Before You Begin
What you need at your table:
- Your own Haggadah — whatever you have
- A journal and pen
- A small stack of sticky notes
- One index card (for the afikomen)
- Four cups of wine or grape juice
- Karpas and salt water · Matzah · Maror
- A candle, if you want one
How This Works
This is not a replacement Haggadah. It is a companion to the one on your table.
At each stage, you’ll do three things: read a brief piece of learning, open your own Haggadah and see what it says, then write. Some prompts go in your journal — longer, private, stays with you. Some go on a sticky note tucked into your Haggadah at that page. The sticky notes are meant to be returned to. Imagine finding them next Pesach, and the one after that.
Set the timers. When they go off, finish your sentence and stop. You have a whole seder ahead.
If you’re doing this as your seder: move through the stages in order, do the ritual actions, pour the cups, eat the matzah. The writing is what makes it yours. Note: This ritual may take several hours. It is designed for depth, not speed.
If you’re doing this during chol hamoed: skip the ritual actions if you want, or keep them. You don’t need to go in order. Open to any stage, set a timer, write. You can do the whole document over several evenings.
On Writing Alone
וְהִגַּדְתָּ לְבִנְךָ — “You shall tell your child.” (Exodus 13:8).
The rabbis ruled that if no one is present to ask the four questions, you ask them yourself. If you are alone at the seder, you still tell the story — to yourself, for yourself. (Talmud, Pesachim 116a)
A Note on the Sustained Piece
At Yachatz ✦ and Tzafun ✦, you will return to the same fragment of writing — broken off, hidden, retrieved. Watch for the symbol to mark these moments.
קַדֵּשׁ · KADESH · Sanctify
The root of kiddush is kadosh — holy, set apart. Holiness in Jewish thought is not a quality inherent to a thing. It is created by the act of distinction. You make something sacred by separating it from the mundane.
The first cup is a cup of awareness. Not celebration yet — that comes later. First, the recognition. Pesah holds what might be called the “already/not yet” paradox: the festival celebrates freedom and simultaneously reminds us that we are neither free nor redeemed. We open the seder with the words of the Kiddush — “this festival of matzot, the season of our freedom” — and almost immediately uncover the matzah and say: “Now we are enslaved, next year may we all be free.” The haggadah names the paradox at the start rather than hiding it. We drink to awareness of where we actually are.
In your Haggadah: Open to the very first page. What is the first word, image, or instruction? What does your Haggadah think this evening begins with?
🗒️ Sticky note — 3 minutes: What are you bringing yourself out of in order to be here tonight? One or two sentences. Tuck it into your Haggadah’s first page. Next year you’ll find it there.
Say Kiddush. Drink the first cup — in honor of awareness.
וּרְחַץ · URCHATZ · Wash hands — no blessing
The Talmud discusses this washing across two folios (Pesachim 114b-115a). The legal basis: anything dipped in liquid requires clean hands. The blessing is withheld — and the rabbis understood that this silence would make a child ask why. The unusual action without explanation creates the question, which is what the Rabbis wanted.
The seder’s first stirring of freedom belongs to the women at the water: the midwives Shifrah and Puah, who defied Pharaoh’s decree and chose life; Miriam, who watched over her brother Moses at the Nile. Joy Levitt writes: “The waters of freedom open and close our story, taking us from the Nile to the Sea of Reeds.” The washing is not incidental. It reaches all the way back to the women who believed in the inevitability of freedom before anyone else did.
Miriam’s Cup, filled with water, sits on the table throughout the seder. While Elijah’s cup holds the promise of redemption yet to come, Miriam’s cup holds the redemption occurring right now — in ordinary time, in daily life.
In your Haggadah: Find Urchatz. How much does yours say about it? Does it name Miriam or the midwives?
🗒️ Sticky note — 3 minutes: What do you want to be cleansed of through the process of this evening?
כַּרְפַּס · KARPAS · Greens dipped in salt water
The word karpas appears once in the Hebrew Bible — in Esther 1:6, where it describes the fine linen curtains in Ahasuerus’s palace. The rabbis noticed the same word sitting in both places and made something of it: luxury cloth in a court where Jewish lives were at stake; a vegetable on a seder plate.
Karpas is spring and new growth — the flowering of spirit and voice. But we dip in salt water, mixing bitterness with sweetness, past with future. We live with the contrasts because no moment exists without a multitude of combinations: sorrow and joy, pain and comfort, despair and hope. The Haggadah does not ask you to resolve this. It asks you to taste it.
In your Haggadah: Does yours explain karpas, or just instruct you to dip? What does it say about the salt water?
📓 Journal — 3 minutes: Stay in sensation. What does the karpas in salt water taste like right now, tonight? Not what it means — what it tastes like. No metaphor yet. Use as many descriptive words as you can.
יַחַץ · YACHATZ · Break the middle matzah ✦
The three matzot on the seder plate are often said to represent Kohen, Levi, and Yisrael — and it is the middle one, Levi, that breaks. The Levites were the carriers: the ones who transported the Mishkan through the wilderness, who bore the sacred from one place to the next. Notice that what we hide is the larger half. We proceed all evening on the smaller piece.
Harold Schulweis writes: “No prayer is recited before we break the middle matzah. This is a silent act. We realize that, like the broken matzah, we are all incomplete, with prayers yet to be fulfilled, promises still to be redeemed. We hide part of this broken matzah and hope it will be found by the end of our seder meal, for we recognize that parts of ourselves are yet unknown. We are still discovering what makes us whole. We hide the larger of the two parts because we know that more is hidden than is revealed. We prepared for Pesah in the night, searching for the hidden leavened bread; we will end the seder in the night, searching for the unleavened bread. With the generations that have come before us and with one another, our search begins.”
Tamara Cohen adds: “Some do not get the chance to rise like golden loaves of hallah, filled with sweet raisins and crowned with shiny braids. Rushed, neglected, not kneaded by caring hands, we grow up afraid that any touch might cause a break. There are some ingredients we never receive. Tonight, let us bless our cracked surfaces and sharp edges, unafraid to see our brittleness and brave enough to see our beauty. Reaching for wholeness, let us piece together the parts of ourselves we have found, and honor all that is still hidden.”
In your Haggadah: How does yours describe the afikomen? Does it explain the hiding, or just instruct you to do it?
📓 Journal — 5 minutes ✦: On your index card, write one sentence about something you keep hidden — from others, or from yourself. Just one sentence. Fold it and hide it somewhere in the room. You’ll find it again before the evening ends.
מַגִּיד · MAGGID · The Telling
This is the heart of the seder. Take your time.
הָא לַחְמָא עַנְיָא · Ha Lachma Anya
This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.
Let all who are hungry come and eat.
Let all who are in need come and celebrate Passover with us.
This paragraph is written in Aramaic — not Hebrew, but the vernacular (the language people actually spoke day to day). It is the only part of the Haggadah addressed outward, to the world beyond the room. And it opens with an honest naming: this is the bread of affliction.
In your Haggadah: Is Ha Lachma Anya in Aramaic, Hebrew, English, or some combination? What does that choice feel like?
📓 Journal — 5 minutes: Name your bread of affliction — what you are carrying into this evening, what feels like constraint or scarcity right now.
Then: who do you want at this table? The door is open. Name them.
מַה נִּשְׁתַּנָּה · Mah Nishtanah
The Talmud is explicit: if no child is present to ask, you ask yourself (Pesachim 116a). The obligation to question is not contingent on an audience. And the questions are not primarily requests for information — they are doors. The child asks because they have noticed something different and want to be brought into the story.
In your Haggadah: Read the four questions. Which one feels strangest to you tonight?
🗒️ Sticky note — 7 minutes: Write your own four questions — the ones you are genuinely living inside right now. Not rhetorical. Not ones you know the answers to. Tuck the sticky note here. Next year, write four new ones on a new note and stack them.
אַרְבָּעָה בָנִים · The Four Children
The four children appear in four separate places in the Torah: Exodus 12:26, 13:8, 13:14, and Deuteronomy 6:20. The Haggadah synthesizes them into one moment. The child called rasha — often translated “wicked” — says: what does this mean to you? Not to us. The rabbis read the exclusion as the sin: not hostility, but removal from the first-person plural.
But the rabbis also understood that no one sits at this table as only one child. The wise one who knows how to ask, the wicked one who has stepped outside, the simple one who wants a plain answer, the one who doesn’t yet know how to form the question — these are not four different people. They are four different moments in the same person, sometimes in the same hour.
In your Haggadah: How does yours translate rasha? What does that word choice do?
📓 Journal — 7 minutes: Write a few sentences from each child’s point of view — all four, in first person, present tense. Where are you wise tonight? Where are you outside? Where do you want a simple answer? Where don’t you yet know how to ask?
בֵּין הַפְּרָקִים · A Pause Before the Plagues
The Haggadah inserts a long stretch of storytelling here — the rabbis debating at Bnei Brak, the Exodus narrative, the theological wrestling. It is not accidental. Before naming what afflicts us, we are given time to remember we are part of a longer story than our own.
Set your journal down. Stand up if you can. Step outside for a moment, or just away from the table. You’ve been doing interior work. Let it settle before you continue.
הַמַּכּוֹת · The Plagues
When the Egyptians drowned in the sea, the ministering angels wanted to sing. God rebuked them: “My handiwork is drowning in the sea, and you wish to say songs?” (Talmud, Megillah 10b and Sanhedrin 39b). We diminish our cup — ten drops, one per plague — because liberation came at cost.
In your Haggadah: Does yours include commentary on the plagues, or just the list? Does it ask anything of you here?
📓 Journal — 5 minutes: A list. What plagues you right now? Ten items, give or take. Spill a drop for each one. Then, in what ways do you contribute to the plagues of others? Spill drops for those, too.
דַּיֵּנוּ · Dayenu
The word means: it would have been enough. The song lists fifteen gifts and after each one pauses to say: even this alone would have sufficed. The theology is strange — it would have been enough if God had only brought us out of Egypt, even though we would have drowned. The “enough” is not literally true. It is a practice. A muscle. The deliberate act of noticing what you already have before the story moves on.
In your Haggadah: How many verses does yours include? Does it add commentary or let the song stand on its own?
🗒️ Sticky note — 5 minutes: Sing (or listen to a recording of) Dayenu. Then write three things from this past year that were enough — even if more came after, even if they were small. Tuck it here. Next year you’ll want to see what you were counting.
בְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר · In Every Generation
In every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt.
The Mishnah (Pesachim 10:5) uses the word כְּאִלּוּ — ke’ilu — “as if.” Not to remember that their ancestors left. As if they themselves left. Ke’ilu is also how the Talmud frames legal fictions and thought experiments: as if this were true — now reason from there.
In your Haggadah: Find this passage. What does yours do with it?
No writing. Sit with the ke’ilu.
Pour and drink the second cup — in celebration of redemption from Egypt.
רָחְצָה · RACHTZAH · Wash hands — with blessing
At Urchatz we were preparing. Now we have moved through the story — asked and told and questioned and listed. We arrive at this washing already changed. The blessing marks not readiness but arrival.
In your Haggadah: Does yours distinguish this washing from the first one?
מוֹצִיא מַצָּה · MOTZI MATZAH · Bless and eat the matzah
In Eruvin 54a, Shmuel tells Rav Yehuda: open your mouth and read Torah aloud, so that your learning will stay with you. He cites Proverbs 4:22 — ki chayyim hem l’motz’eihem — “they are life to those who find them” — and reads it against itself: not motz’eihem, those who find, but lemotzi’eihem, those who say it with their mouths. Saying something aloud is different from knowing it silently.
In your Haggadah: Read whatever yours says at this moment.
Before you eat: Read aloud something from your journal — whatever you’ve written tonight, or whatever wants to be heard. Your own voice, in the room. No one is listening but you, which means you have to listen.
Eat the matzah.
מָרוֹר · MAROR · Bitter herbs
Maimonides writes that the point of maror is to make the memory of bitterness real enough to be felt. He specifies: you must eat enough to actually taste it (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Chametz U’Matzah 7:13). There is no dipping here — no salt water or charoset to soften it. Just the bitter thing, straight.
In your Haggadah: Does yours say anything about how to eat maror — how much, how to prepare it?
📓 Journal — 5 minutes: What is bitter right now? Don’t soften it. Don’t explain why it will be okay. Name it specifically.
כּוֹרֵךְ · KORECH · The Hillel sandwich
Hillel disagreed with his colleagues about how to eat the Pesach offering. They ate the lamb, matzah, and bitter herbs separately, in sequence. Hillel wrapped them together, citing Numbers 9:11: they shall eat it with matzah and bitter herbs. The sandwich is not a compromise. It is an insistence that two things can be true at the same time and eaten together.
In your Haggadah: Does yours explain Hillel’s reasoning, or just instruct you to make the sandwich?
🗒️ Sticky note — 3 minutes: One sentence only. Hold two contradictory things inside it. Don’t explain how they fit. Tuck it here.
שֻׁלְחָן עוֹרֵךְ · SHULCHAN ORECH · The meal
The meal falls in the middle of the seder deliberately — the structure is designed to keep children curious and awake. This is the only stage with no text, no instruction, no learning. Just eating. Rest is part of the structure.
No writing during the meal. Eat. Let everything you’ve written breathe. Play some music if you’d like.
צָפוּן · TZAFUN · Find the afikomen ✦
Joy Levitt writes: “When some of us were children, this moment was the high point of the seder. This was the time we would search for (and always find) the afikoman, a portion of the middle matzah that had been hidden at the beginning of the seder. We knew that the seder could not be completed until the afikoman had been found and redeemed with gifts so that everyone could be given a piece to nibble for dessert. Even as children, we knew that it wasn’t possible to find everything that was missing in life. As much as we prized the gift we received for our bargaining, it was the hunt that we really loved, running through the rooms and turning everything upside down. The older we get, the harder the search becomes. We aren’t always sure now what we are seeking, what the afikoman means to us, which dessert will bring us a sense of completion and satisfaction. Unlike during our childhood search, there are now fewer loving and reliable coaches in the next room giving us clues. There are no guarantees that we will find what we are looking for. But this we know: it is still the search that is important — the looking, the running, and the turning everything upside down.”
In your Haggadah: What does yours say at Tzafun? Is there any text here, or just the instruction?
📓 Journal — 10 minutes ✦: Go find your index card. Read what you wrote at Yachatz. Then: continue it, or decide it wants to stay incomplete. There are no guarantees that we will find what we are looking for. But this we know: it is still the search that is important.
בָּרֵךְ · BAREICH · Grace after the meal
Birkat Hamazon is one of the few mitzvot derived directly from a Torah verse: v’achalta v’savata u’veirachta — “you shall eat and be satisfied and bless.” (Deuteronomy 8:10) The blessing comes after, not before. You bless from fullness.
The Cup of Elijah is poured here. In some communities the door stays open through the rest of Hallel — the blessing goes out into the world rather than staying in the room. While Elijah’s cup holds the promise of what is not yet, Miriam’s cup — still on your table — holds what is already occurring: the daily, ongoing work of redemption.
In your Haggadah: Find the Cup of Elijah. What does yours say about it — who Elijah is, why he comes, what we’re waiting for?
🗒️ Sticky note — 5 minutes: A blessing for someone who needs one. Address them directly. It can be short. Tuck it here, next to Elijah’s cup.
Pour and drink the third cup — in gratitude for all the gifts we have been given, and most of all for the ability to question, to challenge, to choose.
הַלֵּל · HALLEL · Praise
Psalm 114, part of Hallel, opens with an infinitive construct — b’tzeit Yisrael miMitzrayim — “at Israel’s going out from Egypt.” The form is temporally unanchored: it doesn’t place the exodus only in the past. The mountains skip like rams. The sea sees and flees. The rabbis ordained that Hallel be sung even when the singer is exhausted, even when the world has not cooperated.
Miriam led the singing at the sea. She took the timbrel in her hand and went out, and all the women went after her. The Talmud records that the angels were silenced at that moment; the humans were not. Those who had passed through the water were permitted — were expected — to sing.
In your Haggadah: Which psalms does yours include in Hallel? Does it print them in full, or abbreviate? Does it include anything about Miriam?
📓 Journal — 5 minutes: Toward joy. One sentence or ten. Write in the direction of it, from wherever you actually are.
Pour and drink the fourth cup — the cup of hope: hope that next year we will all be free, that next year children and parents, neighbors and nations will turn their hearts to one another.
נִרְצָה · NIRTZAH · Acceptance
The word nirtzah does not mean finished. It means accepted — desired, even. The prayer is that what we have done tonight has been received. We do not declare the seder successful. We offer it and hope.
לְשָׁנָה הַבָּאָה בִּירוּשָׁלָיִם — Next year in Jerusalem.
The name ירושלים — Yerushalayim — carries within it the root שלם, shalem: whole, complete, at peace. Ir shalem: a city of wholeness. We are not simply saying: next year in a place on a map. We are saying: next year in wholeness. Next year arrived.
And where are we now? The rabbis read מצרים — Mitzrayim, Egypt — through the root meitzar: a narrow place, a constriction. The story of the Exodus is the story of leaving the narrow place. In every generation, each of us knows what our narrow place is.
Peace and wholeness are the same root. The city we are hoping toward is both out there and in here.
In your Haggadah: Turn to the last page. What is the very last word, image, or instruction?
📓 Journal — 10 minutes: What is your narrow place right now — the constriction you are living inside? And what would it mean, in the coming year, to move even a little toward shalem — toward wholeness? Not arrival. Just direction. Write toward it.
Close your journal. Sit in silence for one full minute before you rise.
חַסַּל סִדּוּר פֶּסַח כְּהִלְכָתוֹ — The Pesach seder is complete, according to its laws.
