To return to the new Peace Now website click here.

This Passover -- Reject Hate, Embrace Hope

APN provides a special reading to include in your Passover Seder...

Each year, APN sends to our friends and colleagues some language which can be added to the reading of the Haggadah at Passover.

We believe it is important that as we recount the history of our journey from Egypt to freedom, that we acknowledge the struggle that Israel and her neighbors still wage for peace and security.

Our suggested reading this year - written by Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky, Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary and author of A Delightful Compendium of Consolation - speaks to our opportunity to reject hate and embrace hope.

You can find Haggadah addendums sent out by APN in previous years HERE.

We wish you all a Hag Sameach and may we all pray for peace. Shalom.



Reject Hate, Embrace Hope, Recommit to Peace!

AT THE POURING OF THE FOURTH CUP:

Traditionally, we fill this cup to welcome the Prophet Elijah, who heralds the start of the Messianic era. For centuries, we have recited Psalm 79:6-7: "Pour out Your wrath on the nations that do not know you and on the kingdoms that do not call upon Your name. They have devoured Jacob and made desolate his dwellings."

In the Middle Ages, Jews invoked this fantasy of divine retribution as a poultice for the wounds inflicted during our long history. This bitterness was understandable, if unproductive. Now we live in a time that we are ostensibly free, yet the nations who actually invoke God's name continue to desolate one another. God's Holy Land is riven by terror and revenge. Jacob's forbears, Isaac and Ishmael, remain gripped in the medieval mind-set. Despair makes us yearn for the arrival of Elijah.

We cannot bear to wait any longer. We cannot endure endless war. Elijah seems but a faint hope, not a solution. Tonight, we open the door to our neighbors, to dwelling with one another in quiet and shared delight. As we open the door we raise our fourth cup in a toast to the fresh breeze of renewed commitment, to the rejection of hate, to embracing hope, and to the hard work of making peace. And, we raise our glasses to life. We pray this "LeChaim," will bring us the longed-for redemption. Let this be the way we welcome Elijah