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Kavanah: Declaring Our Intentions
Contributed by Noraa Kaplan

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

Once we were slaves. Now we are free. These two simple statements contain some of Pesach’s most elusive paradoxes and radical possibilities. The Passover seder is a complex, nuanced ritual that embodies liberation and oppression at the same time. It asks us not only to remember slavery, but relive it; not only to celebrate freedom, but to take it for ourselves.


For thousands of years, the Jewish people have been challenged to regard the Exodus not as a bible story or historical event, but as a part of our own lived experience. The haggadah tells us, “In every generation, each person must see themself as if they personally left Mitzrayim.” 


This practice of radical empathy is a crucial piece of spiritual weaponry entrusted to us by our ancestors. It served them well, helping countless generations of Jews survive millenia of oppression. Now we must continue the work our ancestors started by radically empathizing with them, with each other, and with everyone who is enslaved today.  


It is a sad truth that slavery did not end with the Exodus, or with the Civil War for that matter. Slavery and oppression persist in the United States to this day. The constitutional amendment that ended the practice of chattel slavery in the U.S. actually laid the foundation for the system that would take its place. The 13th Amendment banned slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for a crime,” taking the power to enslave away from individuals and giving it to the carceral state. 


After the war, southern plantation owners needed a new source of free labor. They found it in state prisons, which exploded in population during reconstruction and were conspicuously full of newly freed Black people. The slave patrols that had once pursued fugitive slaves became the police forces that arrested Black people, largely on minor or fictitious charges. The courts gave them heavy sentences, and they were forced to work without pay under brutal conditions nearly identical to antebellum slavery. Gradually, prisons and police spread across the country and became ubiquitous fixtures of American oppression. 


As we celebrate our liberation tonight, we must remember that not everyone in this country is free, and recognize that none of us can be truly free until all of us are. Though none of us are in prisons tonight, the system of carceral violence oppresses us all. It is from this shared experience that the possibility of abolition arises. If we can come to terms with our own oppression and practice radical empathy with incarcerated people, we can replace performative allyship with authentic solidarity, and open our hearts to a world of transformation and possibility.


The word kavanah is often translated as intention. It comes from the phrase kavanat ha-lev, which means “preparation of the heart.” The Jewish people believe that rituals are incomplete if they are performed rote, devoid of intentionality or emotional authenticity. Kavanot prepare our hardened hearts to be opened, so love can reach us. A Chasidic teaching explains why the Torah tells us to place the words of Judaism’s central prayer, the Sh’ma, “on our hearts,” (Deuteronomy 6:6) not in them. Our hearts are too hard to put anything inside of. Instead, we place the words on top of them, so that when they break, the words can fall inside. In the words of the Kotzker Rebbe, “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”

 
One of the first things Jews are supposed to say after waking up every morning is a blessing for prisoners to be freed. We begin the Seder with this same energy. Let us remember that the work of liberation is sacred. Let us open our hearts to a world without prisons and without police.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יי אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים
Baruch atah Adonai, eloheynu melech ha-olam, matir asurim.
Blessed are you, who frees the prisoner. 
 
haggadah Section: Introduction

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