Radical Haggadah Supplement
Hi all! Some friends — Max Buchdahl, Maya Rosen, Liz Bentley, Netanel Zellis-Paley, and Caroline Morganti — and I edited a Haggadah supplement featuring pieces from members of Halakhic Left, HaSmol HaEmuni, All That’s Left, and others that speak to this moment. You can see the supplement here! There are essays on liberation, radical imagination, broken-heartedness, and the ongoing horrors unfolding in Gaza.
I submitted a piece describing the ways in which Zionism has altered how many Jews conceptualize the idea of “redemption.” Here’s the opening:
“Through faith that each generation will have its own Exodus, that Exodus is revealed,” wrote the Sefat Emet, R’ Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter of Gur. For him, this was the hidden meaning behind the juxtaposition of the instructions in the Haggadah to see oneself as having left Egypt and to recite “And He brought us out from there [Egypt]” (Deuteronomy 6:23). Only when we imagine ourselves leaving whatever broken, exiled world we find ourselves in does God bring us out of it.
In other words, our very belief in the possibility of redemption – a radical restructuring of political, spiritual, and social conditions – is part of what makes redemption possible. But it is not just our belief that brings such redemption into being. As R’ Avraham Chein insisted, “Redemption is sown with the thirst for redemption”: our yearning for a different world is also necessary…
Read the rest and all of the other amazing pieces in the supplement. May this Pesach bring us — all of us — one step closer to a true redemption.