From “Go Down Moses” to Liberating Earth
By Rabbi Arthur Waskow
The Shalom Center
April 14, 2022
Dear chevra, Last night we searched for chometz; this morning we burn it. We make a sacred flame, an inward flame like the Burning Bush, to consume not only the swollen yeast and sourness we eat, but swollen empire, swollen hatred, swollen violence, swollen armies, swollen Hyper-Wealth. Not only in our enemies but in ourselves.
In 1969, I felt called to write an Haggadah that was embodied in the first Freedom Seder on the first anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King. It celebrated the ongoing liberation struggle of Black America alongside the ancient liberation struggle of Israelites against Pharaoh. It seems to have been the first Haggadah ever to address a liberation struggle other than a Jewish one. Among its passages from that long campaign was “Go Down Moses” as an outcry that used a Jewish motif to call for Black freedom.