It was a packed house at 2640 Space in Charles Village for the Second Night Community Liberation Passover Seder on April 13 hosted by Hinenu: The Baltimore Justice Shtiebl.
This year marked the second Passover Seder that Hinenu has put together for the community, and around 100 people attended the sold-out event while several more attended via Zoom.
Hinenu’s rabbi, Ariana Katz, said before the event that the Seder would engage the community’s interfaith families and several multifaith guests with which the community has worked and shared meeting space with at the Homewood Friends Building.
“We have a large number of multifaith guests coming, some who will be offering some words about liberation and, just in general, getting to celebrate the holiday with us because we’re so used to organizing together, seeing each other in the streets and getting work done,” Katz said.
Katz added that she always tells those partners that she’s excited for the chance to see them around the table at the holidays rather than only coming together at protests.
Katz said that the reason why the Seder is held on the second night is because many people enjoy spending the first night of Passover doing a Seder with close family members and friends.
But putting together a large community Seder is a lot of work, and Katz said Hinenu has had a committee planning Passover celebrations for around two months.
Katz said that despite all the work she and the committee are putting in to have this event, it benefits people in the sense that they don’t have to do a lot of domestic labor in preparation.
“I often find that women and fem folks are often doing the lion’s share of preparing the house and cooking the food. The benefits of [Passover] being a home-based holiday are myriad, but the cost of it is at the expense of individuals in the family who bear the brunt of domestic labor,” Katz said.
Katz said another benefit of a community Seder is the chance to weave new traditions as a group. Everyone has specific traditions with their families that “make Passover feel like Passover” that don’t yet apply to this community gathering.
Katz mentioned some examples of these fun community moments she hopes will stick, including surprise trivia questions for kids during the Seder.
“Having children at our Seder makes that bridge between it feeling like a sterile, formal, communal thing and something happening in your home,” Katz said. “And I think the moments where we feel our synagogues and our community centers are more intimate like our homes, the more powerful what we build throughout the year gets to be.”
Katz said that the Seder being focused on “community liberation” is a way to link the current political moment to the story of Passover.
“In households across the city and around the world, we’re saying, ‘Where are we seeing the cruelty of Pharaoh operating in the world, and how are we responding? How are we resisting?’” Katz said.
She added that this Seder serves as an opportunity to “not mince words” about the threats members of the Hinenu community, which is majority LGBTQ+, face currently. It’s also an opportunity to discuss how the Passover story can serve as a source of strength.
That commitment to liberation and justice is reflected in everything down to the produce at the tables. Katz said the Hinenu Seder plates include oranges representing the LGBTQ+ community.
As the second annual celebration rolls around at Hinenu, Katz reflected on last year’s festivities and noted the great atmosphere provided by the kids who were running around having fun. She said that the joy the kids showed gave her a solid assurance that the community they’ve built at Hinenu was strong and would continue to grow and thrive.
In the spirit of growth and outreach, Katz said that this year the head table at the Seder will be shaped as a U to give people access to those they came with and allow them to be closer to people they’re meeting at the Seder for the first time.
The Seder is a great way to engage interfaith families.
“I would say three-quarters of the families at Hinenu are interfaith and so, simply by having a community event, we’re engaging our interfaith families,” Katz said. “[This year] we also have an adaptation from the Lunar Haggadah called ‘Dancing in Between.’ It’s about four more children. In addition to the classic four, we’re also reading the Jewish adoptee, the multiracial or interfaith Jew, the patrilineal Jew and the Jew by choice. And the refrain at the end is to all these children, we say, ‘Welcome, we see you and you belong.’”
Katz said that the welcoming attitude is the spirit of what makes up Hinenu, and the Seder is another expression of it.
