Welcome to this Liberation Haggadah. Tonight we celebrate the freedoms that we have, freedom that our predecessors fought for us to have. Tonight we celebrate the human will to survive, to love, and to live with dignity and in freedom. Tonight we celebrate the force of this will against the many historic and current attempts to break it. Tonight we celebrate the shoulders we stand on, the long and many legacies of struggles for liberation.

At Passover, Pesach in Hebrew, we tell the story of the liberation of the ancient Hebrews from oppression in the land of Egypt, Mitzrayim in Hebrew. Seder means“order”—the order of the meal and ritual of Pesach that Jews all over the world have participated in for centuries. Mitzyrayim is the Hebrew word for Egypt, but it literally translates to mean“a narrow place.” We understand this as a metaphor for all which is in opposition to life, justice, connection and sustainability. The Haggadah insists:“In every generation, a person is required to see themselves as if they personally left Mitzrayim.” In the spring, as the seedlings break through their shells and emerge from their narrow place in the earth, we imagine for a moment that each of us has personally left the narrow places that constrain us, that we live in a world of limitless possibility where we have the freedom to honor what is sacred.


haggadah Section: Introduction