The Well of Deir Yassin
(created by Elliott batTzedek with inspiration from the “Ten Plagues & Elijah’s Cup” ritual by Rabbi Miriam Geronimus and “Nakba Dayunu” credited to Jews Against the Occupation-NYC in a 2015 Jewish Voice for Peace Haggadah)
This ritual begins after the ten plagues and before “Dayenu.” It uses the same cup of wine from which drops have been taken to symbolize our grief about the violence done to the people of Egypt in order for the Hebrews to be liberated. The “well” can be a large bowl placed on the table for this purpose.
Reader: This year we break another silence too long held – the acts of horrific violence done to Palestinians in order to found a Jewish state. The consequences of these actions still define and entangle all of our hopes for a just peace in the land between the river and the sea. We cannot fully understand this year’s ongoing genocide in Gaza without understanding that the nation of Israel was founded on expulsion and ethnic cleansing.
Reader: The drops we take out from our cup of wine in the Ten Plagues are a symbolic way to acknowledge the violent acts done to the people of Egypt in our story. But these are symbols from myth, when we have in our own time actual violence done to actual people in the process of founding a Jewish nation state. Those ten drops of wine on a plate cannot account for all of the murders, expulsions, and theft of land that made up the Nakba. And that continue even to this day in the West Bank and Gaza.
Reader: As we read each of these crimes, we pour from our cups, already lessened by naming plagues, until they are drained completely.* As each is read aloud, all echo the chorus, and pour into The Well of Deir Yassin.
Reader: This well is named for the village of Deir Yassin that was destroyed on April 9, 1948, when three Jewish militias attacked, blowing up houses with TNT with residents still inside, lining up residents against walls and shooting them, and then burning the bodies or throwing them in the well or into a nearby quarry to try to hide the crime before journalists arrived.
When, in villages throughout Palestine, Jewish brigades implemented a systematic expulsion of the Palestinian population,
we should have said Enough!
When the Jewish terrorist groups massacred 125 Palestinians at Deir Yassin,
we should have said Enough!
When Jewish soldiers rounded up Palestinians and massacred them, then forced neighbors to dig their graves,
we should have said Enough!
When Palestinians were forced into labor camps and their labor included destroying Palestinian homes,
we should have said Enough!
When on Erev Pesach in April 1948, in an operation nicknamed “Pesach Cleaning,” the Haganah forced 90% of Haifa – 70,000 humans – to flee the city,
we should have said Enough!
When the 10,000 Palestinian residents of Majdal, now Jewish Ashkelon, were enclosed for two years in a militarized ghetto, then forced onto trucks and transferred to Gaza,
we should have said Enough!
When, after villages were depopulated, the IDF bulldozed and bombed houses and mosques, destroying all evidence of Palestinian life there, including by the Jewish National Fund’s tree-planting campaign,
we should have said Enough!
When thousands of Palestinian homes were confiscated by the Israeli government and given to Jews, with food still in the kitchen and linens on the beds,
we should have said Enough!
When Israel and much of the leadership of the U.S. Jewish community denied that the forced expulsions happened,
we should have said Enough!
When for over 15 years Israel has turned Gaza into the world’s largest open-air prison, repeatedly waging military invasions, building deadly surveillance weapons, blockading food and medical aid, and destroying access to water and power
we should have said Enough!
Though Israeli & U.S. Jewish communities continue to deny the Right of Return to the Palestinian refugees of 1948
WE SAY: ENOUGH!
Though Israel, with the financial and military backing of the U.S. government, wages a brutal campaign of genocide and expulsion on the civilian population of Gaza
WE SAY: ENOUGH!
Reader: Tonight, in our annual recounting of the increasing acts of destruction and murder that our story tells us were necessary for our ancestors to be freed, we must pay attention. We must stop accepting Israel’s propaganda that they have a right to self-defense but that Palestinians do not.
Reader: To fully honor our own story, we must be able to recognize who is living while dispossessed, whose children are under threat of murder, and who has empire and vast armies.
Reader: Tonight, in this well on our table, we together have made a space big enough to hold complicated truths. The truth that our people have lived dispossessed and vulnerable, subject to attacks and genocide, and that we carry that grief with us. And the truth that our people created a nation state founded on violence, murder, expulsion, and ethnic cleansing.
Reader: This year, different from all others, we have poured out the wine that represents our historical liberation into the Well of Deir Yassin. We cannot honestly taste freedom until propaganda is undone, until we can collectively hold and somehow reconcile all the complicated truths, and until all people between the river and the sea can build a secure future for their children.
Reader: Look upon this Well, which stands full while your glasses stand empty.* Carry this image in your mind just as our ancestors carried all they could gather into bags before fleeing.
Reader: After the seder tonight, we will gather outside and pour this offering on the ground as a sacrifice – an offering pulled from what is most precious to us and offered as a hope for, as a small step towards, the future we want to build. After the wine is poured, all will respond, “Finally, we say ENOUGH!
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*if you are hosting a large seder, or doing this with a large crowd, having everyone empty their glasses may not be possible. In that case, modify the text ritual to simply pouring a small amount of wine for each crime listed
