A SHULCHAN ORECH

PLEDGE FOR PASSOVER

As we sit down to seder this Passover, we must acknowledge the genocidal violence Israel continues to inflict on the Palestinian people in Gaza. To date, over 32,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, including over 25,000 women and children. The devastation being wrought by this military onslaught is truly beyond comprehension. Entire families have been killed; whole neighborhoods, hospitals, universities, mosques and cultural institutions have been completely destroyed.

Israel is also committing violence against the Palestinian people by actively blocking the entrance of life saving humanitarian aid into Gaza. As many human rights observers have noted, “the Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which is a war crime.” This war crime is being actively abetted by the Biden administration through its defunding of the United National Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the primary agency providing Palestinian relief aid. 

This Passover we are crying out in the loudest terms possible: We cannot observe this night like all other nights.

We cannot in good conscience sit down to enjoy festive seder meals as a state acting in the name of the Jewish people is weaponizing starvation against the Palestinian people. We will not be complicit in genocide.

 In the Passover seder, the section in which the meal is served is known as Shulchan Orech. We invite all those who are hosting seder this year to join us in

this pledge:

This year, we will not fulfill the requirement of Shulchan Orech by eating a festive meal while the weaponized starvation of the Palestinian people is taking place. Instead, we are calling upon members of the Jewish community to fulfill Shulchan Orech by taking the following actions at this point in the seder:

• DONATE the amount that would have been spent on food to UNRWA;
• DEMAND that the Biden administration refund UNRWA.
• CALL ON the Biden administration to facilitate a permanent ceasefire in Gaza now.

In place of the meal, we encourage reading aloud essays and poems by Gazan Palestinians - particularly by those who have been killed by the Israeli military.

As Palestinian writer/poet Mohammed El-Kurd has written:

This consequential moment calls on us to raise the ceiling of what is permissible, and demands that we renew our commitment to the truth, to spitting the truth, unflinchingly, unabashedly (and cleverly), no matter in what conference room, no matter in whose face. Because Gaza cannot fight the empire on its own. Or, to use an embittered proverb my grandmother used to mutter at the evening news, “They asked the Pharaoh, ‘Who made you a pharaoh?’ He replied, ‘no one stopped me.’”