Korech | Passover haggadah by Jacob Cantor

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We now eat the matzah, the maror, and charoset together, as Hillel, the 1st century Babylonian Jewish Sage and Scholar, did with Matzah, the bitter herb and the pesach offering in the times of the temple.

“According to several sources, along with my heart of hearts, the Hillel Sandwich is one of the oldests recorded examples of the sandwich in human history. While in Hillel’s time, hellenistic influenced ritual resulted in a sandwich of warm pita, sacrificial roasted lamb, and bitter herb, ours is simply one of matza, maror, and charoset. Which is disappointing. But it raises a few questions. Why is the sandwich Jewish? Even if Jews didn’t invent the sandwiches, why did one of our sages and later the whole tradition choose to symbolize, sanctify and eternalize it in one of our holiest customs? The question should be: ‘how could they not?’” - Jacob Aaron Cantor, Avodah Service CORP Member, 2019-20

A traditional reading of Hillel’s sandwich is that it combines the sweetness and bitterness of our expirience, our slavery and liberation - inextricably tied. One cannot be understood without the other. In interpretations that tie modern day slaveries and social ills to the story of exodus, we are meant to understand that these ideas of liberation and slavery are complicated. That they overlap and compound. Systems of social hierarchy and predatory capitalism link our slaveries... and our freedoms too. Like the exit from Egypt, tactics of revolt and dissent carry their own messes. Revolutions cost decorum and lives. Time and again we see freedom demanded, blood spilled, freedom won, and chains re-shackled. In other words, we eat this sandwich to understand and remind ourselves that our liberation is messy, connected to violence and love. In other other words, we eat a sandwich to “hold complexity!” - Cassie Lynn Bergman, Avodah Service CORP Member, 2019-20

The essence of Korech is on display in the storied Jewish history of the 3rd Night of Passover Seder. Made famous by the Arbeter Ring (Workers Circle), large, ceremonious, secular yiddishists seders were held around the country on a night during or near passover (explicitly not on the 1st or 2nd evenings so that folks might have traditional seders with their families). These gatherings were festivals for leftists of many stripes and celebrated a Jewish progressivism and the working class. After the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, an armed resistance against the German army conducted by Jewish paramilitary organizations on the night of Passover, 1943, the Arbiter Rings 3rd Night Seders were held in solidarity with the uprising and the subsequent annihilation of the Ghetto. Selections from the trove of surviving yiddish resistance art and poetry was read. Lifted were the virtues of action, the pain of passivity and the complexity of violence.

More than 100 years have passed since, in our own city of Chicago, black citizens mounted an armed defense against white mobs that set out to murder them, to erase them from the city. We celebrate the resistance fighters who in 1919, and every decade since, have fought against the ghetto, imposed on them by a racist society, and the inequity and suffering that are its legacies. We remember the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as an ancestral legacy we aim to live up to. We remember the 1919 Race Massacre in Chicago in order to celebrate the communities and revolutions we stand in solidarity with, and note the systems of anti-blackness, racism, and white supremacy we seek to dismantle. The complexity of violence in uprising and art made in darkness passes silently throughout our story of liberation. Beauty tucked into tragedy and success grown from failures paints our story tonight and defines our work for the future.

To honor the complexity in our own stories and those we aim to honor and fight for, we recite two poems. One written from the Warsaw Ghetto and one in remembrance of the 1919 Chicago Race massacre

No Title (The Night)

The night has rocked me to sleep in her lap

and sung into my ear

the song of darkness and sweet dying

but I was awake and aware

heard my young hot blood

prepare to fight

against it

By Simkha Shayevitch

Insert Exodus 10 By Eve Ewing

haggadah Section: Koreich