I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, and then this article written by Eugenia Tsao  inspired me:

Smug Toronto Seethes as Tamils “Go Too Far”

“Tamil protests a test of our tolerance,” the Toronto Star pronounced, while the Globe and Mail chided the demonstrators for squandering public support with their disruptive tactics (“Tamils earn goodwill—then lose it,”  May 20).

“Ours, you see, is a tolerant society” Canadians smugly confide to visiting Americans. And while the line between tolerance and mere endurance is a slender one, few would deny Canadians’ infatuation with cultural diversity. We like to lunch on sushi and samosas, sport henna tattoos, practice yoga, wear paisley embroidery, listen to reggae, and hang feathered dreamcatchers from our rearview mirrors. We proudly subscribe to magazines like National Geographic for the exotic, high-contrast photography and romanticized verbal portraiture. We love falling asleep on the subway to a velvet medley of diasporic languages, and nothing delights us more than consuming enormous sandwiches filled with things like prosciutto and chorizo.

But we cannot eat acts of non-violent civil disobedience or wear political grievances, you see, and this confuses us.

Tsao is so right on. In fact, whenever I hear certain liberal multi-culti white folks in Toronto yammer on and on about cultural diversity, it’s almost always immediately followed up with some bull about how great it is that in Toronto they can have samples of cuisines from around the world.

Of course that is something that I, too, value about living in Toronto, however, to simply eat the other is not enough. Consuming culture (metaphorically) and food (literally) without a political understanding of struggles, power and colonialism, is just reiterating imperial power relations all over again.

Back to Tsao:

Rather than forcing the natives to dance for us at the crack of a whip, we expect them to do so voluntarily, citing our need for unending cultural enrichment and enlightenment, or their need to evince gratitude for our generous foreign policies. Rather than accusing them of high treason when they dare to publicize historical injustices in inconvenient—and unentertaining—ways, we cluck our tongues and accuse them of strategic imprudence. “Can’t you see you’re just alienating your audience?” we hiss, annoyed, mouths full of falafel and tandoori chicken.

Hot damn, I love this woman. 

I’ve been hosting a seder fairly regularly for the past 7 or 8 years, something that I didn’t grow up with at all, having both a non-religious Jewish grandmother, as well as a non-religious Jewish mother. But there have been many feminist haggadahs that have crossed my path, as well as some anti-oppression and anti-occupation haggadahs, so I’ve been able to reclaim the holiday with minimal references to god and to the state of israel.

Also, my grandmother died in October.

I never attended a seder with her present, as she was brought up quite religiously, and probably was sick of them by the time she started her own family, and her parents passed away. I’m sure she associated them with doing lots of work and doing lots of housework. Women are assigned a great deal of work to do in preparation for, and in the conducting of, the passover ritual, celebration and meal. Whereas traditionally, the men do all the talking and pontificating about freedom from slavery and liberation.

Her parents, so my mother tells me, were very religious. Three sets of dishes, temple, traditional. Having emigrated here as adults with 4 children, they seemed typical of newcomers in a place that didn’t reflect their language, religion or traditions: hold on tighter to what grounds them. The effect on their children, the four born in Romania and the four born here, including my grandmother as the second youngest, and the youngest girl, was to effectively chase all of their children away from anything and everything religiously Jewish. As a non-religious person myself, I can’t say that’s a bad thing. But a part of me does feel like cultural, rather than religious, traditions are worth keeping, adapting, sharing and remembering.

A few years ago when I told my grandmother about my women-centric seders, she was very supportive, and asked me to send pictures of the table. She even sent me, via my mother, the family seder plate, which I happily use every year.

Even though she had never been present at one of my seders, I felt her absence, as I do every once in a while, in this first year after her death.

R and I had invited two of his friends from his documentary program at Ryerson, and my mom and sister. All non-Jews, except for my family, inasmuch as we can be considered Jewish. It was a wonderful evening, and I enjoy hosting, every time, a seder in which at least one person attending is experiencing the seder ceremony for the first time.

There’s so much food to prepare,  both for eating and as part of the ritual. There must always be both an orange and an olive on the seder plate, always a good starting point for the many discussions that go on related to the many symbols in the passover story.