---

Paschal Offerings– Jen SteinThis year, on the seder plateinstead of the bloodied shank bonewe place a cluster of sweet grapeswhich serve as a symbol of fertility,of new life and abundance.We choose this, life, and not death:for before us is set life and deaththe blessing and the curse.Therefore, we choose lifethat we may invite not only Elijahbut the spring into our homes,that we may set an exampleof compassion and of lovefor the things of His kingdom,the new fleeced lambs in the fieldswhose...

---

Slaves eat quickly, stopping neither to wash nor to reflect. Tonight, we are free. We wash and we express our reverence for the blessings that are ours. Pass a bowl of water, a small cup and a towel around the table. Everyone pours three cupfuls over their fingers. There is no blessing over this washing.

---

Touch Me by Stanley Kunitz Summer is late, my heart. Words plucked out of the air some forty years ago when I was wild with love and torn almost in two scatter like leaves this night of whistling wind and rain. It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown. Outdoors all afternoon under a gunmetal sky staking my garden down, I kneeled to the crickets trilling underfoot as if about to burst from their crusty shells; and...

---

At the end of the seder, it is traditional to say or sing " Next Year in Jerusalem". We sometimes think of this as a literal wish, though far fewer of us have actually found ourselves in Jerusalem for seder the following year -- congratulations if you have!But Jerusalem is more than a place, it is a feeling, it is a hope.  At this point in the seder, 1/2 or 1/4 sheets of paper should be passed around to each participant,...

---

by Lisa/Leah Russ     I dreaded passover growing up. It seemed boring and oppressive and... dreadful with the emphasis on DREAD. I never really named it, but felt somewhere in my hungry gut that this wasn't a great place to be...my grandparents’ overheated undersized apartment in Queens, with these flat books in our hands, these hollow songs, this jelly on my fish. A couple of years ago I was at a workshop called L'dor V'dor (generation to generation) and I thought about...

---

The Passover Seder is one of the most recognized and widely practiced of Jewish rituals, yet had our ancestors visited one of these modern-day celebrations, they would be baffled. Not only does our modern Seder wildly diverge from the Passover of old: during antiquity itself the holiday underwent radical changes. As the centralized Israelite state took shape about 3,000 years ago, the religion of the people varied from place to place and took variegated forms, hints of which we can see...

---

Elijah the profit it a symbol of the hope to come. It is told that when he comes he will bring peace and spread love throughout the world. Let's drink our last cup of wine to Elijah! Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha'olam, borei pri ha'gafen.

---

The world was awakened and shattered by the images of a little boy whose body lay lifeless amidst the gentle surf of a Turkish beach this past summer. Another nameless victim amongst thousands in the Syrian Refugee Crisis, the greatest refugee crisis since WWII. But this little boy, like every little boy ,had a name. His name was Aylan Kurdi (age 3), he drowned along with his older brother, Galip (age 5), and their mother, Rihan, on their own exodus to...

---

Why is there no orange on our Seder plate?      In the early 1980s, while speaking at Oberlin College Hillel, Susannah Heschel was introduced to an early feminist Haggadah that suggested adding a crust of bread on the Seder plate, as a sign of solidarity with Jewish lesbians (there's as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the seder plate). Heschel felt that to put bread on the Seder plate would be to...

---

The answers to the first three questions are drawn from Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). Excerpts are cited with “NJC” and the page number. Question #1 Why does America have the highest incarceration rate of any developed nation in the world? Many factors have increased the incarceration rate, including the War on Drugs, the imposition of mandatory minimum sentencing, and privatization of prisons, which creates financial incentives for keeping people...

---

Leader: God brought ten plagues upon the Egyptian people as part of the Israelites’ journey to freedom. Tonight we read ten modern plagues that result from unfair, inequitable, and excessive practices in the criminal justice system. As we read each plague we remove a drop of wine from our glasses to symbolize our anguish at the suffering these plagues have caused. Recite together:  The concentration of police drug enforcement resources in poor communities of color  The forfeiture laws and...

---

(at St. Mary's)may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16489#sthash.FlxZP4Fx.dpuf

---

What would it mean to livein a city whose people were changingeach other’s despair into hope?You yourself must change it.What would it feel like to knowyour country was changing?You yourself must change it.Though your life felt arduousnew and unmapped and strangeWhat would it means to stand on the firstpage of the end of despair?