The Swarthmore Passover Co-op - A Pilgrimage

Goldberg - "Pilgrimage and Creating Identities"

Harvey Goldberg states, “Pilgrimage sites thus reflect historical events and shared cultural sensibilities while also providing the context for the coalescence of a personal path in relation to life’s flow” (162). This Passover, I would like to think that I embarked on a pilgrimage very similar to the situations that Goldberg describes. By participating in the Swarthmore Passover Co-op, I spent eight days in the liminal sphere of life outside of Sharples, eating all of my meals with only Jews. Throughout the eight days, a group of about fifteen people, who at first seemed to share little except for religion and culture, formed a close-knit community through our realization of communitas. Sheltered from the religious diversity of Sharples, our conversations somehow always returned to our Jewish culture and history. By the middle of the week, we were all so addicted to our interior pilgrimage from the Swarthmore bubble that our lunch and dinner conversations began to last for hours and then expand into further meetings about the future improvements of Hillel and about our reactions to the Three Days in Palestine event. In the liminality of the Passover Co-op, we felt a sort of freedom to express and change our personal relationships to Judaism that Sharples would not have been able to induce.

There were a few moments this week that related more directly to this class’s readings and discussions. For instance, one dinner, someone asked about the Zohar, and we spent the rest of the meal in the Beit Midrash, reading the translation – in the freedom of our liminality, of course - and joking about how all of the boys would be swallowed into the earth. Also, with Three Days in Palestine, we entered into several discussions about our personal relationships to Israel and whether it enhanced Jewish identities or not, as Goldberg grapples with. Finally, during the last few moments of Passover, while we waited for pizza over a lecture about Mimouna, the lecturer explicitly mentioned Turner’s liminality, and Noah and I could not help but laugh. As the Israelite’s exodus and journey through the desert thrust them into the liminality of separateness and transformation into a more concrete nation, my past week of isolated Judaism forced me to look closer at my identity and shape my beliefs in a transformative setting of pilgrimage.