This telling of the Exodus story is taken from the text of the 1969 Freedom Seder, originally held to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s death. It was written by Abraham Johannes Muste, a Dutch-born American clergyman active in the American workers' rights and civil rights movements. "Moses lived in a period of dictatorship. His people were slaves. The bosses made them work under a speed-up system, and committed horrible atrocities, such as trying to kill all...

Traditionally the third cup of wine is followed by a prayer called Sh'foch Chamatecha, "Pour Out Your Wrath." Oppression breeds anger to which we must attend. Once, we recited this text out of powerlessness. We asked God to pour forth wrath because we were unable to express our own. But in today's world, where we enjoy agency to an unprecedented degree, we must resist the temptations of perennial victimhood and yearning for revenge. And yet we know that rage, unexpressed, will...

Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark— freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. Putting together, inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections. - Adrienne Rich

When the founder of modern Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, saw misfortune threatening the Jews, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a special fire, say a special prayer, and the trouble would be averted. Later, when his disciple, the Rabbi Maggid of Mezritch, had occasion for the same reason to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master of the...

Tonight we drink four cups of wine. Why four? Some say the cups represent our matriarchs— Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah—whose virtue caused God to liberate us from slavery. Another interpretation is that the cups represent the Four Worlds: physicality, emotions, thought, and essence. Still a third interpretation is that the cups represent the four promises of liberation God makes in the Torah: I will bring you out, I will deliver you, I will redeem you, I will take you to...

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 accept that Jewish lesbians and gay men violate Judaism...

From now on I will make burning my aim, for I am like the candle: burning only makes me brighter. - Rumi Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu ruach ha’olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel yom tov. Blessed are you, God, Spirit of the universe, who has made us holy through the commandments, and has commanded us to light the candles of this holiday.