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If God Had Only Given Us Reparations – Dayenu

  • April 7, 2025

Building on the momentum of last year’s Haggadah supplement Adding JOC Voices to Your Haggadah,” the Tikkun Olam Commission has developed a new Passover resource for 2025: If God Had Only Given Us Reparations – Dayenu. This resource applies the practice of reparations to our Reconstructionist Jewish liturgy as a form of spiritual and political repair. The full resource contains two in-depth essays on reparations in the Passover story and the Haggadah, and two different supplements for use at your Passover seder:

We Were Liberated from Slavery … with Reparations
by Sandy Gerber
This supplement provides new “reconstructed Reconstructionist” Dayenu liturgy and a series of discussion questions to guide conversation after the ritual.

Should We Put Reparations Back in Dayenu?
by Rabbi Micah Weiss
This activity convenes a pretend Reconstructionist prayerbook commission tasked with debating the Tikkun Olam Commission’s demand to “put reparations back in Dayenu!” It invites participants to wrestle with all the fun challenges of liturgical evolution considered in the essay, “If God Had Only Given Us Reparations – Dayenu,” viewable on p. 3 of the embedded resource below.

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