This year I am putting a whistle on my Seder plate.
It is tiny. But it is loud. It says “F-ICE.”
It’s like those the citizen monitors in Minneapolis, and around our country, used this fall and winter to warn their neighbors that ICE agents were in the neighborhood,
on their streets,
looking for them,
coming to get them, take them out of their houses and their workplaces,
arrest them,
detain them far away from us,
and deport them as fast as possible to any faraway land they could.
My friend made these whistles on her 3D printer. She brought them to work to give them to her coworkers. She got in some trouble for it.
But aren’t we supposed to get in trouble? Good Trouble?
Aren’t we already in trouble when we must have whistles to warn our neighbors and our friends that ICE, a modern Pharoah if ever there was one, is coming?
My synagogue learned a song this year that says “Everyone/ oh everyone these people are ours/ Just like we are theirs/ We belong to them and they belong to us.”
I believe this to my bones.
And yet that notion was under so much threat this year. People were killed, shot dead in the streets, for living that truth this year.
The Passover Seder is a time to remember that we were all slaves in Egypt.
That we are all on the road to liberation.
That none of us is free until we all are free.
To tell the story that calls toward justice.
In the 1980s Professor Heschel and the students at Oberlin College put an orange on the Seder plate to honor the place of women, lgbtq and queer people in our tradition.
Many years ago, people put a tomato on the Seder plate to honor immigrant farm workers in Florida.
Several years ago, my rabbi suggested a bottle of water find its place on the Seder plate to bear witness to restrictionist laws that would ban even giving water to voters waiting in line.
As I write this I try to remember, did I put a trans flag on our Seder plate the year our state banned hormone therapy for trans kids?
There is so much. So much witness to bear.
Oh, how I would love to put a board book of the alphabet on my Seder plate, or figurine of a guitar or a bass, or mini stethoscope–not to remember oppression but to celebrate that everyone could read, everyone had access to art and music and we all had the healthcare we need.
But this year, we put a warning whistle on our Seder plate.
And we will continue.
To work like Miriam and in the path of Elijah.
