At The Politically Correct Feminist Seder
The Jewish Labor Federation Haggadah
I had long ago made peace with a female God
and, not without a certain pleasure, the possibility
of the woman on top, nor did it bother me
to hear about oppression of the workers, sexism,
ethnic cleansing, corporate greed and the like
in addition to the usual boils, hailstones, famine
and locusts. I knew, of course, how badly
we had treated the Japanese during the War
and that we had discriminated against others
on the basis of class, race, gender and sexual
persuasion. There was certainly nothing wrong
with contemplating social justice between
the matzoh ball soup and the gefilte fish
and I didn’t even mind a brief mention
of Martin Luther King and Gandhi—why not
let the goyim have their say too?—along with
the bitter herbs and the Manischewitz wine.
So what if ______ wasn’t my favorite poet?
She, too, deserved a place at the table, and a poem
or two between the karpas and roasted shank bone
seemed reasonable enough. (After all, I had spent
eight hours, as instructed, baking the roasted eggs
in their strange brew of coffee grounds, onion skins
and vinegar—so why not be generous now?) Soaked
with sobriety I downed the fourth cup of wine,
only to find that the messenger Elijah, once again,
had failed to make an appearance. If this is the way
to celebrate the flight from Egypt, I thought to myself,
I’d rather go back. By now, I had little appetite left
for anything, but when the chocolate mousse—
prepared by an unrepentant capitalist and supporter
of the war in Iraq— finally appeared, I dug right in,
hiding a hard-on beneath my napkin. At last I was
overjoyed to have escaped from Egypt, to have
emerged, bone-dry, from the freshly-parted sea.