June 20, 2024

About a month ago, I wrote about Pesaḥ Sheni, the second chance opportunity to celebrate Pesaḥ set aside for those unable to make their Passover offerings at the proper time. The source for this holiday comes from this week’s Torah reading, Parashat B’ha’alotekha. What I find most interesting about the Torah’s narrative around Pesaḥ Sheni, especially this week, is that it describes a holiday in formation, one whose story is in the process of being created. 

In the Torah’s telling (Numbers 9:1-14), those who are unable to make the Passover offering at the appropriate time due to being ritually impure are at first left out of the command to celebrate Pesaḥ in the second year of their journey. They are then given an alternate date for celebrating, complete with specific rules and rituals. They get a Passover do-over, which, through the passage of time, has become a holiday in its own right. 

This week when we read about a new holiday in the Torah, we also celebrated a newer holiday as Americans - Juneteenth. This day, which marks the day in 1865 when General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, finally enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation that had become the law of the land two and a half years earlier.

Juneteenth was for a long time observed in Texas and spread throughout the country as an important day in the African American community in the years following the Great Migration - although it still wasn’t always widely known or marked. It wasn’t often a part of the American history curriculum taught in schools; people often found out about it as young adults. Most recently, Juneteenth gained national attention as it became an official federal holiday in 2021. It is a day with real significance for the African American community and for our nation as a whole, a day whose celebration and observance are also continuing to evolve.

I want to highlight an article I read in Tablet Magazine this week, “Jewish Juneteenth,” by Shoshana McKinney Kirya-Ziraba. Rather than restate and interpret Kirya-Ziraba’s words here, I strongly encourage you to read the article, which I’ve linked above. However, I do want to highlight a couple of points she made that were illuminating for me. 

She spoke about how Juneteenth is being celebrated in some Jewish communities, inspired by the work of Black Jews to give expression to all aspects of their identity in their sacred spaces. One person featured in the article, Tameika Minor, brought a Juneteenth celebration to her synagogue in New Jersey. Unsurprisingly, she and her fellow planners first promoted the event celebrating African American culture as a summer solstice celebration, due to their uncertainty about how something directly tied to Juneteenth would be received by other members of their synagogue. The success of the event gave them the confidence to celebrate Juneteenth more openly in their Jewish community ever since; however, that story highlights the challenges of building truly open communities.

Another person featured in the article, Rabbi Heather Miller, is a direct descendant of people freed on the first Juneteenth - and this connects us back to our parashah this week - and is the author of The Juneteenth Haggadah. The Juneteenth Haggadah, much like the Haggadah for Pesaḥ, tells a story of liberation through ritual, food, and song. It takes the themes of Pesaḥ, freedom from enslavement, a journey toward a promised future, themes that are essential to Jewish identity, and refracts them through the lens of the African American story. It seems a powerful, uniquely current way to give Passover a do-over. 

Shabbat shalom.

​