Passover is a very favorite holiday. It is a time of gorgeous things: radical empathy, identification with the oppressed to keep us focused on liberation. Re-up on the mission for the year ahead, walk out dreaming what will be better with all the tactics we can learn from the Exodus story.
I started writing songs and poems for Seders with my parents as a kid. I wrote my first Haggadah in high school, and have compiled/written Haggadot now for many years. Re-framing and interpreting this annual ritual allows me to stay connected to all that I love so dearly about Judaism – our culture, our flawed texts, our foundational liturgies and traditions, our magic, our grief, our hope.
The Seder ritual especially has given me a space to approach my work as Jewish person outside of the walls of institutional Judaism, outside of Zionism, nationalism, binary thinking that is always looking for a hero and a villain.
2026 Haggadah
My Divine Chaos Haggadah is on its way!
With the Seder’s ancient mandate of radical empathy towards liberation, this Haggadah was born from my training as a grief coach and death doula. What I have come to understand is that, like Moses, each of us encounters the burning bush – divinity that burns eternally – and the work of the Angel of Death, a sensual but senseless and terrifyingly-reliable aspect of divinity. These divinities transform us, wash through us, and with smoke in the air and stories to tell, we move through them with the aim of divine connection and ancestral healing.
From the fire through the water to the air
2023
god is change
2017
These haggadot were created on haggadot.com
Ariel N Kates 