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Friday April 9, 1999

Jews, Arabs gather at coexistence seders

JULIA GOLDMAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

NEW YORK -- Arms linked around one another, the 180 souls gathered in the gaily painted synagogue sanctuary sang Shehechiyanu, a Hebrew prayer of gratitude.

On Sunday, the fifth night of Passover, the American Jews and Arab-Americans sitting together at New York's Congregation B'nai Jeshurun celebrated a seder that told an ancient story of hardship and redemption.

But while there were four cups and Four Questions, roasted eggs and horseradish, sprigs of greens and salt water, little of the Haggadah, or "telling," at the "Seder of the Children of Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah" reflected the story of the Israelites' Exodus from Mitzrayim, the Hebrew word for Egypt.

Instead, the event examined the current "mitzrayim," translated literally as "the narrow place."

The text by Rabbi Arthur Waskow says that region is the "place of bloodshed that comes from war between the two families of Abraham" -- the Jews, Abraham's descendants through Sarah's son Isaac, and the Arabs, the children of Hagar's son Ishmael.

The seder coincided with Easter and the anniversary of the 1968 death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It also came within a week of the Muslim festival Id al-Adha.

One of Islam's holiest days, the "Feast of the Sacrifice" commemorates Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Ishmael, the koranic version of the Torah's sacrifice of Isaac -- and a version that receives equal treatment in this newly written seder.

"There is a great common bond between Muslims and Jews," both religious and historical, said Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, president of the American Sufi Muslim Association, who began the New York seder by reciting the first verse of the Koran.

"The challenge for us is to develop a way we can live together, inshallah, in a way which is what we believe it would be in paradise."

The seder's vision of coexistence, while poetically penned, does not shrink from a political message.

The answer to the first of its newly interpreted Four Questions -- "Why do we break the matzah in two?" -- for example, answers that "the bread of affliction" becomes "the bread of freedom -- when we share it." "Because the Land that gives bread to two peoples must be divided in two, so that both peoples may eat of it. So long as one people grasps the whole land, it is a land of affliction and no one is nourished by it." Published in the March-April issue of Tikkun magazine, the seder -- which took place throughout the week at other sites in Philadelphia, Washington and Seattle as well as in San Leandro -- is Waskow's third attempt, as he put it, to "look in our own generation for what it is that is keeping us unfree."

In 1969, he wrote the "Freedom Seder," which drew from the writings of King, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau, among others, and bought together some 800 celebrants.

That interreligious, interracial seder 30 years ago, he said, "broke open the sense that you could, in fact, remake your own Haggadah for your own redemption."

In 1983, he took up a new theme with the "Seder of the Children of Abraham," which stirred excitement, but also passionate criticism at a time when Israeli-Palestinian dialogue was considered taboo.

The 1993 Oslo accords signed by then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, however, muted American Jewish opposition to open dialogue between Jews and Arabs and raised the hope of imminent peaceful coexistence.

But with the current peace negotiations at a near standstill, Waskow said, he decided to revisit the conflict.

The seder highlights accounts of "collisions" between Jews and Arabs -- including terrorist attacks and house demolitions -- and acts of reconciliation that resulted from each.

In one of the most touching parts of the service, Jewish and Arab participants were invited to speak about personal interactions with their biblical "cousins."

Ahssan Haj, a 38-year-old living in Brooklyn, recalled an episode from his childhood in the Palestinian village of Taibeh. A Jewish student from the nearby town of Kfar Saba was expected in his home for a class visit. But the student's refusal to enter Haj's home, at the instruction of his parents, Haj said, was his "first experience of rejection."

Later, as a social work student at Jerusalem's Hebrew University in the 1980s, he said he met activist Jews who shared his hope for peace.

Waskow urged the New York group to move beyond dialogue -- "not just waiting for, but pursuing peace" -- by writing letters, working in groups and meeting with representatives in Congress.

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