Kavanah for an Abolitionist Seder | Passover haggadah by Noraa Kaplan

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Those who decide upon a course, and declare their intention, saying, “we will go free the prisoner and redeem the captive,” the Holy One provides them with the opportunity, and they go and do it. Those who merely think in their hearts and don’t declare their intention, the Holy One affords no opportunity.
— Avot de-Rabbi Natan 8:5

Tonight, we gather to tell a story—a story from the narrow place.

It is a story about us. It is a story about all of us. It is a story as ancient as stories themselves. It is a story that is not finished yet. It’s a familiar story, a story that we have been told before. It’s a story worth telling, and worth telling again. It’s a sad story. It’s a beautiful story. It’s the only story. But most of all, it’s our story. We get to tell it. And we deserve to be told.

We were slaves in Mitzrayim, ‘the narrow place,’ where our hopes were slim and our options were few. It was impossible for us to see the possibility of leaving. Our lives were bitter, our spirits were crushed by hard labor, and all we could do was pray to a God we didn’t believe in. We are Yisra’el, the people who ‘wrestle with God,’ who struggle to make meaning out of ancient words and sense of the violence we’ve endured. Then the miracle happened: our prayers were heard.

The great Chassidic teacher Rabbi Nachman of Breslov wrote that “prayer is the Jew’s main weapon. Prayer is the weapon with which to win the war.” Some might be uncomfortable with this framing. If we dream of beating our swords into plowshares, shouldn’t we beat our prayers into divine submission? We are advised to “carry a shovel amongst your weaponry” (Deuteronomy 23:14) to dig deep inside our souls. We might be surprised by some of the things that we find.

The history of the Jewish people is one of survival, above all else. For millennia, our ancestors have survived slavery, captivity, exile, imperialism, crusades, pogroms, inquisitions, disputations, libel, displacement, second- class citizenship, poverty, discrimination, violence, genocide. The rituals that have been handed down to us are powerful spiritual weapons, used in self-defense against a world that not only wants us dead, but wants us to want to die. Too often, we see these old traditions as relics of a bygone time, artifacts from a violent past, not worth our time.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we are still in the narrow place. Some of us might be lulled into thinking our dying days are over, and the world is safer now. The resurgence of fascism in mainstream politics and the expansion of a paramilitary police force should be enough to dispel that idea. More and more Jews have been feeling nervous about the state of anti-Semitism in America. White supremacist attacks on our shuls, Nazi graffiti, disturbing conspiracy theories—these things don’t bode well for our people. Now might be the time to start looking to tradition to unearth the radical weapons our grandparents left us, just in case a time should come when we need them to survive.

But these weapons aren’t for us alone. We can use them to fight for what is right. One of the most important weapons they’ve left us is found in the seder. By challenging us to view the Exodus not as a mere Bible story, but part of our own personal narrative, our ancestors teach us the use of radical empathy, not just walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, but leaving Mitzrayim with them. We must carry on the work of our ancestors, radically empathizing with all who are oppressed today, and fighting for them as we would fight for ourselves.
Slavery did not die out when we left Egypt, and it didn’t die out after the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment says clear as day that there are slaves in the United States being punished for their ‘crimes.’ Prisons are disproportionately and overwhelmingly filled with Black people and other marginalized groups. The police, today’s taskmasters, roam city streets looking for people to arrest to meet the ever increasing demand for slave labor, and they kill with impunity anyone who dares to defy their orders.

Judaism is an abolitionist religion. Our people’s founding myth is of liberation from slavery. The Tanach has dozens of verses about Hashem (and people) setting captives free and our liturgy is full of references to Hashem releasing prisoners. The rabbis of the Talmud forbade the use of incarceration as a punishment for sin. They considered imprisonment a fate worse than death, and declared that pidyon shvuyim, freeing the captive, is a great mitzvah. Maimonides went so far as to claim it’s most important mitzvah. The Torah forbids returning a runaway slave to their master, and our Sages forbade reporting people to the authorities, even if they’re doing wrong, saying that doing so is tantamount to murder. Every single morning, as we wake up, we bless Hashem for freeing prisoners. As we state our intention to free the prisoner and redeem the captive, we make this same bracha, in hopes that we will wake up.

בְּרוּכָה אַתְּ שְׁכִינָה, רוּחַ הָעוֹלָם, מַתִּירָה אֲסוּרִים

(Fem:) Brucha at Shechinah, ru’ach ha-olam, matira asurim.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יי אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים

(Masc:) Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam, matir asurim

Blessed are You, who frees prisoners.

❉ What are your intentions coming into this seder? What do you want to get out of it? What have your experiences with seders been, and what have you found meaningful about them?

haggadah Section: Introduction

Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan