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Introduction: Chocolate & Justice?
Contributed by Shoshana Rice

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

Welcome to Hillel of San Diego’s 2021 Passover Seder: Chocolate & Justice. We’re so glad you all joined us for this special evening to celebrate our ancient Passover traditions as a warm and welcoming community. 

Every Passover we gather to celebrate the Israelite’s plight from slavery to freedom. We are obligated to tell the story of the Exodus, the journey to liberation, and recall the bitterness of that experience. Each year we read, “every generation is obligated to see him or herself as though he/she had personally been redeemed from Egypt.” We are urged to remember that we were once slaves. We tell the details of the story, taste the symbolic foods; we try to imagine what the clay mortar looked like as we worked endless hours building Pharaoh's kingdom, we try to replicate the diet, limited to “the bread of affliction”. Each ritual is an attempt to “experience” what slavery felt like as if we were there. The tradition is to work towards forming the highest levels of empathy for enslavement, envisioning it on ourselves. 

But the story is thousands of years old. How deeply can you really connect and feel the pain of an ancestor moving gigantic clay boulders in the Egyptian desert thousands of years ago? It’s our tradition to try, and we will. But slavery wasn’t eradicated thousands of years ago. There are children enslaved today, a part of the very industries we consume on a regular basis. This year, as we’re called to imagine ourselves as slaves in Egypt, we will simultaneously envision real world slaves today, specifically our brothers and sisters in West Africa. Let this be an opportunity where we not only more deeply fulfill our tradition to experience empathy for enslavement, but also an evening where we open our eyes to realize we’re not done with this struggle.

 

We each have the power and the obligation to participate in liberating the modern slave. What does this mean to us and how can we do this? We must reach beyond ourselves, beyond the usual extent of our gaze. Slavery does not end through hope and passivity. Today we’re not going to simply talk in abstract about the fact that slavery exists. Throughout our Seder, we’re going to learn about a real example, the child slaves employed by our favorite multi-billion dollar chocolate companies. 

 

And tonight, we’re not consuming that chocolate touched by child slave laborers. Instead, we eat fair trade chocolate, reminding us that while these horrors exist today, there is a struggle against it and we can be a part of it. We have the freedom to support industries who won’t stand for injustice. As we recall our immense joy at being freed from slavery, we celebrate the great strides made today, fighting oppression similar to our ancestors. We take the sweetness of this chocolate as a symbol of resistance and the possibility of liberation for all. Let this observance of Passover evoke thoughtful insights, authentic emotions, impactful education, and connective interfaith celebration. May the world know liberation, one person at a time, mindful act by mindful act, until all people are free!
haggadah Section: Introduction

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