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By Rabbi Tamara Cohen We sit down for our seders this year at a powerful cultural moment when the voices of women and girls are rising – the collective activism of #metoo, Emma Gonzales’s six minutes of silence and 11-year-old African American Naomi Wadler’s speech at the March for Our Lives, and even the truth telling of Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels. All this makes the absence of women’s voices in the Passover Haggadah more glaring. Thirty years ago,...

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Tonight with the traditional candles we also light a Veladora with the Virgen De Guadalupe, who is the protector of all Mexican People and all of Latino America. Similar to a Yarzeit candle, a candle of remembrance, people all over Mexico light veladora's in their home with prayers for those in struggle, those lost, and those in need of protection. Tonight we also light a veladora for all those who still are in the bondages of modern slavery and are yet...

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The formal telling of the story of Passover is framed as a discussion with lots of questions and answers. The tradition that the youngest person asks the questions reflects the centrality of involving everyone in the seder. The rabbis who created the set format for the seder gave us the Four Questions to help break the ice in case no one had their own questions. Asking questions is a core tradition in Jewish life. If everyone at your seder is around...

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[Begin taking turns reading. Each person is invited to read a grouped set of lines - or to pass.] It is said, there is nothing new under the sun, yet nothing remains the same. Against the backdrop of eternity the earth displays an ever-changing countenance. The sun rises and the sun sets, yet each day and each season is fresh and new. Slowly, one season emerges from another. The harshness of ice and snow yields to gentle, nourishing showers. Inevitably, the...

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O ur hands are the primary tools to interact with our environment. They generally obey our emotions: Love, fear, compassion, the urge to win, to be appreciated, to express ourselves, to dominate. Our emotions, in turn, reflect our mental state. But, too often, each faculty of our psyche sits in its cell, exiled from one another. The mind sees one way, the heart feels another and our interface with the world ends up one messy tzimmes. Water represents the healing power...

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Rumi, the Persian poet of the soul, understands the meaning of love in this way:             Your task is not to seek love             But merely to seek and find all the barriers             That you have built against it.             The same can be said of freedom; we build barriers against it, barriers born of fear-fear of death, fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough, fear of being happy. An antidote to these fears is gratefulness; when we cultivate our awareness...

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By Rabbi Gavriel Goldfeder  alternadox.netLater on we will do ' rachtzah '─the washing over the matzah . Now we are doing ' urchatz ', which amounts to washing before eating a vegetable.  This is not something we do every day.To explain, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, first chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, writes of dividing life into two categories: the goal, and everything else.  We set goals for ourselves and set out to reach them.  Everything we do that helps...

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Back to basics, get rid of what is bloated and inflated“Letting go means just what it says. It’s an invitation to cease clinging to anything- whether it be an idea, a thing, an event, a particular time, or view, or desire. It is a conscious decision to release with full acceptance into the stream of present moments as they are unfolding. To let go means to give up coercing, resisting or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which...

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The top MatzohAnd bottom Matzoh are,it is said,Pesach substitutesFor the two loaves of challah on Shabbat,Supposedly a reminderOf the two portions of mannaThey received  in the dessertEvery Friday before Shabbat. But the middle matza?!Ah,That's for the seder.We break it in halfAnd call it the bread of affliction,Just like the unleavened breadWe ate as we fled slavery Matza Number Two,The afflicted matza, We break it in halfAnd separate ourselves from joySo we don't forget the painThat has been ours.We break it in...

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by cynthia greenberg     1 leaving is the easy part not where to run, how to get there children pulling at your hems so many bags to carry which way in the dark will you wander what star use as your guide stepping out into the uncertain sands what then it is more than the worry of food, shelter, water, food what will become of us this is what holds you back 2 leaving is the simplest part to turn, in panic,...

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PARTICIPANT: This is the cup of Miriam, Moses's sister and the heroine of our story tonight.  It is filled with water to remind us of Miriam's well, which provided the Israelites with water during our forty years wandering in the desert.  We place this cup on our table as a reminder of the important and equal role of women in tonight's story, our tradition and our society as a whole.