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"You must not mistreat or oppress foreigners in any way. Remember, you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt." -- Shemot: 22:20 As we remember our own liberation from bondage in Egypt, we drink this cup of wine to honor those for whom the story of the Jewish exodus is a daily reality, in hope that they may find their freedom as we found ours. We as a people have stood in the shoes of the refugee. Just as...

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(Reader should raise the empty water glass in the center of the table.) Miriam's Cup is a newer object that is placed on the Seder table beside the Cup of Elijah to represent her importance -- and the importance of many women -- in the Passover story. Miriam's Cup is filled with water, rather than wine, to symbolize the well that was said to have followed Miriam throughout the desert and served as the main source of water during the Jews' ...

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Pass the bowl & pitcher around the table, each pouring a few drops of water onto their neighbor’s hands. Why are we washing our hands?  The term "delayed gratification" probably describes it best. We should be remembering what the slaves went through all those years ago, who weren't able to eat such delicious food whenever they wanted. We wash our hands to stave off the eating bit and keep ourselves hungry. Other rabbis disagree (of course) about the reason: they believe...

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Tonight we will drink not one cup of wine but four as we recount the journey from exodus to liberation, a journey that stops in many places along the way. We come first to the recognition of slavery, of degredation, of narrowness. Until we know the ways in which we are enslaved, we can never be free. We drink this first cup of wine in honor of awareness. Baruch atah, Adonai, eloheinu melech ha’olam, borei p’ri hagafen. Blessed are you, Adonai...

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The symbolic washing of the hands that we now perform recalls the story of Miriam's Well. Legend tells us that this well followed Miriam, sister of Moses, through the desert, sustaining the Jews in their wanderings. Filled with waters of life, the well was a source of strength and renewal to all who drew from it. One drink from its waters was said to alert the heart, mind and soul, and make the meaning of Torah become more clear. In Hebrew,...

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"You must not mistreat or oppress foreigners in any way. Remember, you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt." -- Shemot: 22:20 As we remember our own liberation from bondage in Egypt, we drink this cup to remember those for whom the story of the Jewish exodus in the desert is a daily reality, in hope that they find their salvation as we found ours. As our wine cups overflow in this moment of joy, we hold out hope...

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We now take some maror and charoset and put them between two pieces of matzah and give the sandwich to the person on our left. In combining maror with charoset, we recall our sage Hillel (head of the supreme council of Yisrael, 1st century B.C.E.) who, in remembrance of the loss of the Temple, created the Korech sandwich. He said that by eating the Korech, we would taste the bitterness of slavery mixed with the sweetness of freedom. This practice suggests...

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The Ten Plagues (Adapted from Jewish Voice For Peace Haggadah 2015  and  Love+ Justice In Times of War Haggadah )  The idea of justice embodied in our story is direct and unquestioned—suffering for suffering. The people of Mitzrayim suffered because of their own leader, who is in part set-up by an angry G-d eager to demonstrate his own superiority. In our story, all of this was necessary for freedom. Jews have been troubled by this for generations, and so, before we...

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CONSIDER: Thoughts about Mitzrayim and Yisrael In the wake of the violence, turmoil, colonialist control, and ongoing Occupation, we want to acknowledge the distinction between “mitzrayim”- the narrow place- where the story we tell at Passover takes place and Egypt, the modern-day nation state. We are not conflating contemporary Egyptians with the pharaoh and taskmasters that appear in the Passover story. In the U.S., and worldwide, anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia saturate our media and our culture, and we must be vigilant...

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This year, our Seder plate has a new symbol – an olive. Why an olive? Because, for slavery to be truly over, for a people to be truly free, we must know that we can feed ourselves and our children, today, tomorrow, and into the following generations. In the lands of Israel and Palestine, olive groves provide this security. When olive groves are destroyed, the past and future is destroyed. Without economic security, a people can much more easily be conquered,...

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In the early 1980s, the Hillel Foundation invited me to speak on a panel at Oberlin College. While on campus, I came across a Haggadah that had been written by some Oberlin students to express feminist concerns. One ritual they devised was placing 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). At...