DIY Passover with The LUNAR Collective

This conversation was hosted as part of our series, “DIY Passover with _____” in which Recustom’s partnerships manager, Jessica, interviewed different Jewish communal organizations about the many different ways to personalize the Passover seder. Read on for her conversation with Rachel from The LUNAR Collective about belonging and honoring Asian Jewish heritage at the seder table. 

At Recustom, we provide tools to DIY Jewish rituals, including Passover Haggadahs. Our full content library is free to explore here. And, you can learn more about how to connect with The LUNAR Collective here. 

Jessica: To start, I'd like to hear a bit about who you are and what brings you to your work with The LUNAR Collective?

Rachel: I’m the Ritual Director at LUNAR, the Asian Jewish Collective. I was guided to this work through my own experience as a Queer, multi-racial, Asian Jew and a yearning for spaces of belonging. Yearning for belonging seems to be a common theme across Jews of Color communities. It’s a word that comes up constantly for those of us who straddle a lot of different spaces and ask questions about whether parts of our identity are ‘enough’ and whether we're ‘enough’ to be in certain spaces. Not because we aren’t enough, but because those spaces make us feel that way and give us the need to ask those questions.

So much of the work that I do is about creating spaces of belonging. Over time I’ve come to believe that many things are true: we need separate spaces of belonging where we set the norms and know that we’re creating those spaces for ourselves. And, that having those affinity spaces just for us, designed with our belonging in mind, allows us to fully see ourselves and then return to other spaces and stand a little taller in ourselves.

Jessica: How does your work fit into LUNAR Collective?

Rachel: LUNAR Collective is an amazing community designed for Asian American Jews. It’s just a few years old and is something that I couldn’t have named needing growing up. It’s been so powerful to find and be a part of. 

I'm the Ritual Director, which means that I think about music, prayer, and ritual as tools for bringing us together. Rituals have a lot of power to make us feel connected or othered, depending on how they’re used. I can think of so many moments in Jewish spaces where I felt pressured to prove that I belonged there and it manifested in needing to know every word of the prayers. Now in my role as Ritual Director with LUNAR, I’ve had the opportunity to be intentional about the power of prayer and music and that it should be taken seriously. I’ve thought about how we intentionally use prayer and ritual to bring people in. Before leading, I always start by naming this: how we might feel the need to prove our belonging through knowledge, but that this is a space where no one has anything to prove. That we all belong here. 

Jessica: Where do you see this idea of belonging in the Passover story? 

Rachel: Passover feels like an extremely important time to talk about belonging. When I picture the holiday, I see a full table. My first experience with LUNAR was actually attending a seder. It felt so special to show up with the knowledge that we each had a seat set specifically for us.  

Thematically, Passover is rich in connections to ideas of belonging for Asian Jews. Coming out of Mitzrayim, a narrow place to liberation feels especially relevant for those of us who have felt like we’ve had to find our places in really intentional ways. Sitting around a seder table with Asian Jews, we all share something experientially in common, even though we come from so many different places. It kind of feels like a miracle to all be together. 

Jessica: What advice would you give to a host looking to incorporate their Asian Jewish heritage into their seder? 

Rachel: We’ve explored lots of different ways to answer that question in the LUNAR Haggadah. Our interpretation of the Four Children names four different ways that people might come to Asian Jewish identity: the Asian Jewish adoptee, the mixed-race interfaith Jew, the patrilineal Asian Jew, and the Jew by choice. At all of our seders we take some time with this section. We know that reading these questions and giving folks a chance to hear and see themselves in our Haggadah and around the table is one of the most powerful moments of the seder. 

We also have an Asian Jewish Seder plate, which includes different Asian Jewish foods. Since the seder is rich with symbolism, there are many opportunities to be intentional about how we engage with that symbolism. People might think about filling their seder plates with objects that speak to tradition and are rich in relation to our ancestors, for example bringing in kimchi, tea eggs, bok choy, and so on. 

These moments of seeing yourself in the text and around the room are so powerful in facilitating belonging and making it extremely clear that we each have a place at the table.

Explore content from The LUNAR Collective and even more Passover content to DIY your seder on Recustom.com.