For the fifth year in a row, the Avocado will be hosting a live online Seder, the traditional service for the Jewish holiday of Passover. It’s an extremely satisfying and wonderful part of the site, and I invite anyone who’s interested to join. As we have in the past, we’ll be using a Discord channel for this.

For those of you who are not familiar, Passover is the Jewish holiday commemorating the liberation of the Jewish people from enslavement in Egypt in biblical times, as recounted in the Exodus. The Seder (which literally means “order of events” in English) is a nightly service held during the holiday during which we discuss, over dinner, the story of our enslavement and liberation and the lessons to be learned from us. But it’s far from the dry biblical lecture that might imply. There are songs, stories, and even a game or two, along with many dynamic topic of discussion. You don’t have to be Jewish to participate– every year so far we’ve had more gentiles than Jews in attendance, and plenty of atheists either way.

The last six months have been a difficult time for the Jewish people and those that consider themselves allies to us, and they have been an especially difficult time for those of us who care about the Palestinian people as well. With that in mind it is my intent that his year’s seder must be a particularly special one; emphasizing peace, restorative justice, and sympathy for refugees in Palestine, Ukraine, Haiti, and many other parts of the world. To that end this year we have two haggadot– the prayer book containing the rituals of the seder– available: the same one we’ve used every year so far; and one I compiled myself reflecting this theme from sections available on haggadot.com. If you choose to present, feel free to use selections from either, both, or ones you’ve chosen yourself. We do this in a fairly casual manner, more than most seders. Since you’re participating from your own home, every part of the celebration is opt-in and can be done in your own, special way. Make a seder plate if you want, recline if you want, drink wine if you want. Or if you don’t want, skip out on any or all of these. We do however have three rules that are expected to be followed at all times:

1. Please keep your mic off when someone is performing a segment. You can still write in the chat—in fact, we wholeheartedly encourage typing comments—and we will have spaces after segments for discussion using voice chat, but just be respectful with your audio.
2. Many of the members of our community are trans and nonbinary, so please don’t assign gender to another person in the Seder unless you know them.
3. A general request to read the room and not be a jerk. I don’t expect anyone attending to need to know this, but I’d like to include it nonetheless.

Here’s the structure; each segment is performed by one member. You can prepare something more elaborate or extensive, but it’s perfectly fine to just read off the Haggadah we’ve included. Seriously, no judgment here. If you’re interested in hosting, please tell us in the comments what segment you’d like to do and we’ll add you. If not all of them are claimed by the time of the Seder, we’ll have to ask for someone to do them, but if you’re uncomfortable performing for any reason, we won’t ask you to put yourself out there.

1. Exposition: how did the Jews come to be slaves in Egypt? – The Other Mike
2. Cleaning house: Preparing the house for Pesach – Mustard of Doom (tentatively)
3. The Seder table and plate – Miss Rim
4. The order of the night: Kadesh Urhatz, etc. – Lumbergini
5. Matzah—what the hell is it? – Scarlet1815
6. The Appetizers: Maror, Haroset, Greens, etc.
7. Mah Nishtanah—Q&A – TheHighBureaumancer (tentatively)
8. Optional History*
9. The Four Children – TheWinsomeWasp
10. The Plagues – WolfmanJew
11. The Action Sequence: the Exodus, Moses at the Red Sea – LibraryLass
12. Dayenu, as if we hadn’t had enough already – LibraryLass
13. Recap: Have We Explained Gamliel’s 3 things? – WolfmanJew
14. Passover Themes in Modern Life: Modern Slavery, Refugees, Prisoners, and our Responsibilities

* Optional History isn’t an official segment. It’s a space that can be used to discuss some special bit of Passover history or its place in the culture. So far, we’ve had stories about Pesach in the Warsaw Ghetto, the first White House Seder, and years where it went unperformed. It’s okay whether or not we include it, but if you’ve got an idea you’d like to pitch, please do!

Between segments there will be opportunity for open discussion and questions of all sorts– asking questions is an important part of this holiday, and the seders have been a highlight of the brightness, wit, and curiosity of the Avocado’s community every year so far, which I expect to continue into the future.

After the Seder, as is tradition, we’ll also host a brief live Hyperbeam show, which may or may not be directly thematically related to Passover, at which all are also welcome.

If you’d like to participate, or you have any further comments, please sign up in the thread below. I am currently expecting the best time for the seder to be the evening of Sunday, April 28 at 8 PM EST/5 PM PST. That’s four weeks, one day, and about 12 hours from now, as of the time I wrote this post. However if that doesn’t work for prospective attendees we can definitely reschedule.