The Revolutionary Story of the Women's Seder

By Sarah Biskowitz

In 2011, the year I became a bat mitzvah, I crowded into the Milwaukee JCC with a lively group for the Community Women’s Seder. I followed along as dozens of Jewish women, of all ages and denominations, led us in rituals and prayers. We used a special haggadah that discussed women’s experiences, singing and dancing along the way. As a young teenager, this event made me realize that my feminist and Jewish identities were not only compatible but complementary. Recently, I gained a newfound appreciation for Women’s Seders after learning their inspiring history.

The Telling: The Story of a Group of Jewish Women Who Journey to Spirituality through Community and Ceremony (1993) by E.M. [Esther] Broner illuminates how the Women’s Seder that I attended as a twelveyear-old was the legacy of a historic feminist phenomenon. The story of the original Women’s Seders provides a rich example for us contemporary young Jews to find grounding in the Jewish tradition, and build new meanings and communities upon it.

In 1975, Broner and Naomi Nimrod (an Israeli scholar) recognized the sexism of the typical Passover seder. Seders often revolved around male attendees, while relying on the thankless labor of women. And only the male heroes of the Exodus were celebrated.

Broner and Nimrod came up with a radical idea: creating a seder that centered Jewish women, past and present. Working to “[enlarge their] matrilineage,” they created her to discover “the purpose of ritual” and Jewish community.

The Women’s Haggadah. The Women’s Haggadah feminized traditional parts of the seder, including The Four Daughters (instead of the Four Sons), The Plagues of Women, and a feminist Dayenu. It added the stories of Ima Shalem and Beruriah of the Talmud, and recognized the heroines of the Exodus like Miriam.

Using this haggadah, the first communal Women’s Seders were held concurrently in New York and in Haifa in 1976. After that, Broner continued to co-lead an annual Women's Seder with more or less the same group in New York City. Many famous second-wave American Jewish feminists were regular organizers or attendees, including activist Gloria Steinem, politician Bella Abzug, and writers Grace Paley and Letty Cottin Pogrebin. There were also many accomplished but lesser-known feminists, like artist Bea Kreloff, Canadian journalist Michele Landsberg, and American-Israeli filmmaker Lily Rivlin. As other communities were inspired and began to hold their own Women’s Seders, Broner and her cohort continued to meet every Passover for thirty years.

To begin the seder each year, Broner invited participants to introduce themselves by reciting their mothers and grandmothers. Over the years, the group members themselves began to refer to each as Seder Sisters. Eventually, biological and surrogate daughters joined as well.

Maintaining the annual seder was not always easy–clashes and tensions sometimes emerged. Broner embraced discussion and critique, explaining: “Like any sports game, analysis and gossip are all part of the mixture, the mortar.” But when rifts lingered, the group invented rituals to communicate and reconcile, including a Healing Ceremony around Rosh Hashanah.

The Women’s Seder evolved along with the Sisters, and the Jewish feminist world as a whole. The group adapted their Hebrew prayers to use feminine language and invoke the Shekhinah as a divine female presence. They incorporated old Yiddish songs and readings reflecting the current political moment. When Debbie Friedman recorded the album And You Shall Be A Blessing (1989) and when Judith Plaskow published Standing at Sinai (1990), the seder excerpted these works.

The Women’s Seder represented just a small piece of its participants’ Jewish feminist involvement; these women devoted their lives to causes that remain pressing. Broner and several others were part of the first group of women to take a Torah to the Kotel; this group later became Women of the Wall, who are still fighting for the freedom to pray at the Kotel without harassment. At the seder in 1991, activist Merle Hoffman declared, “soon it will be illegal to have an abortion in this country.” Unfortunately, her prediction has become all too true in many states. Jewish feminist activism is needed now more than ever on these issues and more.

I am grateful for the Seder Sisters’ groundbreaking work to forge Jewish feminist ritual and community. Though their lifestyles, professions, and Jewish observance differed, the Seder Sisters gathered every year on Passover to recount the Exodus and discuss how to bring our world from Mitzrayim (the narrow place) to Yerushalayim (a city of peace). They serve as an inspiring example for contemporary young Jews of all genders and backgrounds to come together, celebrate our heritage, and contribute to its evolution and vibrancy.

I did not know about the origin of the Women’s Seder when I attended as a pre-teen in 2011, but now I am proud to claim my spot in the Seder Sisters’ legacy. This Passover, let’s recount not only the story of Moses but also of Miriam, Yocheved, Batyah, Shifrah, and Puah. And let’s remember not only the generation of Israelites who experienced the liberation of the Exodus, but also the many generations who fought for women’s liberation, within and beyond the Jewish community–including the Seder Sisters.

About Sarah Biskowitz

In this way, the Seder Sisters became a “chosen family,” as Gloria Steinem called it,

Sarah Biskowitz ia student in the Year Program and the journal editor fellow at Pardes. She also leads the popular Pardes Yiddish Club. Sarah worked at the Yiddish Book Center as the 2021-2022 Richard S. Herman fellow in bibliography and exhibitions. For more information, visit www.sarahbiskowitz.com

Artist Statement

Here is a digital collage depicting the sight of the splitting of the Red Sea. Initially getting inspiration for the project from the depiction of the same scene in “Prince of Egypt,” I’ve been creatively inspired by the experience of splitting the sea for as long as I can remember. Regardless of trying to imagine the logistics for the impacted sea-creatures when the sea split, imagining any large body of water splitting in half to reveal soil dry enough to walk on is very powerful.

To make this collage, I used Canva and tried to match the teals and blues to what I imagined the sea might have looked like. This collage was also an experiment for me artistically. Generally, I’ve built up the reputation to use any opportunity to use Canva yet to this point I’d never made such an elaborate artistic piece on the platform. The bright spot in the center of the image, while the pshat is that it is the sun, the midrash could be the sheer brightness of the future of the Jewish people shining between the waters when the sea split.

About Liora

Liora Finkel is from Montville, New Jersey, and graduated from Muhlenberg College in May 2022 with a degree in Religion Studies. In her senior year, Liora combined her academic passions of Near Eastern Studies and Gender Studies by completing a senior honors thesis on polytheistic practices among Middle Eastern women. At Pardes, Liora participates in the 2022-2023 Pardes Experiential Educators Program. After Pardes, beginning September 2023, Liora will continue her studies at JTS at the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education, working toward a master's degree in Jewish education.

Splitting of the Sea

By Liora Finkel

Viola Sonata "Geula"

I: Shi'bud Isaac Gantwerk Mayer

Shi'bud

By Isaac Gantwerk Mayer

דובעש (bondage)

This is the first movement of a longerterm project, a four-movement viola sonata meant to tell the story of the Exodus narrative through the lens of music. Specifically, what is included here is the first movement, "Shi'bud," reflecting the experience of slavery. The piece is introduced with a heavily accented "scream" motif near the very top of the viola's range, before speeding up into an anxious fastpaced minor work march for the primary theme of the piece. This continues until abruptly breaking into the secondary theme, a sweetly flowing "waters motif." In the process of going through the stages of a normative sonata form (exposition, development, recapitulation), the water theme inevitably returns, but tinged with an air of menace that leads right back into the scream of the introduction — this time reflecting the murder of the children of the Israelites. Then it transitions into an uncertain and unsteady major triad in a totally unrelated key. Woven throughout the movement is a repeated descending motif, on account of the rabbinic notion that Israel descended both literally and figuratively when in Egypt. Later movements will continue the story. The second movement will be in minuet form and reflect Moses's childhood and life before returning to Egypt. The third movement will be a theme with ten variations (one for each plague) concluding with a reference to the original scream motif. And the final movement will be a celebratory rondo reflecting the dancing at the shore of the sea.

About Isaac

From a family of musicians, Isaac Gantwerk Mayer (PEP Cohort 22) believes that creative art is one of the most powerful ways to get in touch with the Divine. He composes music and poetry in Hebrew and English.

To listen to Isaac's music, scan the QR code here:

What Does it Mean to “Know God?”: A Neo-Hasidic Reading of the Plague of Blood

By Jonah Gelfand

It wouldn’t be a seder without recounting the ten plagues. As we dip our pinkies into the wine, we list off dam (blood), tzfardeiya (frogs), kinim (lice), etc.

But what is the actual purpose of these plagues?

Many of us assume that they are simply attempts to force Pharoah to “let My people go.” (Ex 5:1) And perhaps they are. But if we look into the rationale given in the Torah, we learn that God originally sent the plagues to make it so that Pharaoh “knows that there is no one like Me in all the universe.” (Ex 9.14) They are not first-and–foremost arguments toward the Israelites’ release, but evidence of the Divine.

But what does it actually mean to know (te’da) God? We learn from the Hasidic leader, Rebbe Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl that knowledge (da’at) is representative of a spiritual awareness, an expanded consciousness. R. Nahum teaches that not only does God use Torah to create the world, but that the presence of the Creator remains in the created. This is to say that the Divine does not exist separate from our world but is present in all that exists.1 Hasidut teaches us that obtaining this consciousness is the purpose of our lives.

Furthermore, R. Nahum understands that

1 Me’or Enayim, breishit 1

2 Me’or Enayim, vayera 1.

3 Bava Kama 82a the exile in Egypt was — at its spiritual core — an exile of this knowledge (da’at). If that awareness was cultivated (i.e., brought back out of exile), the world would be seen to be brimming with Divinity.2

Thus to “know God” is to be tuned into the imminent Godliness that permeates all reality. Is this the kind of knowledge that God wanted Pharaoh to obtain? And if so, what do we see as God’s first attempt to “wake him up”?: the plague of blood.

In the narrative of the story, Moses brought about this plague by striking the Nile, after which it all turned to blood. (Ex. 7:20) Here too, the rationale given by God is that “By this you shall know (te’da) that I am the Lord.” (Ex. 7:17)

But how is the plague of blood an attempt to raise Pharoah to the knowledge of God?

The answer lies in its two components: water (mayim) and blood (dam).

In the Talmud, we learn that “water” is Torah. It is that flowing mayim hayim — “living water” — that is ever sustaining the world.3 Since we already learned from R. Nahum that God is present in all of Creation through Torah , “water consciousness” in our discussion is the constant awareness of the radically immanent presence of God. To interact with the world through water consciousness is to see through the multiplicity of the world and to find beneath it the One — the divine hiyyut (Lifeforce) that flows through all things. The mystics teach us that God is One and all is contained in that one, but when we look out on the world, we do not see that. We see separate entities which are seemingly unrelated to one another.

The Baal Shem Tov says of this multiplicity that “If you know the blessed Holy One is hiding, then God is not truly hidden.”4 If we know that God is manifesting in all these diverse forms, then we see God in all things. And this is the way of the tzaddikim — the holy beings — who are able to see the Divine in the mundane. For them, the world is bubbling over with Divinity.

But what about the average person? What about me? How am I to know God? And if this knowledge (da’at) is the purpose of our Creation, why do we not automatically experience the world as shimmering with holiness? Why are we created such that our baseline disposition is to see the world as mundane?

The answer from our tradition is that this awareness was taken from us.

Initially, it seems strange that the first thing God does in Sefer Shemot to bring Pharoah (or maybe us?) into knowledge of

4 Toledot Yaakov Yosef, breishit 1a

5 Niddah 30b

God — i.e., the first plague — is to turn the water into blood. [Exodus 7:20] Isn’t this counterintuitive? Wouldn’t God want us to be able to see the water more clearly and not change it into something else? What are we to learn from this?

This only starts to make more sense when we hold it next to the Talmud’s teaching that we learn the whole Torah in utero but are made to forget it as soon as we are born.5 In fact, we know that the amniotic fluid is composed mostly of water and so (in our proposed framework), fetuses are sustained by Torah! Our original creation thus contained within it this knowledge: all of Torah was known to us. But we lose it with our first breath of air out of the womb; when we are made “flesh and blood.”

One might say that once we are incarnated into bodies with thoughts and needs and desires, we are distracted from the reality of ever-present Divinity. We are brought from the prenatal expanded consciousness of “water” into the embodied, constricted consciousness of “blood.”

What are we to make of this? Why does God take this from us?

The answer is to be found in the Hasidic principle of avodah b’gashmiut, or service in physicality.6 We were not created as pure spiritual energy (like angels) but as

6 See Noam Elimelekh on va-yashev and Degel Macheneh Ephraim on Ki Tissa and elsewhere embodied creatures. And it is in fact precisely through our embodiment that we are to serve — a— and thus “know”— God. The gashmiut — physicality — of this world, is “blood consciousness.” If one were to see it merely as physical, it would be a mundane thing indeed.

But far from scorning the materiality of “blood consciousness” and attempting to transcend it into pure “water consciousness,” our tradition teaches us to value our embodiment. When used appropriately, materiality is the life-giving substance that flows through our veins. Our blood is actually our mayim hayim — “living water.” Without it, we wouldn’t survive.

One, who is the cosmic aleph (a), one becomes adam (a complete person).”

7 To understand this, we must understand that Hebrew letters have numerical value — aleph is 1, bet is 2, etc — and that the mystics have understood aleph to be referring to the only true and original One: God. Visually, this teaching from the Maggid can thus be written as: person = ם+ד and God= א

It is precisely through dam that we can interact with God. Perhaps this is what is meant when God says kol dimei ahikha tzo’akim — “the blood of your brother cries out to me.” 8[Gen. 4:10] Our blood is what enables us to tzo’ak — “cry out” — to God.

Therefore we see that it is not by transcending the physical world that we find our liberation. Rather it is through interacting with the physical world through the correct consciousness — by merging the blood and water. It is not that we are stuck either in water or blood consciousness, but we are a combination of both physical and spiritual awareness.

Baal Shem Tov reframes hiyyo to refer not to the “living things” (i.e., the angels) but instead to Lifeforce itself. And this Lifeforce is constantly growing and shrinking; shifting between different levels of consciousness.9 One cannot stay in water consciousness forever but must constantly shift between the two, understanding that both, water and blood, are required.

And this complication of the blood/water binary is true in the plagues themselves! God changes the water into blood not to block the Israelites from knowing God, but to present the physicality which blood represents as the vehicle through which the nation would know God! In the end it is specifically through blood that the Israelites find their liberation: the blood on their doorposts which spared their firstborn on the eve of the Exodus.10 (Ex 12.22) Similarly, today if we use our physicality with mindfulness of its underlying holiness, we are that much closer to “knowing God” in our lives.

And this is why God says that it is in the blood (i.e., our physicality) that the nefesh — “soul/life” — is found. [Lev. 17.14]

About Jonah

Jonah (he/him) is in the Year Program at Pardes and is the Jewish Spirituality Fellow. He co-founded and is co-editor of the online publication, Gashmius Magazine: Towards a Progressive neo-Hasidism. He got his Masters in Jewish Studies from the Graduate Theological Union, where his research focused on Hasidism and neo-Hasidic leadership.

The Maggid continues by teaching that “when one connects themself with the Holy

7 Maggid Devarav le-Ya’akov, be ha’alotekha.

This idea is encapsulated in how the Baal Shem Tov understood the line ha-hiyyot ratzo v’shov in Ezekiel 1:14. Narratively, this referred to Ezekial viewing the angels in heaven and remarking that the “living things were running and returning.” But the

8 Thank you to my wonderful havruta, Adira Rosen, for pointing out this connection to me.

9 Keter Shem Tov 1:24:2

10 Thank you to Louie Zweig for pointing this out to me.

Between Poland and Jerusalem: An Exodus

By Yitzi Gittelsohn

These poems emerged from my time spent in Poland with Pardes friends and mentors. I wrote one on each day of the five-day journey, ending with the sixth day on which we arrived back in Jerusalem. The reflections wrestle with and mourn the Holocaust sites we visited, celebrate and explore my ancestral connection to the land, and try to locate beauty amidst a dark past. As I entered and then left the places where our ancestors were enslaved and murdered, I felt as if I were descending into and then arising from Mitzrayim. I made my way back to the Promised Land, both literally and figuratively: literally by returning to Jerusalem, and figuratively by uncovering beauty and connection within a haunted land and past.

For the first time

Day 2 - Grounding (Rocks at Treblinka)

The rocks were really heavy They must have been really heavy to move, All those rocks, Together, For the monument.

The lives must have been even heavier, They must have been really heavy to move, All those lives, Together, To kill.

But they were wrong: They made the world so much heavier, Because the lives that were lost too soon, The millions of lives, Sit on the ground like heavy rocks, Boulders, And now the world has to hold them, Forever, So the world is heavier, And so are their hearts, And so are our hearts.

To our rightful place In the world to come.

Now every moment is a gift, Every moment they don’t take from us, In the fear that it will make their lives intolerable, And we get to live now, A heavy life.

Day 1 - Landing (In Ancestral Land)

Landed in Warsaw

Got in a packed bus

Got out at Chopin Airport

My favorite composer to play Growing up

On the plane

Sank beneath the clouds

And saw flat brown fields stretching on forever

And thought

This is where my ancestors lived?

And wondered if I should Say a blessing

Upon seeing my ancestral land

I don’t think that they didn’t care About us,

I think that they cared too much, I think we were really heavy for them, Too heavy,

And they wanted to cut us out Like a tumor.

They couldn’t handle the heaviness of their own life, Of the world, So they tried to lighten it, lighten it, lighten it By burning the heaviness away.

But standing amidst the heavy rocks, In the center of them, With a friend, And my people, I felt the lives that had been lost there All sitting around me, Deeply rooted in the earth, And I felt a lightness Ascending upward, For coming together In our heaviness, We somehow become light.

When we cut away the heaviness, And try to burn it to the heavens, We only become heavier.

When we come together in our heaviness, We become lighter, And rise naturally, with those who came before and after us

No need to cut things out of it, No need to cut it down, No need to kill, The earth that holds so many boulders Can hold so many lives.

And we can just let go, A little bit in each moment, With each exhale, Each connection, We become Just a little Lighter.

All those people killed, All our ancestors, Should not just be remembered for being killed, They should be remembered For the moments they didn’t take life Or each other For granted, For the moments when they recognized How heavy this life was For it could be snatched away,

Day 3 - Remembering (Great Great Grandma)

I just discovered

I am in the region

That my grandpa’s grandma is from In Galicia, Poland

Bertha Einhorn

I felt a rush of joy

At the timely discovery

That I am in an ancestral homeland

For real this time

I didn’t know I had anyone from Poland

And I found out while I’m here

Thanks to my Great Uncle Joel

One of the last of his generation I’m connected to

She was a single mother

With nine kids

She came to America with nine kids

And no husband

And no money

Her husband Isaac was killed in World War

I

Because of which the rest of them evaded the Shoah

If he hadn’t been killed

That ancestor with my name

Would they have stayed

And been killed, all of them

Including my Great Grandma Mildred

In a death camp

Like the one I saw today?

Great Grandma Mildred was 5 when Isaac died around 1920

She would have been 17 in 1942

The year when most Polish Jews Were killed

Would she have been sent to Majdanek

The concentration camp I visited today

A camp where many Jews from Galicia would have been sent?

If she was 17, and they needed labor

She might not have been sent to the gas chambers

Right away

She might have walked

Through the cold blowing rain

From the barracks to the crematorium

As I did today

Though she would not have had warm clothes

And she would not have had a comfortable bus to drive her away

And she would not have been going to remember a horrific past event

She would have been a part of it

And going to help shovel the ashes

Of her own people

And she might have stepped outside the crematorium

As the rain turned to softly falling snow

And been comforted for a moment

And been comforted for a moment

Imagining a life in which she was never sent to the Majdanek camp

Because she had gone

With her mother and eight siblings

Years earlier

To join their family in America

In New Jersey

Where she was safe

And could find a nice Jewish boy to marry

And have two nice Jewish boys with Don and Joel

Who would have their own families

Who would have their own

One of them

Being me

I’m from the world where that happened

Because Isaac died in World War I, not World War II

Funny how bad things lead to good things sometimes

And what is incomprehensible is how many Jews must have imagined or yearned for, in their imprisonment, the freedom to have children, or grandchildren, or great great grandchildren

And how, for them, that flame was extinguished so quickly, for so many

I am the miraculous continuation of Bertha’s, of Gertrude’s, of Don’s, of Ellen’s flame. So many miracles had to happen for me to speak these words

To you.

Day 4 - Softening (In the Forest)

I started to learn how to soften today

Not needing to expect myself to feel the most intensity

At the sites of mass graves

Of mass murders

We went into the forest

The Polish forest

And I allowed myself to smell the crispness of the air

To see the wisdom of the tall trees

To feel the grounding of the earth

While I honored the lives lost there All around me

Was the unavoidable truth that life had persisted

That life is always persisting

Nature continues on

And I felt more connected to this nature

Knowing that my great great grandmother Bertha

And my great great grandfather Isaac

Knew this nature too

Maybe those same woods

For they were a farming family

Here in Galicia, Poland

And they knew the earth, the trees, and the air

Like family

And like family they had to tear themselves away

Whether in the death of war

Or the pain of immigration

And like family I have returned

Many generations later

In a sort of homecoming

And I will have to tear myself away as well

But I’m grateful for this glimpse of home

Even if that home is a grave to so many

It will live forever in my heart

Day 5 - Releasing (At Auschwitz)

At Auschwitz, at the end of the day

We held our memorial rocks

And sang ‘Eli, Eli, Oh Lord, My God

I pray that these things never end

The sand and the sea

The rush of the waters

The crash of the heavens

The prayer of the heart’

And I felt a release

Of much heaviness

That built up over 5 days

That built up over a day of being in a place

Where 1.1 million people

1 million of my people

Were murdered

So efficiently

The scale is too large to imagine, to hold

And I found myself humming the song

‘Loosen, loosen baby, you don’t have to carry the weight of the world in your muscles and bones, let go, let go, let go’

And sitting in that circle with our rocks, praying for the continuation of life

I let go

And let my community hold the weight

And let the land hold the weight of the world

The land that my ancestors farmed and knew intimately

‘I don’t have to hold the weight of this history’, I thought to myself

As we walked outside into the softly falling snow and the fading afternoon light

I walked slowly

Meandering

Letting my mind loosen

Something the prisoners did not have the luxury to do

There is a horror and a harshness and an evil to this place that has held unfathomable death and suffering

A coldness to knowing that a people went to such great lengths to cut away your people

Like a tumor

From the face of this earth

What caused such a strong desire

In their hearts

To be so distant from us as to erase our bodies from the earth?

Maybe

They were trying to hold the entire weight of the world

In their muscles and bones

And feeling that weight

Wanted to remove

Like a surgery

What they saw as bad weight

By doing so, they only added weight to the world

Endless heaps of bodies and trauma

We all must hold

If they only remembered that the world can hold all of us, together

All our beauties and flaws

And that they did not have to bear the weight on their own shoulders

They might not have needed to invent that evil operation

In a vain attempt at annihilation

They might not have needed to harden their hearts

Seeking protection from their own fear of annihilation

Of losing the power of gods

Like Pharaoh

Fearing the loss of his kingship, his godship

Fearing that indeed there was a god more powerful than him

To let go of our fear of loss of power

Is to let life live

Is to let our emotions, our thoughts live

Is to let our friends live

Is to let an entire people live

Let people go, let the wild happenings of life ride their wild journeys

Let yourself be its own mysterious unfolding self

And let god be in control

If we truly did that

We could walk out of Auschwitz

80 years later

Taste the fresh snow on our tongue

And feel a moment of peace

In what was hell on earth

We have gone down to Egypt

We have escaped and survived

We have returned

And we have made the narrow place wide open space

We have brought death back to life

We have turned hatred into love

We have turned separation back into connection

Auschwitz has been an Egypt

Perhaps the worst in our people’s history

It can also be an Eden

For the trees there are still holy

The snow is still sweet

And the ground can hold us

Like a loving mother’s warm embrace

Keeping her child safe

After a terrible, terrible nightmare

Who sings a lullaby as he falls back to to sleep:

‘Loosen, loosen baby, you don’t have to carry the weight of the world in your muscles and bones, let go, let go, let go’.

Day 6 - Resurrecting (Valley of the Ghosts)

I woke up to the sound of children playing

In Jerusalem

I walked down the street

Busy with shoppers before Shabbos

I thought to myself, ‘All these people

Survived The Final Solution’

They all survived Miraculously

In each passerby’s face

I saw one of the portraits of prisoners at Auschwitz

In the children passing me by With their abundant energy

I saw the pictures of children getting off the train at Auschwitz

Holding each other’s hands

Being held by their mothers and grandmothers

Those lost souls

Have come back to life on this bustling modern Jerusalem street

On Emek Refaim:

“Valley of the Ghosts”

This is the valley of the ghosts

We were all supposed to be dead

They wanted us dead

We have been revived

M’chayei ha’meitim

In this moment,

I understand why this place is so precious to so many Jews

How could you not feel

After having descended to Auschwitz

And then risen to Jerusalem

That you have made it from Egypt

To the Promised Land?

About Yitzi

Yitzi, currently in the Pardes Year Program, is a singer-songwriter, poet, and budding spiritual leader from Vermont. Check out his soundcloud at https://on.soundcloud.com/Eqi82SkyAih9FxJo9

Coming Out of Egypt

By Julia Gluck

I’m coming out of Egypt. The waters parted, I walked on dry land, Solid beneath my feet, the soles of which Had finally let go the last of my Egypt.

I’m coming out of Egypt: the narrow place In which I had confined myself, Resisting with all I knew The disease which has taken My husband from me.

I’m coming out of Egypt, That narrow place was dark, Heavy with anger, resentment and guilt, Emotions which claimed me for their own.

I’m coming out of Egypt, And it matters not how my heart softened. I know that now.

It matters not how my mind stilled its chatter Nor how my body became suffused with calm.

I’ve come out of Egypt. I’ve had a revelation.

I’m in the promised land.

My husband Ted was a poster boy for Parkinson’s Disease from October 2006 until June 2019. In early 2020, he was diagnosed with Lewy-Body Dementia. I had two weeks of respite shortly afterward which allowed me to come to terms with the growing likelihood that we didn’t have much more time together. He died October 19, 2020. The specific pasuk which inspired me to write this poem was in Beshalach, 14:30:

םירצמ דימ לארשי תא אוהה םויב םשה עשויו That was just after I came back from the respite break.

About Julia

Julia Gluck lives in Toronto. She attended Hillel Academy in Ottawa for her elementary education. Her BA in Judaic Studies is from the University of Toronto and her third year was at Hebrew University. She attends a small traditional egalitarian synagogue in downtown Toronto. She and her late husband Ted attended many classes at Pardes when they started spending part of their winters in Jerusalem in 2010 and she has been taking an online Pardes course with Rahel Berkovits on Talmud for the last three years.