Why is this night different? Israel’s democracy movement answers with a new haggadah

Israel’s holiday season has not stopped the protests. One of the most creative is a haggadah that intersperses the traditional texts with musings on freedom and liberation from such prominent voices as David Grossman, Etgar Keret and Nurit Zarchi.

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to halt his judicial overhaul until after Pesach, that doesn’t mean that the upcoming holiday and its festive seder meal will be free of politics.

This week, a number of Israel’s most prominent literary figures have released a new haggadah tying the Israelite exodus from Egypt to latter-day Israelis’ struggle against what many see as the government’s efforts to curtail their freedom.

Titled The Freedom Haggadah: A Story of Struggle and Hope, this new take on an ancient liturgical work intersperses the traditional Biblical and rabbinic texts with “all kinds of musings on freedom and liberation,” said Etgar Keret, a Sapir Prize-winner and one of Israel's best-known authors, who contributed to the project.

“Being an Ashkenazi heterosexual Jew, I never found myself in any position where I felt oppressed and attacked and with this new [overhaul] for the first time this concept of people who want to take away freedom has received a new meaning. Now for the first time I don't take the idea of freedom for granted,” he said.

The Haggadah also includes contributions from International Man Booker Prize-winning author David Grossman, Israel Prize laureate Nurit Zarchi and Sapir Prize recipient Ilana Bernstein interspersed with photographs of the recent anti-overhaul protests.

In recent days, 150,000 copies have been distributed across Israel and the entire project, from conception to shipping took less than two weeks, according to Sigal Naim, one of the organisers

of the project.

Protests continue despite pause on judicial overhaul

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the government’s judicial overhaul plan in dozens of locations on Saturday, in a sign that Netanyahu’s announcement that he was temporarily suspending the legislation had not subdued opposition.

 David Grossman addressed the protest in front of President Isaac Herzog’s official residence in Jerusalem.

“Why is this night different from all other nights?” he said, quoting the haggadah ahead of the holiday. Grossman then answered himself: “We are different. We, the protesters, the people in this movement … We ourselves did not realise the enormity of the love that was hidden within us for the life we have managed to create here, in Israel.

“From protest to protest, the feeling grows that those behind the coup have made the mistake of their lives,” he continued, adding, “Life in Israel consists of many injustices and errors, but the worst of all is the suppression of an unbearable fact: that we are a nation that has been occupying another people for 55 years.”

International opposition

In a new development, many demonstrators at Saturday’s Tel Aviv protest waved American flags alongside Israeli ones, to voice their support for the US on a week that saw US President Joe Biden express his opposition to the Israeli government’s conduct, which led the Right to lash out at Washington.

The new head of Human Rights Watch, Tirana Hassan, also spoke out against the judicial overhaul this week saying it would be "a disaster" for human rights. "This is a government that's actually on a rampage against human rights domestically against its own people in Israel," she said.

READ MORE
'Freedom Haggadah': New Passover Text Ties Israelite Exodus to Pro-democracy Protests (Haaretz)

The Freedom Haggadah – Printable PDF (in Hebrew and English)

Hundreds of thousands take to the streets, vow Netanyahu’s ‘pause’ won’t quell anti-judicial coup protests (Haaretz)

Government made ‘mistake of their lives’: Hundreds of thousands protest overhaul (Times of Israel) 

Israel is on 'rampage' against human rights, new HRW chief says (Reuters)

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