Passover’s Message Gets a New Reading : Ceremonies: Activist’s adaptation of the traditional Haggada text draws a connection between the plight of America’s homeless and the Jews of biblical Egypt.

The holiday of Passover calls upon Jews to recall their ancient passage from slavery to freedom, emphasizing that every generation must strive to understand the meaning of oppression and liberation. Yet for most Jews, Passover’s story of bondage and deliverance remains a distant, if symbolically powerful, chapter in history.

For Len Doucette, however, the message of Passover is a contemporary clarion call to action. Doucette, a disabled Jewish man who has spent much of the past two decades living on the streets, sees a stark analogy between the plight of America’s homeless and the Jews of biblical Egypt.

To dramatize this connection, Doucette, a well-known activist on the Westside, has written an alternative text for Passover from the perspective of the homeless. This adaptation of the traditional story, or Haggada, will be used at a Passover service, or Seder, for homeless people to be held at 4 p.m. Sunday on the lawn of Santa Monica City Hall. Paper plates, empty styrofoam cups, rocks and sand will be substituted for the traditional meal.

The participants will read the Haggada, which incorporates commentary on the conditions that afflict the nation’s homeless population, and poses a moral challenge to Jews and non-Jews alike.

“The biblical Jews, for all of their slavery, were at least sheltered and fed!” reads one section of the narrative. “We, America’s homeless, have no door to open so that the Prophet Elijah may enter. Instead, we can only extend to him an empty Styrofoam cup that is overflowing with our bitter tears of misery and pray that he will open the door to a new world for us.”

Doucette, who is currently living in an apartment in Santa Monica but expects to be homeless again by April 1, wrote the Haggada last year, during a hunger fast to protest Santa Monica’s new restrictions on the homeless. “It seemed an appropriate time to think about hunger and poverty in America,” said Doucette. “It was written really to raise peoples’ consciousness, to make them think about hunger and homelessness, and to think there are answers.”

Allen Freehling, the rabbi at University Synagogue in West Los Angeles, recently read the “homeless Haggada” at Doucette’s request and agreed to edit the text. He believes that this contemporary interpretation of Passover is a valid one.

“Our tradition has us remind ourselves that while once we were enslaved, we have to be mindful of other people who are either physically or emotionally enslaved as well,” said Freehling, who has often taken an active role in various social and political causes.

“From every point of view that I can think of, the homeless population within our community has been enslaved economically, as well as by prejudice, and as a result of that I think the parallels that he’s drawing are very real.”

Harvey J. Fields, chief rabbi at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, agrees that the Passover-homelessness comparison makes sense. He points out that the traditional Passover matzo, or unleavened bread, represents the “bread of poverty,” and that the Seder itself begins with an invocation for all those who are hungry to come and eat.

While Passover provides an opportunity to stress Jewish responsibility for those in need, Fields believes that in general the Jewish community has responded vigorously to the problem of homelessness. His temple, like others around the city, operates a weekly feeding program and is an active participant in HopeNet, through which 250,000 meals a year are supplied to the hungry.

Doucette’s unique Haggada insists that history places a special burden on those of the Jewish faith to heed the suffering of the homeless.

“If Judaism is, indeed, to be a Light Unto the Nations,” his Haggada reads, “we must, by example, use our multitude of resources and talents to fight this evil disease that is threatening to destroy America.”