For our Passover Seder, we ask people to share a story from their own experience or imagination that rhymes somehow with the exodus from slavery. Here’s how we put the prompt this time:
This year, we’re feeling like Mitzrayim is here and our challenge is to allow something far better to push through and be born. So whether you want to share about a past time when that happened or dream into a future time that opens out, I’m sure everyone will welcome your words.
Mitzrayim is Hebrew for Egypt, but also connotes straits or narrow places, even the birth canal. I wrote this year’s prompt with my fingers crossed, hoping that stories would emerge to uplift us all. I thought it was my own idea, but I soon realized that something in the moment must have whispered the prompt into my ear, because it emerged directly from a bit of history that hadn’t been on my mind.
The Passover Haggadah is the book of prayers and instructions and rituals that guides us through the Seder. The event is at once a meal and a kind of experiential learning symposium (reportedly influenced by the Romans’ habit of combining high-minded conversation with leisurely consumption of food and drink, as in Plato’s Symposium). But this way of celebrating our liberation is very different from the directions in the biblical books of Exodus, Numbers, and beyond. There, the key element is an exacting sacrifice and ritual consumption of a lamb in holy precincts, which morphed into an even larger and more formalized communal observance when the Temple stood in Jerusalem.
With the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans seven decades into the common era, animal sacrifice ended. It was impossible to bring gifts for sacrifice to the High Priest because the rituals—even the existence of the High Priest—could not continue in the absence of the Temple. The people were faced with a massive challenge: with the utter destruction of their way of life and worship, how would holiness and Divine connection be possible?
The first inklings of the Haggadah emerged perhaps a hundred years into the common era. As time passed, elements have been added and adapted, a process that continues today as people create their own Haggadot to reflect their kinship with many struggles for liberation, for the protection of Planet Earth, for radical inclusion. But no matter how different Haggadot may be from each other, the underlying purpose is the same: for people in their homes, generation upon generation, to experience the long struggle for liberation as if we ourselves had been enslaved, left Egypt, and sojourned forty years in the wilderness.
This made me think of something I’d read and written about in 2007, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, a wonderful book by Jonathan Lear that traces the determination of the Crow people to renew their lives after a great change that rendered their former path impossible. Here’s how I described it:
“The book tells of the Crow people, forced by encroaching white power a century ago to trade a way of life shaped by hunting and battle for settled life on a reservation. A powerful account from the great Crow leader Plenty Coups says it all: ‘When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.’”
Just as the story of the Jews 2000 years ago could have ended in extinction and erasure, the story of the Crow people could have ended that way. Instead, writing about Lear, Charles Taylor describes how Plenty Coups offered his people a revolutionary path to renewal:
“Plenty Coups was able to help bring about this kind of redefinition for his people. He drew on the established practice of going into the wilderness to seek a revelation through a dream. The dream he reported foretold in thinly veiled terms the end of the Crow way of life, but it also promised a kind of survival for the Crow, provided they could listen ‘like the Chickadee,’ that is, observe others, and find new ways of going on. These were, of course, at that stage wholly unknown, but the dream was the basis for the hope that somehow, beyond just biological survival, the Crow way of life might continue in a yet to be defined new form.”
I’ve been pretty demoralized by the scope of wreckage and total absence or conscience or compassion Trump has left in his wake in so short a time. I don’t have a lot of ideas about how to pick up the pieces and somehow restore the imperfect order of a few months ago, how to have a starting place where the people in charge haven’t cut off lifesaving aid, thrown children and elders to the wolves, pillaged the economy so that the richest few could profit at the expense of everyone else—and much more.
But I find myself thinking with a newly rediscovered freshness about the subject of Lear’s book. I want to be inspired by both these stories to wrench my thoughts away from restoration to true renewal. It isn’t that the loss in either story is insignificant. In both cases, it was massive, encompassing a way of life, a self-understanding, all sense of value. It isn’t that each people’s renewal of vision and understanding didn’t entail conflicts, contested lands, negotiation and compromise. It did. But it also led to the possibility of survival and self-determination.
Now, about the film I promised you. It contains exactly nothing about the Jews or the Crow people, but my search for inspiration in these times took me there and I want to tell you why. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a 2024 Oscar-nominated, Sundance award-winning long, gorgeously made, incredibly well-documented, musically amazing, and startlingly informative documentary about the political machinations that led to the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. I couldn’t write a better description than the one on Kino Lorber’s page:
“2025 Oscar® nominee for Best Documentary Feature. United Nations, 1960: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe, and the U.S. State Department swings into action, sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup. Director Johan Grimonprez captures the moment when African politics and American jazz collided in this magnificent essay film, a riveting historical rollercoaster that illuminates the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congo’s leader Patrice Lumumba. Richly illustrated by eyewitness accounts, official government memos, testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives, speeches from Lumumba himself, and a veritable canon of jazz icons, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat interrogates colonial history to tell an urgent and timely story of precedent that resonates more than ever in today’s geopolitical climate.”
Why am I urging you to see it now? Because our massive apparatus of headlines and newscasts and pundits is clogged with superficial and therefore normalizing reporting of the rapid dawn of authoritarianism led by Trump. As in Congo 60 years ago, the true story of corruption, self-dealing, evil intentions and conscience-free violence is there for those who take the trouble to look for it (read Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, and many others), but entirely unseen by most of the people whose suffering will be greatest if Trump succeeds.
Seeing this amazingly good film made me realize that we can’t dream our way into the post-Trump future until we are fully awake to the nightmare he is busy imposing. If we can’t see through the impersonations of diplomacy and cowardly submissions that are being offered to take in a truthful account of what is happening, I fear that our task will be not renewal but defeat. You can rent it in lots of places. Please, please do.
“Freedom Day” from We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite with Abbey Lincoln.