By Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Editor’s note: In 1976, writer-activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms. magazine, attended a women-only Seder in New York City. A radical idea for its time, that first Seder brought together 13 feminist Jews at the apartment of Phyllis Chesler, the psychologist-author of the feminist classic, “Women and Madness.” It was co-officiated by the late novelist, poet, and ritualist Esther M. Broner using the women-centric Hagaddah that Broner co-created with Israeli scholar Naomi Nimrod. The Broner-Nimrod Hagaddah, which has been the core text of the feminist Seder ever since, features Wise Women, the Four Daughters, the Four Questions posed by Jewish women to patriarchal Judaism, and the Ten Plagues of Women. Each year different questions, different plagues, depending on events in contemporary women’s lives.
Regulars at the New York Seder have included feminist pioneers Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller; Congresswoman Bella Abzug; writers Grace Paley and Marilyn French; filmmaker Lilly Rivlin; and any number of non-Jewish “strangers” from different faith traditions.
Pogrebin wrote about the Seder’s origins in her 1992 memoir, “Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America.” This essay is adapted and condensed from the book and updated by Pogrebin for the Jewish Journal.
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Nobody needs three seders. God seems to think two are enough. Yet I have come to feel that the holiday is incomplete without the all-women ritual that I have attended on the third night of Passover every year since 1976.
Why is this night different from all other nights?
Because on this night, twenty to thirty women sit in a wide circle on pillows on the floor with a cloth spread like a table before us, and we ask the four Questions of women. On this night, for a change, we speak of the Four Daughters, female archetypes yearning to know their past. And on this night the goblet usually set aside for the prophet Elijah belongs to the prophet Miriam.
At the feminist seder, Miriam comes alive to as rebel, a leader and a visionary.
A famous midrash says that when Pharaoh condemned Jewish babies to die and Miriam’s father lost all hope for the future, it was Miriam, then seven years old, who dissuaded him from divorcing her mother Yocheved. It was Miriam who convinced her parents to stay together and continue having children. It was Miriam who rebelled against death and argued for life. The result was the birth of Moses. Then it was Miriam who watched over her baby brother in the bullrushes and, when the Egyptian princess found him, it was Miriam who put forward Moses’s own mother as his wet nurse. Years later, after the crossing of the Red Sea, it was Miriam who led the Hebrew women with timbrel and song, acts recognized as a sign of prophetic power. (Only three women in the Bible are given the title prophetess: Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah). The traditional telling of the Passover story barely mentions Miriam. Our feminist Hagaddah amends and gives the prophetess her due.
On this night, we read from the Women’s Hagaddah:
We were told that we were brought out of Egypt from the house of bondage, but we were still our fathers’ daughters, obedient wives, and servers of our children, and were not yet ourselves.
On this night, we become ourselves. We speak with the grammar of the feminine plural and invoke the Shechina, the feminine essence of the divine who suffered with the Israelites in exile and protected them in the desert after liberation. On this night, the ritual hand washing is not a solitary act but a rite of collective nurture. We pass a pitcher of water and a basin and each woman washes the hands of the woman sitting beside her. On this night, one by one, we name our matrilineage, the mothers, aunts and grandmothers who cleaned, cooked, and served at family seders while the men reclined against their pillows retelling Jewish history – his story, the story of Jewish men.
On this night, we give her story equal time. We remember the five disobedient women to whom are owed the life of Moses and the destiny of the Jewish people: his intrepid sister Miriam; Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives who disobeyed the pharaoh’s order to murder all first-born Jewish sons; Moses’s mother Yocheved, who surrendered her baby so that he might survive; and Batya, the pharaoh’s daughter, a righteous Gentile who disobeyed her father’s decree and adopted a Hebrew baby marked for murder. At our seder, we do not praise good girls and well-behaved ladies; we honor our rebels, our holy troublemakers.
On the third night of Passover, the words belong to women.
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Postscript by Letty Cottin Pogrebin: This year, the 46th annual feminist Seder will be led by Esther Broner’s daughter, Nahama, and granddaughter, Alexandra. Our ceremonies never fail to move me to tears. I recite my matrilineage – I am Letty, daughter of Ceil, granddaughter of Jenny and Yetta, mother of three, grandmother of six – and as I listen to other women recite theirs, the centering of female voices is still a cause for wonder, pride, and celebration. But to the generations of younger feminists who have followed in the wake of our Seder’s founding mothers, the rituals we created nearly half a century ago are no longer called transgressive, they’re called tradition. And Judaism is all the richer for it.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s 12th book, “Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy,” will be published in September.
