, saved from violence, saved from political indifference to the plight of others, saved so that black lives matter, saved from prison inequity. In calling out “Hosanna” and claiming deliverance we embraced the bitter notions of our reality. When I saw your gift of this image I knew that the procession of the palms into Jerusalem, so many years ago, had a profound connection with the liberation claimed in Passover.
Yes, I am thrilled to be joining LabShul once again, this time at the Sayder at the JCC Manhattan. I am humbled by the invitation take part. I am so excited for you to be with us again at St. James in Harlem, this time on Easter Sunday. Our conversations have woven their way in to my bible study of the Easter texts, a blog for a Liberation Bible Study for More Light Presbyterians, and has helped to inform my lesson plan on the texts for the undergraduate New Testament course I am teaching at Fordham University, at Lincoln Center. For me, Passover Seder is such an important part of my personal Christian understanding. I mention it every time I serve communion or the Eucharist as some understand it. Our conversations have given me much to think about in the connection between the Passover Seder and the Last Supper, especially the bitterness and hope all wrapped together in a promise of liberation.
As Seder meets Good Friday this year, I am taken back to the sacredness of the Hush Arbor of my African American ancestors. The place where we could gather and cry, dance, laugh and claim our freedom in ways that became part of the earth and sky itself, as earth shielded our sacred from our oppressors. I am taken back to the Seder meal that took place in the “upper room” with Jesus and his followers; the room and the Seder itself shielding their sacred from their oppressors. I am taken back to the in between moment of believing in divine promise and yet waiting to see if in fact, it will happen this time, on that first Passover, before the journey of freedom. Yes, my brother, we share many persecutions in our respective histories—Jews and African Americans, Christians and Jews and the gayness of our same gender loving selves.
This icon you present to me is bitter truth in many ways. I see the palm wrapped around the bitterness as a reflection of Christianity’s embrace of this most bitter moment of our faith. We tend to tie up the bitterness into a nice neat package of Easter’s joy. It is evocative of the notion espoused by theologian James Cone when he assesses how we want to move so quickly from Good Friday to Easter, to ignore the bitterness that makes us actually tear up, to cry, to bring the bitter in, before we let it go. Our icon, however goes deeper than that. It holds the pain of Good Friday, the death of hope in a world of hurt and oppression and ties it up. The palm makes us hold onto the bitterness until we can stare at it deeply enough to realize that it moves us to “Never Again”. It moves us forward to my own African American understanding that Easter is resistance. Theologically we understand Easter as the divine victory over death, that death’s pall over us has been lifted and that life is liberated from its grip.
Just as eating the bitter root on Passover begs us to remind ourselves of the bitterness, to use this to strengthen our resistance so that we never again repeat the history of our bondage; so Good Friday is the bitter reality of cruelness, of the brutality of a police state, Jesus’ brown life not mattering, a government that will sacrifice the innocent and wash their hands of the blood of those who suffer. It is oxymoronic to say “Good Friday” and yet in African American reality, maybe even our Christian reality, it rings true. Claiming the good of this barbaric Friday, is in my understanding, a rallying cry for “Never Again”. Or in other words, “Good, this Friday is over and I am determined for a day like this to never happen again.”
The bitter herb we will eat at Seder is reminiscent of the African icon and notion of Sankofa. She is a bird, moving forward but looking back with an egg resting on her body. She carries the young forward to liberation, while looking back to never forget the past. Beyond us sharing our faith traditions in this sharing of ritual observances, our coming together strikes a deeper chord. There is an ancestral and cultural connection between us. If I may but imagine for a moment, I see Sankofa flying just ahead of the people of Israel as they leave Egypt behind. She is calling them forward, telling them to cradle the generations, while looking back to remember so that the resolve remains, “Never again”.
I claim this vision while still knowing that Christian Jewish relations are strained over many different issues. But I will be honest with you and say that as an African American Christian, the tensions are mostly defined by White Christians. The bigger concern I have is the lingering racism and antisemitism between our communities; Jewish and African American. As a Christian I am to live by what the leaders of the Jewish faith in Jesus’ time agreed was the greatest commandment: “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” Both our peoples come from painful and violent histories of oppression. I posit that this commandment is the most difficult of all because we have to figure out how to heal amongst ourselves, learn to love ourselves so that we can love our neighbor and thereby love the Divine that covers us all.
I consider it an honor and a privilege to do this hard work with you, my brother. We may not have it all figured out. But I do know this one thing, the way to healing these wounds and sometimes even these hatreds, is to build relationship. This radical notion of becoming an expression of Beloved Community is as you say, “a precious privilege and responsibility”. I trust this, we are better together than in isolation. So, let us prepare ourselves during this Holy Week, a holy week for both of us.
Thank you ~
Derrick
