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18 things that’ll get you excited for Passover

Rugrats Passover
The Rugrats Passover Special is an annual tradition for many.

Passover, love it or hate it, there is always some dread associated with its arrival. Here are some of our favorite quotes on the holiday that we hope will give you inspiration and the energy you need to head into chag.

1. Memes!

2. Passover in Seven Minutes with Mayim Bialik and Friends!

3. Prince of Egypt!

4. “A poem for the Seder” by Yehuda Amichai

5. Rabbi Sacks: Turn affliction into freedom

“Sharing food is the first act through which slaves become free human beings. One who fears tomorrow does not offer his bread to others. But one who is willing to divide his food with a stranger has already shown himself capable of fellowship and faith, the two things from which hope is born. That is why we begin the seder by inviting others to join us. That is how we turn affliction into freedom.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l

6. Elie Wiesel: I love Passover

“I love Passover because for me it is a cry against indifference, a cry for compassion.”

Elie Wiesel

7. The funny things people say

8. Reflecting on the Exodus story

“The exodus from Egypt occurs in every human being, in every era, in every year, and in every day.”

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov

9. Ties to centuries past

“The Seder nights… tie me with the centuries before me.”

Ludwig Frank

10. True freedom

“This is true freedom: Our ability to shape reality. We have the power to initiate, create and change reality rather than only react and survive it. How can we all educate our children to true freedom? Teach them not to look at reality as defining their acts but to look at their acts as defining reality.”

Yaacov Cohen

11. Vehi shamda by Yonatan Razel from the Haggadah

12. There’s still unfinished business

“I suppose I am remembering Passover as a way to remind myself that the struggle for freedom is as old as time. That there are always others who yet need to be delivered.”

Jonathan Auxier, Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster

13. The call for freedom still rings

“On this night, long years ago, our forefathers hearkened to the call of freedom. Tonight, that call rings out again, sounding its glorious challenge, commanding us to champion the cause of all the oppressed and the downtrodden, summoning all the peoples throughout the world to arise and be free. Let us raise our cups in gratitude to God that this call can still be heard in the land. Let us give thanks that the love of freedom still burns in the hearts of our fellowmen. Let us pray that the time be not distant when all the world will be liberated from cruelty, tyranny, oppression and war.”

Mordecai M. Kaplan, The New Haggadah For the Pesah Seder

14. Power in retelling our story

“I don’t know that the question of belief in God is all that important to me. But what is very important to me is the story that’s being told and has been told by more than a hundred generations of Jews, for thousands of years, and the power that the story has in my life and in my family’s life.”

Jonathan Safron Foer

15. “The seder’s order,” by Marge Piercy

The songs we join in
 are beeswax candles
 burning with no smoke
 a clean fire licking at the evening
 our voices small flames quivering.
 The songs string us like beads
 on the hour. The ritual is
 its own melody that leads us
 where we have gone before
 and hope to go again, the comfort
 of year after year. Order:
 we must touch each base
 of the haggadah as we pass,
 blessing, handwashing,
 dipping this and that. Voices
 half harmonize on the brukhahs.
 Dear faces like a multitude
 of moons hang over the table
 and the truest brief blessing:
 affection and peace that we make.

16. “Wildpeace,” by Yehuda Amichai

Not the peace of a cease-fire
 not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
 but rather
 as in the heart when the excitement is over
 and you can talk only about a great weariness.
 I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
 And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
 how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
 A peace
 without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
 without words, without
 the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
 light, floating, like lazy white foam.
 A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
 (And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
 to the next, as in a relay race:
 the baton never falls.)
 Let it come
 like wildflowers,
 suddenly, because the field
 must have it: wildpeace.

17. Personal liberation

“The Haggadah’s purpose is not, in fact, to present a narrative. It’s a how-to guide to finding our own personal liberation.”

Rabbi Mendel Herson, associate dean of the Rabbinical College of America

18. Jack Black singing “Chad Gadya”

Bonus: It’s not Passover until the Rugrats make an appearance

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