This is our Passover Plate. Since we are vegetarian we do not have a Zro’a, the traditional roasted bone to put on the plate. In the United States people may put beet, or an avocado seed instead.
I decided to paint a bone on the plate . This Seder plate that we use was made by my late father, who was a craftsman and artist and so I added my drawn bone to my father’s art.
The Passover Seder is the retelling of our passage from slavery to freedom, our defining central journey. We begin the Seder by opening the door to say, “All who are hungry, come and eat. All who are needy come and celebrate Passover with us.” This is the night that we are seated around the table, friends and families, to narrate our history as a people. We raise the matzah plate and recite, “This is the bread of poverty that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.”
The exodus powerful narrative has produced enduring timeless Jewish values of care, compassion and justice as foundational and compelling. In some communities it is customary to put an empty plate on the table to remember those less fortunate, those who are suffering, those in need of shelter, the homeless and the hungry. We who follow the custom, place pledges on the plate and commit to do a mitzvah of our choice to alleviate suffering in the coming year.
This intense psalm describes a state of frightening loneliness, of abandonment, of God’s face hiding, and of the psalmist’s sense of being a worm rather than human.
The metaphor of a worm is striking and unique, precisely because it is so rarely used: it appears only twice, in this psalm and in Isaiah’s prophecy (44).
The Psalm begins with a piercing cry, “Eli, Eli, My God, My God, why have You abandoned me”; a scream of existential loneliness of the psalmist, “You are my God, no one but You has ever been my God, why have You deserted me now?!.” The cry is about a double separation: the spatial distance from God – “until You will not be close to me to be my salvation in times of need,” and the emotional remoteness – “until You cannot even hear my roaring,” and despite my loud cry that can be heard afar, “You would know nothing of my troubles”—abandonment as well as hiding God’s face (Malbim). All these become a daily unbearable pain, “ in the morning I call and you do not respond, and at night I have no respite.”
The big news story today is that the Syrian government has probably used nerve gas against Syrian rebels, killing a number of civilians. Because we place poison gas in a different category from conventional means of killing people from the air, and because the Asad government is despicable, it has received a good deal of attention, temporarily driving the latest Trump scandal from the lead story in the news.
The biggest problem in trying to follow the news in recent months hasn’t been fake news—though there certainly has been enough of that, thank you very much—but too much real news, like water from a burst dam, flooding everything, saturating our ability to follow it. It has been difficult to follow any one story as it quickly rushes by, and we all seem to be unable to concentrate on any one story for very long.