On this page, you will find 1-page source sheets to help stimulate discussion at your seder table. We produce individual Haggadah supplements in addition to our Haggadah, The Other Side of the River, The Other Side of the Sea, which can be downloaded anytime or purchased in the weeks leading up to Pesach. We hope these additions to your seder help you to stimulate meaningful conversation with you and those with you, and that your conversation will lead to reengaging in the work of liberating our world just as the Israelites were liberated from Egypt.
Pour Out Your Wrath, 2022
This supplement examines the “Shafoch Hamatecha” section of the haggadah, where we ask God to pour out God’s wrath upon all the non-Jewish nations of the world. How might we read a text that unnerves many of our modern sensibilities. Bennett Decker and Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson offer two sources; one that seeks to contextualize and the other to substitute, each as a means of processing relationships to uncomfortable texts and antisemitism.
COVID-19 Seder Supplement: The Four Coronavirus Children Within Us, 2020
Produced during the heart of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson asks us which of many “4 children” we contain within ourselves. How can we process the experience of living through a pandemic through the different archetypes presented in the 4 children section of the Haggadah.
Resisting Tyrants Since Pharaoh, 2019
In this supplement, T’ruah presents a midrash that attempts to define the oppressions the Israelites experienced in Egypt. How do we see those same qualities in our current government? What might we do to resist those as the Israelites ultimately did in Egypt?
Tomato on the Seder Plate, 2019
This supplement suggests and gives textual support for placing a tomato on the seder table to symbolize farmworker who picked the tomato and their struggles for justice. This ritual was created in conjunction with our #TomatoRabbis campaign, a movement in support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farmworkers union originally based in southern Florida.
Midwifing Resistance, 2018
How might we act like the midwives Shifra and Puah in Exodus 1:15-21? Rabbis Bill Plevan, Sharon Brous, and Lev Meirowitz Nelson bring rabbinic and modern sources to ask us to think seriously about how we will tell our children, and specifically, our daughters, what it looks like to resist a tyrannical and misogynist government.
Crying Out Against Mass Incarceration
This longer supplement asks important questions of us on mass incarceration. On the night when we celebrate the breaking of our chains in Egypt, how should we think our modern day system of imprisonment and enslavement, and what we are doing off to break the chains of others?
