The First Cup - Welcome The Festival

By Avigayil Halpern

Blood: Young girls tuck tampons quickly into backpacks, secret them in purses, hide them in Ugg boots. It’s not blue dye that the river is running with, and periods are more trouble than the pamphlet in that goody bag from middle-school health class would leave one to believe. “It’s beautiful to be female,” we’re told, but nobody...

Pesach is many things to many people. Its customs are familiar and can be viewed with many lenses. The symbols are universal and are subject to almost any reading: social justice, class, the Holocaust, Middle East politics, American politics, agriculture, the environment, the list is endless, and the proliferation of interpretations is evidence that this is fertile territory.

A few things – maybe only two –...

The Paschal Lamb reminds us that the Holy One, praised be God, passed over the houses of our ancestors in Egypt.

The Matzah is to remind us that before the dough our ancestors prepared for bread had time to rise, God revealed the might, power and presence of God unto them and redeemed them.

The Bitter Herbs are to remind us that the Egyptians embittered the lives of our ancestors in...

Egypt, no sleet or snow for sure, not even rain or the usually hail.

Nourished only from an ancient wide stream,

On which women secretly shared the boy of redemption.

Our Seder recalls the signs and marvels, the plagues, the costly victory.

We will honor our timeless bread and play with sweet mortar; taste bitterness and tears.

We drink past our fill.

God will split their...

Maggid
By Marge Piercy

The courage to let go of the door, the handle.
The courage to shed the familiar walls whose very
stains and leaks are comfortable as the little moles
of the upper arm; stains that recall a feast,
a child’s naughtiness, a loud blistering storm
that slapped the roof hard, pouring through.

The courage to abandon the graves dug into the hill,

URCHATZ

The Leader of the Seder only, now washes his/her hands from an ewer into a bowl held

by another celebrant, wiping them dry on a hand towel. We have accepted the need for

leadership, we wash the leaders's hands. This small, formal act of service is a symbol of

our recognition of their leadership. This is an ancient Jewish...

“Gratitude is the moral memory of mankind. If every grateful action were suddenly eliminated, society would crumble.”
– Georg Simmel

Gratitude and happiness are intertwined and for good reason. It is no coincidence that positive psychology practitioners and happiness experts state that in order to increase your contentment in life you need to boost your level of...

In Morocco, Mimouna, a traditional North African Jewish celebration is celebrated the day after Passover. This celebration marks returning to eating chametz. They celebrate with baked foods and foods that symbolize luck because Mimouna is the Arabic word for luck. Such foods include dough with hand prints of silver coins. At the conclusion of this celebration, they enter the ocean and throw pebbles...

Thank you for joining us for tonight’s exploration of the racism and other issues within our criminal justice system. Now it is your time to act. One of the easiest and most important things you can do is to decrease the stigmatism against those with criminal records. We encourage you to use your personal seders as an opportunity to share what you have learned and help your family and friends to feel equally invested...

Ahora es el turno de lavarse las manos

"baruj ata adonai eloheinu melej aholam, asher quitchanu ve mitisvotahv, be tzivanu al netilat iadaim"

Hace muchos años, Alugnos pueblos no judios, creían que, a los judíos no les llegaban las epidemias por su simple condición de judíos. Pero, en realidad, era porque ellos se "lavavan las manos" antes de que esté científicamente...

ALL: Tonight we might have put an oyster on our Seder plate.

While I didn’t particularly want to put something traif atop that most kosher of dishes, this Passover falls on the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. And since BP, the leaseholder of the failed well, seems intent with its new television ads...

In every generation, we all should feel as though we ourselves had gone forth from Egypt, as it is written: “And you shall explain to your child on that day, it is because of what God did for me when, I, myself, went forth from Egypt.” (Exodus 13:8)

We end our Passover Seder by saying in unison:

May slavery give way to freedom.
May hate give way to love.
May ignorance give way to...