MARK PODWAL: What’s unique about this haggadah is trying to draw in as many people as possible to participate in the service. That’s why it’s called Sharing the Journey. There are wonderful explanations that are very inclusive, and so you can come to this seder not knowing anything.

Although I try to be as original as possible, I like to have some tradition not only in the concepts but in the images that were used. I wanted somehow to include the seder plate visually because it’s there in the scriptures. I also wanted to make a reference to medieval haggadahs where there were large letters that illuminated a page, and so what I decided to do was have that image with the three letters of the Hebrew word “seder” and within the samech, the first letter, I drew the seder plate.

In trying to come up with an original way to depict the four children I did them as books and as the Torah, so the wise child, his body is the Torah, his arm is the Torah pointer, his head is an open book. The wicked son, or the wicked child, is in a suit of armor. The first time the wicked child was depicted in an illustrated haggadah was in 1526, the Prague Haggadah, where the wicked child is depicted in a suit of armor.

The first time the ten plagues were illustrated was in the Venice Haggadah from 1609, and I came up with just illustrating one plague, the last plague, when God slays the first-born of Egypt, and the way I depicted that was by having a wing and the mummies of the dead Egyptians on the wing.

The traditional haggadah text doesn’t even mention Moses. It’s repeatedly said that it’s God who led the children of Israel out of Egypt. It wasn’t an angel, it wasn’t an angel of fire, it wasn’t a messenger. It was God, and it’s a very beautiful passage.

The tradition is that all the Jewish people were at Sinai for the receiving of the Torah. So there were the tents of the children of Israel, and what I did was, to identify them as such, I put the flags representing the various tribes. I drew Mount Sinai as the Ten Commandments itself. It’s also one of my favorite images.

The afikomen is part of the middle matzoh that’s hidden. It’s then needed to complete the seder, and a custom is that it’s hidden, and children go to find it, and whoever finds it will get some kind of reward. I used that image to hide the afikomen within a prayer book, within the haggadah itself, and the afikomen then serves as a bookmark.

I came up with putting Elijah’s cup in front of the Golden Gate in Jerusalem because the tradition is that the Golden Gate is where the Messiah will come through into Jerusalem and that Elijah will lead the Messiah, and so that’s why the cup is waiting for Elijah in front of the Golden Gate.

Another image that’s in the haggadah that is a reference to a previous haggadah is for the illustrations to the song at the end of the seder, Adir Hu, “Mighty Is He God.” It says in that song, “May God rebuild his temple speedily in our days.” I drew the Torah enclosing Jerusalem, and the rebuilt temple based upon how the temple was drawn in the 1695 Amsterdam Haggadah.

These paintings were really an unexpected gift. Kafka once wrote that writing was prayer, and for me my art is prayer.

RABBI SHARON BROUS (IKAR, Los Angeles): Passover is the centerpiece of the Jewish moral imagination and the Jewish collective memory, and so every aspect of Jewish liturgy, of the calendar, of the Jewish experience in the world is in some way rooted in the experience of the Yetziat Mitzrayim, of the Exodus from Egypt.

Our job as a community is to position ourselves spiritually, to prepare ourselves spiritually so that we’re ready when we go into our individual homes on Seder night, that we’re ready to receive the inspiration that will flow. The cleansing of our homes is part of the cleansing of the soul. This is part of the spiritual preparation.

We live in this very paradoxical relationship with slavery that’s enunciated through the pages of the Haggadah, the book that we use to guide us through the Seder experience, in which we both articulate that we are free and we’re celebrating our freedom but also we are still slaves and maybe next year we’ll be free. We recognize that our freedom is intimately linked to the freedom of those who are most vulnerable in our society today, and we can’t be fully free until they are also free.

Matzo is the most powerful food substance there is. We hold it up at the beginning of the Seder and say Halach Ma’anya, “this is the bread of affliction,” this is the bread of poverty and it’s also the bread of freedom. When we share our resources, when we live from a place of abundance instead of from a mindset of only scarcity, when instead we say “come in and share this meal with me, share this bread with me,” so then it becomes the bread of freedom.

I think actually the symbols on the Seder plate are some of the most powerful ways of communicating what the essence of the Passover experience really is about. So we have the egg, which is the symbol of the possibility of something completely new entering into the world. We have the karpas, the greens, which is something that seems like it’s completely dead finding new life, and we dip it in salt water so we remember the tears that we shed during the time of our suffering and we remind ourselves that something beautiful and something new emerged from the depths of that suffering. There is the charoset, the sweet—it’s this sweet-tasting apple cinnamon mixture which actually comes to remind us of the bricks and mortar when we were slaves in Egypt, which I think is so interesting. There’s something about this sort of sweetness of being stuck in a life that you know you don’t want to stay in, but it’s comfortable because you’ve been there for a long time. And then on the other side there’s chazeret, the lettuce, which is a kind of bitter lettuce which comes to remind us that even once we’re in freedom there’s a kind of bitterness that comes with everything that’s unknown. And the shank bone, the symbol of the Paschal lamb. The idea of this is that freedom came to the Israelite people after the night that they were willing to go out and actually put the blood on the doorposts of their home and say, “I’m ready to take part in my own liberation right now.”

All of the rituals around Passover are designed to shake us out of our complacency and basically awaken us to the memory of the experience from Egypt, so that it’s not only that we’re remembering a story that our parents and grandparents and great grandparents told, but we’re actually remembering it in our own human experience, that I remember walking from slavery to freedom because I was also there.

Originally broadcast August 21, 2009

KIM LAWTON, guest anchor: Parents are often looking for entertaining and educational outings for their kids. An interactive museum in Brooklyn, New York helps children learn about the Jewish faith, from holidays to traditional rituals and Bible stories. Education director Rabbi Nissen Brenenson gave us a tour of the Jewish Children’s Museum.

RABBI NISSEN BRENENSON (Director of Education, Jewish Children’s Museum, Brooklyn, NY): As you approach the museum, the first thing you see is a giant photo mosaic, and as you get closer you realize that it’s made up of thousands and thousands of smaller photographs of children of all ages, of all races. Then that contains a special message, and that is that we’re really one.

The gallery on the six days of Creation and the Shabbat, the Sabbath, contains a Shabbat table where you’re actually walking on the table. There are Shabbat candlesticks, a giant crawl-through challah tunnel. Inside the tunnel, you can learn about the ingredients, the significance, of the special challah bread.

Hanukkah is also a favorite. We have an olive oil pressing station where children can actually squeeze their own olive oil. They like to do that, and the olive oil represents the miracle of the oil that happened at the time of the Hanukkah story.

I think we have the world’s only touch-screen Seder plate, and by pressing the screen and selecting the various symbolic items on the Seder plate, the children can watch short clips of what these symbols represent and the story of Passover.

The holiday of trees is called Tu B’Shvat, and here at the museum we have our own special talking Tu B’Shvat tree:

Talking Tree: Tu B’Shvat is my birthday.

RABBI BRENENSON: He’s sort of a storyteller and explains how man is compared to a tree in many ways. We have our roots, and that’s our faith, and we also have our fruits, and those are the good deeds that we perform.

The journey continues into our kosher supermarket, where children can scan products. Instead of coming up with prices, there are trivia questions about the kosher diet as well as a full-scale kosher kitchen.

The last gallery on that floor focuses on values that are rooted in Jewish tradition but have also become universal, such as kindness—kindness to others, kindness to animals, respecting the environment, charity.

RABBI AMY EILBERG (Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning, Saint Paul, Minn.): The central themes of Passover have to do with exploring the journey from different kinds of enslavement. Not just the historic kind referenced in the biblical story, but on multiple levels, journeys in life, individually and collectively—from enslavement, from constriction, from tyranny to freedom, liberation, transformation of self, community, and the world.

The core message of the seder is to say that we, in its particularistic Jewish meaning, we who know the soul of the stranger because we were strangers, we were slaves, we were the object of oppression in Egypt, since we know that story so well we are always—it’s fundamental to who we are to stand in our lives as champions for the oppressed.

Just as a seder has groups of four in its structure—there are four cups of wine and four questions and four children—we had four stories to illustrate different kinds of immigrant experiences, people who are still, to use the metaphor of the seder, still not sure that they’re going to make it through the sea alive.

One of the central lines of the seder that has to do with opening the door of our homes, “whoever is hungry may they come here and eat,” we take that simple phrase—I recited it in Aramaic—and then we go around the room and invite whoever can speak that phrase in their native language to go ahead and do that. It’s very beautiful to have that embodied moment of feeling that we have the whole world here.

This is an ancient and also very contemporary, meaningful ritual that is sacred to one group of people and also speaks of themes that are shared by everyone.

People leave with a sense of hope that with this kind of large community of people very much dedicated to these issues, that perhaps we will overcome.

Psalm 136

Give thanks to the Creator for all that is good—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
Give thanks to the Judge of all judges—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

Give thanks to the Foundation of foundations—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
To the one who performs great miracles alone—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

To the one who makes the sky with great wisdom—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
To the one who spreads the earth over the sea—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

To the one who makes great lights—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
The sun to govern by day—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

The moon and stars to govern by night—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
The one who struck Egypt through their firstborn—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

The one who brought out Israel from their midst—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
With a strong hand and outstretched arm—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

To the one who split the Sea of Reeds into parts—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
Who helped Israel cross through its midst—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

The one who struck down powerful kings—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
And slew kings who seemed invincible—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

Sichon, king of the Emorites—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
Og, king of Bashan—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

And gave their land as a portion—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
A portion to Israel, your servant—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

Who when we were low in spirit remembered us—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
And broke us away from our oppressors—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

Who gives food to all flesh—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.
Give thanks to the Power of the heavens—
for God’s kindness is toward the world.

RABBI NISSEN BRENENSON (Director of Education, Jewish Children’s Museum, Brooklyn, NY): As you approach the museum, the first thing you see is a giant photo mosaic, and as you get closer you realize that it’s made up of thousands and thousands of smaller photographs of children of all ages, of all races. Then that contains a special message, and that is that we’re really one.

The gallery on the six days of Creation and the Shabbat, the Sabbath, contains a Shabbat table where you’re actually walking on the table. There are Shabbat candlesticks, a giant crawl-through challah tunnel. Inside the tunnel, you can learn about the ingredients, the significance, of the special challah bread.

Hanukkah is also a favorite. We have an olive oil pressing station where children can actually squeeze their own olive oil. They like to do that, and the olive oil represents the miracle of the oil that happened at the time of the Hanukkah story.

I think we have the world’s only touch-screen Seder plate, and by pressing the screen and selecting the various symbolic items on the Seder plate, the children can watch short clips of what these symbols represent and the story of Passover.

The holiday of trees is called Tu B’Shvat, and here at the museum we have our own special talking Tu B’Shvat tree:

Talking Tree: Tu B’Shvat is my birthday.

RABBI BRENENSON: He’s sort of a storyteller and explains how man is compared to a tree in many ways. We have our roots, and that’s our faith, and we also have our fruits, and those are the good deeds that we perform.

The journey continues into our kosher supermarket, where children can scan products. Instead of coming up with prices, there are trivia questions about the kosher diet as well as a full-scale kosher kitchen.

The last gallery on that floor focuses on values that are rooted in Jewish tradition but have also become universal, such as kindness—kindness to others, kindness to animals, respecting the environment, charity.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Beginning Wednesday evening (April 8), Jews celebrate Passover, the annual retelling of their liberation story. We talked about the Exodus with philosopher Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Dr. MICHAEL WALZER (Professor, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ): The Exodus story isn’t a story of universal liberation. The Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt saves only the Israelites. But the idea is that this can be repeated, and it invites people to imitate it, to do it again.

The Haggadah that we read, the book of Passover prayers that we read on the night of the seder, is a story of divine deliverance, the hand of God against the Egyptians. But people insisted on finding human agency in it and retelling it as a story of liberation, from the House of Bondage to the Promised Land.

You marched across the desert to reach a place in which you could have a better life than you could have in Egypt. It’s going to be very slow because it takes a long time to erode, to overcome the slave mentality, and in fact Moses eventually decides, or God decides it will take a whole generation. It will take 40 years ’til there are people who were born in freedom.

They get there, and it doesn’t exactly flow with milk and honey, and freedom is hard work. This is a realistic account of how human beings move through periods of radical social change. The story was an inspiration for the civil rights movement, and the civil rights movement was a great achievement for—a liberation for America.

But one of the things we’ve learned is that sometimes you need not only God’s help, you need help from your friends, from people—like the people in Darfur today. They can’t do it themselves. They can’t march themselves. They need help. Think of democratic dissidents in China.

The world is always radically imperfect and radically in need of improvement, and it is the task of each generation to retell this story and to try to make the world better.

ABERNETHY: Michael Walzer is the author of many books, among them EXODUS AND REVOLUTION.