Additional Social Action Programs for Passover

AIDS Awareness

Temple Sinai of Sarasota, FL (www.templesinai-sarasota.org) holds a program entitled, “Seder of Hope: An Interfaith Passover Gathering for People Touched by AIDS.” The mission of this uplifting program is to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS in the local community and to bring support, healing and comfort to those affected. Approximately 150 people attend this event each year. Those who attend are from all segments of the Sarasota community, especially those individuals who are afflicted with HIV/AIDS, their friends and family members, and those who have lost someone to the disease. Temple Sinai’s Social Action Committee created a unique Haggadah for the Seder of Hope. Instead of discussing the ten plagues sent by God to liberate us from Egypt, this Haggadah enumerates the plagues that hinder liberation from AIDS. These plagues are ignorance, denial, hypocrisy, bigotry, apathy, shame, gossip, recklessness, impatience, and fatalism. The program takes advantage of the participation of many of the temple’s 500 members. Volunteers decorate the social hall with AIDS memorial quilts, and every guest is greeted with a red AIDS ribbon. The Seder has also helped the congregation build alliances with many diverse organizations, like the Diocese of Venice, Florida, Sun Coast Cathedral, PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and the Doctors Hospital of Sarasota, which help to support this event. The Seder of Hope was initiated at Temple Sinai by a program chair who had lost her son to AIDS in 1992. It has become an inspiring vehicle through which many temple members have put their Jewish values to work. The Seder has served to educate both the congregation and the community-at-large about the problems associated with this disease. The Seder of Hope promotes social justice for a part of the population that is often persecuted by defending their civil rights, relieving their mental suffering and building positive community relations.

Women’s Seders are perhaps the most prolific addition to the variety of Passover Haggadot available. Thirty years ago, Jewish women sought to alert the greater Jewish community to injustices and inequities suffered by women in Jewish society. Recent times find liberal Jewish women on a much more equal standing with men. The observance of a Women’s Passover Seder, which celebrates the great strides women have made to become equal participants in the Jewish world, has become widespread. References for many of these different Haggadot can be found in The Women’s Seder Sourcebook and The Women’s Passover Companion.

Environmental Concerns

There are many environmental themes that run through the Jewish holidays, including Pesach. Individuals and congregations may wish to incorporate special readings or blessings that highlight the agricultural roots of the holiday. The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) provides background information, sample readings and a special Haggadah with environmental reading on its website (www.coejl.org), including the following reading by Rabbi Warren Stone, which can be read while dipping the parsley or other greens into salt water:

If the Earth Could Speak, It Would Speak with Passion:

As you dip the beauty of greens into the water of tears, please hear my cry. Can’t you see that I am slowly dying? My forests are being clear cut, diminished. My diverse and wondrous creatures -- birds of the sky and beasts of the fields -- small and large are threatened with extinction in your lifetimes. My splendid, colorful floral and fauna are diminishing in kind. My tropical places are disappearing before us, and my oceans are warming. Don’t you see that my climate is changing, bringing floods and heat, more extreme cycles of cold and warm, all affecting you and all our Creation? It doesn’t have to be! You, all of you, can make a difference in simple ways. You, all of you, can help reverse this sorrowful trend.

May these waters into which you dip the greens become healing waters to sooth and restore. As you dip, quietly make this promise:

Yes, I can help protect our wondrous natural places. Yes, I can try to use fewer of our precious resources and to replant and sustain more. I can do my part to protect our forests, our oceans and waters. I can work to protect the survival of creatures of all kinds. Yes, I will seek new forms of sustainable energy in my home and in my work, turning toward the sun, the wind, the waters. I make this promise to strive to live gently upon this Earth of ours for the good of all coming generations.

The Women’s Seder Sourcebook and The Women’s Passover Companion, edited by Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfield, et al. ( Woodstock: Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2003).

Available on-line at: http://www.coejl.org/celebrate/pass_stone.shtml.