Aurora Levins Morales is a Puerto Rican Jewish writer, feminist, and author of several books of stories and poems. She is also an advisor with the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace. She describes herself as
an activist, a healer, a farmer, a revolutionary. I tell stories with medicinal powers. Herbalists who collect wild plants to make medicine call it wildcrafting. I wildcraft the details of the world, of history, of people’s lives, and concentrate them through art in order to shift consciousness, to change how we think about ourselves, each other and the world. The stories we tell about our lives shape what we’re able to imagine, and what we can imagine determines what we can do. My job is to change the stories we tell and help us imagine a world where greed has no power, the earth is cherished and all people get to live safe and satisfying lives.
In the Jewish tradition, Passover celebrates the flight of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. In her poem, “Red Sea: 2002,” Morales expands the Passover story to encompass liberation — not only of the “chosen people,” but of all people. She references aspects of the Passover seder:
Leaning (to the physical, not political, left), which the newly-free Israelites supposedly copied from the Greeks and Romans;
Red wine (symbolizing blood);
Blood on the doorposts (to mark the home as Jewish);
Bread of affliction (matzo);
Bitterness (bitter herbs);
Figs and apples (ingredients in a dip called charoset);
The four questions; and
The salt dip, which symbolizes the tears Jews shed while in slavery.
Morales warns us that Moses parted the Red Sea because he had faith, but “the turbulent water will not part for us” because “we’ve lost the trick of it.” In a striking allusion to the tens of thousands of refugees who have drowned seeking life and safety, she writes that we are all refugees, but “this time no one will be left to drown.”
During 2002, when Morales wrote this poem, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was months old; the torture camp at Guantanamo opened for business; President George W. Bush called North Korea, Iran, and Iraq the “axis of evil”; the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq; and the Second Intifada (2000-2005) in Israel-Palestine was at its height.
Click the link at the top of this newsletter to listen to me reading the poem, or click this link to read the poem on your own.
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