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Intro: Hillel of San Diego Passover Around the World
Contributed by Shoshana Rice

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

In a nutshell, Passover is the retelling of the story of Exodus, the story of Jews escaping slavery in Egypt, and it’s told through a variety of rituals. But I’d argue that the point of it all actually has little to do with knowing the details of the Jews and the Egyptians. Rather it’s about the feelings, questions, and inspiration that the story has the power to elicit. We will be following readings and rituals explained in these booklets in front of you called Haggadot. But did you know that for the first 800 years of Jews celebrating Passover, there was no written text. The rituals were all based on Rabbis leading dramatic first-person re-enactments of the story tailored to whatever would strategically engage their people, using props, food, and actions. The purpose was, and is, to use the story to create unscripted dialogue, introspective conversation, and inspire deeper perspectives of the modern world. 

Similarly, tonight we’ll only spend a few minutes in the middle of the Seder actually retelling the details of the story. All around it, we’ll be experiencing rituals that immerse us in the themes. It’s a practice to more deeply connect with concepts like oppression, suffering, hope, revolution, freedom, or whatever else we might discover in the story. 

Okay but oppression, suffering, hope, revolution, freedom… those are huge topics, too huge to digest without specific examples. That’s why it's becoming more mainstream in modern Judaism to give your seder a theme. Instead of just generally talking in abstract about all these big picture concepts, we get to pick lens to apply them, pick a statement to make. Maybe some of you can relate if your families recently began putting oranges on the seder plate, to call for freedom for women and in the LGBTQ community. Maybe at some of your family seders the conversation has grown into a discussion of more recent stories of Jewish oppression like the Holocaust or even more recent antisemitism. Maybe you've been to vegan seders, environmental justice seders, or our fair trade chocolate seder last year about slavery in the chocolate industry. The beauty of this Jewish ritual is that it tells us to take this ancient story and make it as relevant as possible to whatever topic feels important to us right now.

In the past decade, the global refugee population has more than doubled. 84 million people around the world have been displaced. And then Russia invaded Ukraine. As of a few weeks ago, an estimated 10 million Ukranians were forced to flee their homes, and there’s likely even more since then. This is not only one of the most heart breaking examples of suffering in our world today, but it's also very personal to us Jews. As Jews living outside of Israel, we are all in a way refugees. Maybe we've been comfortable now for a few generations, but beginning 2,000 years ago and many many times since we have been violently displaced from oppressive regimes. This diaspora is a tragic curse but also a blessing. While being scattering time and time again across the world is undeniably traumatic, at the same time, it is the reason for both our unbreakable tenacious spirit and our wildly rich cultural diversity. 

Our Seder tonight will draw inspiration from our oppression in Egypt to empathize with today’s refugees and send our support to Ukrainians. We’ll be wishing them the same undying hope for peace that we conjured in Egypt and so many times since. And at the same time, echoing the typical duality of Jewish traditions, we’ll enjoy the beauty and sweetness that ironically came out of our own bitter displacment. We’ll be celebrating Jewish diversity through the Passover traditions and foods of Jewish communities in all different corners of the world.
 
haggadah Section: Introduction

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