“A people driven by hate are not – cannot be – free.” (Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, z”l) (photo from flickr)
According to Exodus 1:8, a new Egyptian king rose to power who did not know Joseph. He did not remember, or did not care, that Joseph, as Egypt’s chief food administrator, had saved the country from famine. As such, this new pharaoh felt no special gratitude toward the Hebrews who had settled in his land so long before. But, while the Torah text deals with pharaoh’s relationship to the Hebrews, it does not address the relationship between the Hebrew slaves and their native Egyptian neighbours.
If we look deeper in the Book of Exodus, we learn that the Hebrew slaves did know the Egyptians – they lived among them. Not only that, but the Hebrews were on good terms with their Egyptian neighbours. Thus, when it was time for the Hebrews to flee from Egypt, their neighbours gave them gifts.
The send-off was carried out in stages. In the first stage, G-d instructs Moses to tell the Hebrews that “each man should ask his neighbour for and each woman of her neighbour, jewels of silver and jewels of gold.” (11:2) It is worth noting that, depending on the context, modern Hebrew might translate neighbour as friend, buddy or colleague. Moreover, the word ask might be translated as borrow – though, since the departing Hebrews had no intention of returning to Egypt, ask is the word to use in this context.
Perhaps G-d was not totally sure how things would work out, so, just to make sure things went as He wanted them to, “He gave the people favour in the eyes of the Egyptians.” This point is apparently so critical that it is repeated soon afterwards: “the Lord gave the people favour in the eyes of the Egyptians that they let the Hebrews have what they asked for.”
Some commentators have said that the Egyptians could not be expected to offer gifts of their own initiative, so the departing Hebrew slaves encouraged them by saying, let us part as friends and we’ll take a parting gift. Others – like Philo in his Life of Moses – observe that the Hebrews were prompted not by love of gain, but by the desire to recoup some of the wages due to them for their slave labour.
The Egyptians, on their part, might have been only too happy to see the Hebrews go, as they were tired of suffering from the increasingly hard-to-take plagues. Thus, in the first chapter of the Book of Exodus, the Hebrews are told to ask for the jewelry and to receive the riches, then they are commanded to “put them on your sonsand daughters.”
While it may seem extravagant to gift someone gold and silver, the ancient Egyptians all wore jewelry, it was more commonplace. According to the article “Egyptian Jewelry: A Window into Ancient Culture,” by Morgan Moroney of Johns Hopkins University and the Brooklyn Museum, “From the predynastic through Roman times, jewelry was made, worn, offered, gifted, buried, stolen, appreciated and lost across genders, generations and classes. Egyptians adorned themselves in a variety of embellishments, including rings, earrings, bracelets, pectorals, necklaces, crowns, girdles and amulets. Most Egyptians wore some type of jewelry during their lifetimes.”
That said, gold and silver are important “not only from an economic but also from a symbolic point of view. Gold, for instance, was regarded as a divine and imperishable substance, its untarnishing nature providing a metaphor of eternal life and its brightness an image of the brilliance of the sun…. The very bones of the gods were said to be of silver, just as their flesh was thought to be of gold,” writes Richard H. Wilkinson in his book Symbol & Magic in Egyptian Art.
Taking this point a step further, we might be able to interpret the Egyptians’ giving of silver and gold as an act of bestowing mystical characteristics on the ancient Hebrews. Certainly, it is a recognition that the Egyptian people viewed the Hebrews well.
However, Rabbi Judah, in the name of Samuel, takes a totally different approach. He claimed that the gold and silver had been collected by Joseph when he stored and then sold corn.
Reportedly, the Hebrews took all the gold and silver when they left Egypt and it was eventually taken to the Land of Israel. It remained there until the time of Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, then changed hands many times. It came back to ancient Israel and stayed until Zedekiah. It changed hands between the various conquerors of Israel and eventually was taken by the Romans. It has stayed in Rome ever since.
While the ancient Egyptians seemingly felt comfortable bestowing gold, silver and clothing on the Hebrews, this act is seen by some as more of a taking than a giving. In 2003, Nabil Hilmy, then dean of the faculty of law at Egypt’s Zagazig University, planned to sue the Jews of the world for the trillions of dollars that he claimed the ancient Hebrews had taken from his country. He theorized: “If we assume that the weight of what was stolen was one ton” and its worth “doubled every 20 years, even if annual interest is only 5% … hence, after 1,000 years, it would be worth 1,125,898,240 million tons.… This is for one stolen ton. The stolen gold is estimated at 300 tons, and it was not stolen for 1,000 years, but for 5,758 years, by the Jewish reckoning. Therefore, the debt is very large.”
That the Egyptians gave the Israelites gifts – willingly or not – is noteworthy. Significantly, in the article “Letting Go,” the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks notes that Deuteronomy 23:7 tells us that we should not hate Egyptians because you lived as a stranger in their land.
“A people driven by hate are not – cannot be – free,” writes Sacks. “Had the people carried with them a burden of hatred and a desire for revenge, Moses would have taken the Israelites out of Egypt, but he would not have taken Egypt out of the Israelites. They would still be there, bound by chains of anger as restricting as any metal. To be free you have to let go of hate.”
The gifts of gold and silverallowed the former slaves to reach some kind of emotional closure; to feel that a new chapter was beginning; to leave without anger and a sense of humiliation.
Further, Sacks cites 20th-century commentator Benno Jacob, who “translated the word venitzaltem in Exodus 3:22 as ‘you shall save,’ not ‘you shall despoil’ the Egyptians. The gifts they took from their neighbours were intended, Jacob argues, to persuade the Israelites that it was not the Egyptians as a whole, only Pharaoh and the leadership, who were responsible for their enslavement…. They were meant to save the Egyptians from any possible future revenge by Israel.”
This is something to contemplate as we read the Haggadah at our seder this year.
Deborah Rubin Fieldsis an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: A Child’s Guide to Radiology Exams, published in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
In Every Generation: A PJ Library Family Haggadah can be downloaded from pjlibrary.org/passover. (photo from PJ Library)
Passover is the ultimate Jewish story – a tale of freedom, hope and food – which makes it the perfect holiday to share with the entire family. Passover is time for gathering, reflecting, telling stories and working towards a world with freedom for all. But planning to cover all that with kids may feel lofty – especially if you’re a little hazy on the details yourself. The free Jewish book program PJ Library has you covered as a go-to destination for making Passover special.
Visit PJ Library’s Passover Hub at pjlibrary.org/passover to find everything you need to plan your Passover seder, set your table and answer your kids’ questions. There, you’ll find PJ Library’s free downloadable Passover Guide, a family-oriented primer that lays out how to prepare for the seders and the foods you need for your table, as well as offering up meaningful activities to make the most out of all eight days. The guide covers three main sections: how to get ready, what you need to get through the seder, and what comes after the festive meals have come to a close.
Also available for digital download from the hub is In Every Generation: A PJ Library Family Haggadah. It follows the arc of a traditional Haggadah and features all the major songs, prayers and moments, but also incorporates helpful framing and stories for kids so they can get the most out of this experiential meal. It also has new question prompts to help you reinvigorate your seder. The online version can be downloaded for free, while the PJ Library Haggadah is available for purchase in paperback from Amazon.ca.
Beyond the guide and the Haggadah, the Passover Hub features downloadable activities to keep little ones entertained during the seder, book lists, a step-by-step video playlist to help kids learn (or brush up on) the Four Questions, and recipes. There are fun and easy recipes like Charoset Breakfast Balls, a perfect grab-and-go breakfast that’s healthy and packed with protein, Chicken Skewers with Avocado Dip, or cholent, a classic hearty Jewish dish made in the slow cooker.
About PJ Library
PJ Library’s goal is to inspire joyful Jewish experiences by sending free storybooks and activities to families with children ages 0-12 and offering ways to connect with community. The program was founded in 2005 by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation and, with the support of donors and partners, now distributes books in seven languages to more than 650,000 children in more than 40 countries every month. The PJ Library family experience is built around the monthly storybooks and also includes family-focused holiday guides and other free gifts. Anyone who visits PJ Library’s website can hear original storytelling podcasts and explore a vast collection of Jewish parenting resources. The program welcomes families across the diversity of Jewish life. Learn more or sign up for monthly children’s books at pjlibrary.org.
“Landscape with Moses and the Burning Bush,” by Domenichino (Italian, 1581-1641), painted sometime between 1610 and 1616. The Maggid, the storytelling portion of the Haggadah, is lengthy, yet it seems to dispense with the story of the Exodus in the barest of details. Where is Moses, or any of the other major characters? If telling the story of the Exodus is our essential task at the seder, it might seem that the Haggadah is more of an impediment than a facilitator. (image from Metropolitan Museum of Art)
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Even if we were all sages, all wise, all learned in Torah, we would be obligated to tell the story of the Exodus. And anyone who tells the story of the Exodus in greater depth is to be praised. Once [five sages] sat together in Bnei Brak and went on telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt the entire night….
Retelling the grand drama of our departure from Egypt, discussing it and probing it, and looking for new ways to relate to it: almost every commentator writing about the seder begins by emphasizing that the central obligation of this night is to tell the story, ideally at great length. Whether through acting or analysis or making connections to our own experience, we look for ways to immerse ourselves in this story. These lines from the beginning of the Maggid section define the seder and drive home the point: there is no such thing as too much story. It is sometimes even a point of pride to announce how late into the night one’s seder lasted.
But the Haggadah, the seder’s ritual script, is strikingly ill-matched to the task of retelling. The Maggid, the storytelling portion of the Haggadah, is lengthy, yet it seems to dispense with the story of the Exodus in the barest of details and go on to other things. Where is Moses, or any of the other major characters? Where are the moments of high drama? If telling the story of the Exodus is our essential task at the seder, it might seem that the Haggadah is more of an impediment than a facilitator.
It might help to remember that the Haggadah is, like many liturgical texts, a composite that cannot be expected to flow in a simple, linear fashion. But I will argue that the main problem is that we are actually misunderstanding what it means to “tell the story” of the Exodus. We see this when we step back to think historically.
The Haggadah first developed around a guiding principle very different from our contemporary expectations, one that closely reflects earlier biblical and rabbinic sources. In short, the original task of the seder was not to tell our story but to tell God’s story; it was not to talk about how we were slaves but rather to appreciate and celebrate the fact that, by the grace of God, we are not and will not be slaves.
In the conceptual world of the Torah, this version of the story is not only the focus of the seder but also the linchpin of Jewish tradition; our entire commitment to serving God is an expression of our gratitude for God’s salvation. The critical task of the seder is to make that salvation personal by conveying to our children that not only our ancestors but we ourselves, in the present, owe our freedom and our very identity as a people to God’s kindness. As long as we are busy looking for a story that was never meant to be there, we risk overlooking this key theme at the heart of the Haggadah.
From haggadah to sipur
Rabbis throughout the medieval and modern periods consistently present the central mitzvah of the seder as lesaper, to retell or to recount the story of the Exodus. The term suggests a detailed narrative, a sense reinforced by the idea that the more we draw out or elaborate on the story the better. Maimonides, in the 12th century, for example, begins his discussion thus:
“It is a positive commandment of the Torah to recount [lesaper] the miracles and wonders wrought for our ancestors in Egypt on the night of the 15th of Nisan.… Whoever recounts at greater length [marbeh lesaper] the events which took place is worthy of praise.” (Hilkhot Hametz U’matzah, Laws of Hametz & Matzah 7:1)
Indeed, recounting the story of the Exodus is the only element other than eating matzah that Maimonides designates as essential.
The chasm between our expectations for seder storytelling and what our text has to offer opens up as soon as the Maggid begins. Right when we are settling in for a story to answer the four questions, the Haggadah offers these two sentences:
“We were slaves [avadim hayinu] to Pharaoh in Egypt, but Adonai our God brought us out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. And, had the Holy One not brought our ancestors out from Egypt, we, our children and our children’s children would still be slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.”
This very, very short version of the Exodus story, a rephrasing of Deuteronomy 6:21, notes the Israelite enslavement but emphasizes God’s actions, in line with the commandment of lehaggid … for us – and our children, in particular – to celebrate Passover because God saved us from slavery.
Let’s put this in the context of the Mishnah’s guidelines for teaching children about the Exodus at the seder. The four questions we find in the Haggadah draw from Mishnah Pesachim 10:4, which provides detailed questions that the child may (or perhaps must) ask about the seder ritual. But for the parent’s response, the Mishnah provides only the following guidelines:
“According to the son’s knowledge, his father teaches him.
“He begins with genut [disgrace] and concludes with shevach [glory/praise].
“And he interprets [doresh] the passage: ‘My father was a wandering Aramean,’ until he concludes the entire section.”
The first line tells us that the response should be variable, tailored to the understanding of the particular child. The second sets the story’s basic framework: it should have a starting point, an end point and a narrative arc, leaving the rest to be filled in. The third line of the Mishnah identifies a passage from Deuteronomy 26 that briefly recapitulates the events of the Exodus and instructs us to interpret or study it closely in the manner of rabbinic midrash. Each of these is indeed a key part of the Maggid: the tradition of the four children expands on the idea of teaching each child according to her needs; two different proposals for texts that go from genut to shevach are included, “avadim hayinu” and a text from Joshua 24; and the longest section of the Maggid is a phrase-by-phrase interpretation of the passage, “My father was a wandering Aramean.”
“Avadim Hayinu” is intended to fulfil the second guideline. The words at the centre of that guideline, genut and shevach, suggest that the story we tell should trace the Israelites’ journey from disgrace to glory, from oppression to triumph. In Exodus 1-12, which traces the experience of Moses and the Israelites suffering from and then breaking free of Egyptian oppression, is indeed such a story.
But by this measure, the “avadim hayinu” passage in the Haggadah falls woefully short. It has the proper beginning and end, but that’s it. There is no middle and no elaboration to fill in what is missing. This has long been a major source of confusion for commentators. They posit that it is only intended as an opening, that it only indicates the starting point of the story rather than the whole story, or that it is a summary or abstract that precedes a fuller retelling. But these proposals merely highlight the simple fact that this is not the story we were led to expect. And none are at all convincing, since these two sentences clearly read as a self-contained unit, not as an introduction to something more expansive.
Detail from Seder Aravit ve-Haggadah, Corfu, 1877; engraved by A. Heinemann. When the Torah commands that we tell our children about the Exodus, it is referring specifically and exclusively to the wonders that God did on behalf of the Israelites. And the purpose of this commandment is to ensure that the next generation, recalling those acts, keeps an unshakeable faith in God’s love and a devotion to God’s mitzvot. (image from Library of Congress, Hebraic section)
Let’s take a step back and return to the Mishnah and, more specifically, its directive that parents teach their children a story that moves from genut to shevach. Although the word shevach can mean “glory” and, at first glance, seems to mean just that in the Mishnah, it is more typically used to signify “praise,” specifically praise of God. Understanding shevach as praise of God changes our understanding of the story the Mishnah wants us to tell. Rather than a story of Israel’s transformation from degradation to glory, we are to tell a narrative that begins with Israel’s degradation and concludes with a celebration of God’s might and love, as evidenced by the miracles of the Exodus. Looking back at “avadim hayinu” with this expectation, we can see that, indeed, it begins with the Israelites’ slavery and ends by describing the wonders God performed in the course of leading them to freedom. But we can go further, because these two elements are in fact the whole story. Perhaps, then, the directive is not “go from disgrace to glory” but only “mention disgrace and glory.”
In fact, the four times the Torah commands us to tell our children of the Exodus (Exodus 12:27, 13:8 and 14, Deuteronomy 6:21), it follows a similarly simple paradigm: (1) we were oppressed, but (2) we are no longer oppressed, thanks to God’s mighty and wondrous deeds. Degradation and praise are the only necessary points. Unlike later traditions, the goal of this telling is to instill in the children a sense of gratitude to God that will move them to join in the ritual and celebration, for which these two points suffice.
This affirms our sense that “avadim hayinu” was proposed as a complete fulfilment of the Mishnah’s mandate to tell a story that ends in praise of God. The Haggadah makes this clear in the next sentence, when it goes on to specify the moral of the “avadim hayinu” story: “Had the Holy One not brought our ancestors out from Egypt, we, our children and our children’s children would still be slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.” This claim is implausible, living as we do, generations and centuries later, but it highlights the true purpose of lehaggid. It suggests that, had God not stepped in forcefully to alter their trajectory, the slaves would not have become a nation and the story of Israel would never have truly begun. This phrasing brings the story from the distant past closer to home. Real gratitude comes from the experience of having been personally saved. We need to understand and convey to our children that salvation is not a relic of the distant past, but that our own freedom is directly attributable to God’s wonders in Egypt. This reinforces the idea that the point is to teach about God’s actions, not the Israelites’ experience. Slavery serves only as the backdrop against which we learn to appreciate our freedom.
This message is, in fact, the foundation not only for one festival but for all of Torah: at Sinai, God’s identity as “the one who brought you out of Egypt” becomes the basis for God’s right to impose divine law. This connection is further expressed in the original setting from which “avadim hayinu” was taken, Deuteronomy 6. Here, the parent is commanded to teach about the Exodus in response to a child asking, “What are these rituals, statutes and laws that God commanded you?” This child is asking about the entire system of divine law, not the rituals of Passover, and yet the Exodus is still the answer. The message is the same: we were in need and God saved us with mighty deeds – and, it adds, led us to the Promised Land and gave us the law.
A wandering Aramean
Let’s turn now to the longest section of Maggid, an exegesis of Deuteronomy 26:5-8. This is the passage that begins with “arami oved avi,” “my father was a wandering Aramean,” in line with the third instruction we find in the Mishnah. The exegesis is written as a midrash, explicating phrase by phrase the biblical passage, which reads:
“My father was a wandering Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meagre numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labour upon us. We cried to Adonai, the God of our ancestors, and Adonai heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. Adonai freed us from Egypt with a mighty hand, with an outstretched arm and awesome power, and with signs and portents.”
This text does indeed begin at the beginning, with Jacob and family settling in Egypt and then being enslaved by the Egyptians; and it does end at the end, with God striking the Egyptians with “signs and portents.” What is conspicuously absent again is the middle, including everything that we would typically consider the drama of the narrative: the fear and bravery of Moses’s family; Moses’s crisis of identity and flight from Egypt; God giving him his mission at the Burning Bush; and Moses and Aaron’s confrontations with Pharaoh and their own people. Even the plagues, which in Exodus are a prolonged battle of wills and wits, are only briefly noted.
Many commentators, both traditional and modern, have struggled with the question of why this passage is chosen as the text for interpretation instead of a more robust summary from elsewhere in the Bible, or even portions of the original text of Exodus 1-12. Some propose quite implausible theories. Joshua Kulp offers refreshing clarity in the Schechter Haggadah with a simple and practical explanation:
“The passage was chosen because it is the briefest and yet still comprehensive passage in the Torah which tells the story of the descent to Egypt and the redemption. Such a short passage is prime material for midrash, a literary genre which focuses on individual words or phrases and connects them to other portions of the Torah. Exodus 12, or any other part of Exodus, is too long, digressive and not as comprehensive.”
In short, Kulp argues that the rabbis’ goal was to simply present a single, adequate review of the Exodus story for close reading. The limiting factor in the choice of text was that for the rabbis, close reading means midrash, a style of interpretation that works through a biblical text phrase by phrase, and, therefore, requires a fairly concise base text as its focus. These considerations made Deuteronomy 26 the obvious choice for the seder ritual. It would be impossible to read and interpret all of Exodus 1-12 within a single evening, while other summaries in the Bible are even briefer than the “arami oved avi” passage.
Kulp’s proposal is clearer and simpler than the alternatives, but it shares the basic assumption that this text is a less than ideal choice, that we should be telling a more complete version of these events, yet are saddled with one that leaves out key details. The distortions we find in how the story is told, with some elements described in detail and others passed over in silence, are an unavoidable but still unfortunate consequence.
I agree with Kulp’s assessment that other biblical reviews of the events of the Exodus (there are, depending how we count, at least 10 others) share the key features of the Deuteronomy passage. But I would argue that reading it in the context of these other passages actually reveals clearly what the Haggadah is doing and what it is not. It illustrates the distinction between recounting the Exodus as a story of the Israelites’ triumphant escape from slavery, and using it to enumerate praises of God – precisely the difference between lesaper and lehaggid.
These lists come in various forms, from songs of praise to speeches urging Israel to show gratitude, to confessions of Israel’s ingratitude. Psalm 136, known as the “Great Hallel,” is simply a list of God’s wonders across the full range of biblical history. It begins with the creation of the heavens, then describes God striking the Egyptian firstborn, bringing Israel out of Egypt and drowning Pharaoh’s army, followed by God defeating other kings in the desert and, ultimately, bringing Israel into the Promised Land. In Joshua 24, God speaks in the first person to highlight the wonders, including the Exodus, God did specifically on Israel’s behalf; while Psalm 106, a prayer of confession, emphasizes that God did these wonders despite Israel’s ingratitude and frequent rebellions. All of these focus on God’s actions, whether presenting them as evidence of God’s might, God’s kindness or God’s faithfulness.
“Arami oved avi” offers its own nuance on this theme. Originally a prayer of thanks to be said by Israelites bringing the first fruits of the Promised Land to the Temple, it describes in detail Israel’s descent, first to Egypt, then into oppression, and their cry for help. It describes Israel’s disgrace in order to frame God’s intervention as heroic, leading them up out of bondage, out of Egypt and back to the Promised Land, coming to their rescue in their hour of need, deepening the personal sense of appreciation and indebtedness. Even so, it is closely parallel to the other lists of God’s wonders. All of them recall the Exodus from Egypt specifically to present it as the preeminent example of God intervening in history, dramatically and publicly, on Israel’s behalf. The only relevant elements beyond the list of God’s acts are Israel’s need for them or response to them.
I want to emphasize how different this is from the original narrative in the book of Exodus. That text chronicles the human experience of slavery, following both the Israelites and the Egyptians, with a spotlight on Moses, Aaron and Pharaoh. God’s role is marginal until the final scenes. These other texts, by contrast, tell us only what God did, and notes human roles only to highlight God’s role.
The most illuminating example, though, is Psalm 78, which explicitly declares that it is the fulfilment of the mandate in Exodus to “tell your children.” Here are the key lines:
“We will tell the coming generation the praises of God and His might, and the wonders He performed. He established a decree in Jacob, ordained a teaching in Israel, charging our fathers to make them known to their children, that a future generation might know – children yet to be born – and in turn tell their children, that they might put their confidence in God, and not forget God’s great deeds, but observe His commandments.” (Psalms 78:4-7)
The psalmist is quite clear about both exactly what we must tell our children and why. When the Torah commands that we tell our children about the Exodus, it is referring specifically and exclusively to the wonders that God did on behalf of the Israelites in their time of need. And the purpose of this commandment, of repeatedly recalling those wonders, is to ensure that the next generation, recalling those acts, keeps an unshakeable faith in God’s love and a devotion to God’s mitzvot. The alternative, the psalm goes on to say, is also made clear in the Torah: the Israelites repeatedly lost that faith and rebelled during the desert journey, always with disastrous consequences.
And thus the picture comes into view in full clarity. It is true that “arami oved avi,” like the other reprises of the Exodus across the Bible, tells a very different story than Exodus 1-12. But that does not make any of these versions a deficient fulfilment of the Torah’s command, lehaggid. They are in fact fully in line with the lesson the Torah wants us to convey. Psalm 78 is literally the Bible’s prototype for how to properly fulfil it.
This is also the way almost the entire Haggadah approaches this command. It does not tell a tale that progresses from disgrace to praise, but one that includes only these two elements: we were in a place of disgrace and God redeemed us. And the point of this explanation is not the story itself but the lesson it teaches: God came for us in our time of need and did wondrous, astonishing, supernatural things on our behalf to bring us to freedom and make a place for us in the world. What we must do in the present is be thankful for those acts, acknowledging that they were done not just for our ancestors, but for us. Our devotion to God, which we show by performing the Passover ritual, celebrating the festival and observing all of God’s laws, flows directly from that awareness.
This framing opens up a whole new way to read the deeply evocative but enigmatic statement that concludes Maggid: “In every generation we must see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt.” Many explanations of this line take it to mean as if we had personally been enslaved, and this can be a springboard for cultivating empathy for all who are oppressed. But the Haggadah’s focus is not on slavery; it is on coming out of Egypt. Here, too, slavery recedes to the background and the Exodus is what matters. It is the Exodus, the exhilaration of being carried to safety in God’s hands, that always needs to feel like it just happened to us.
This is the real point of the seder ritual, for the Exodus to be happening in what we can call the Eternal Present. Like Moses’s paradoxical claim that all future generations stood/stand at Sinai, the seder is meant to make us feel for a moment that we are there on the banks of the sea, living that ecstatic moment of finally knowing that we are fully and irrevocably free. Look back and you will notice that the crucial claims in the Haggadah are in the present tense. If God hadn’t saved us, we today would still be slaves. In every era, including our own, there is an enemy pursuing us and, true to God’s promise, God saves us from their hand. Our freedom now is thanks to the Exodus; we are kept safe now because of God’s promise; and when we see that, when we really get it, we will be able to see ourselves as if we now are standing on the banks of that sea, that God’s salvation happened to us personally and thus makes a direct claim on each of us. We did not all experience slavery, but we have all been saved from it.
And the ritual prescribes that we respond to that awareness just as we did the first time, with an instinctive and unrestrained outpouring of song. This is the moment of transition in the seder: we go from the story of our disgrace to an intense song of praise filled with the intensity of those who have just escaped oppression. We, in this moment, know that we owe all we have to God’s salvation and, therefore, cannot help but begin pouring out songs of thanks. If we have done Maggid properly, Hallel will simply burst forth. This is where the night reaches its apex, when we are ready to relive the joy of salvation and to sing praise to God with the same intensity and gratitude as the Israelites who sang at the sea.
A time for singing
I have tried to demonstrate that the reason we often find it hard to engage meaningfully with the Haggadah is that the text is focused on a fundamentally different purpose than the one we typically bring to the table. Part of my goal has been to unlock the mystery in this familiar text, so we can see it anew and read it on its own terms; I have also tried to reclaim this earlier mission, which has been largely displaced by sipur. I would not wish to argue that storytelling should be removed, that we hold back from discussing slavery, from remembering Moses, Miriam and Aaron. Sipur enables us to include and engage children of all ages by filling in the missing narrative – playacting Moses’s showdown with Pharaoh, marching around like Israelites in the desert and making the plagues colourful and silly. In this way, our children are engaged and they come to know the story as their own. And the challenge of finding new layers of this story adds richness and creativity to the ritual.
But I also hope I have convinced you that the story is not an end in itself. A ritual’s sole function cannot be limited to retelling a familiar story, even if it is a great story. Even if it is our story. The goal of the seder ritual is for us to notice and to celebrate how far we have come; and to move us to joy, to gratitude and, ultimately, to hallel, to praising God.
So, the seder can be a time for telling wonderful stories or for reflecting on evils yet to be overcome. But don’t worry if you don’t get to the whole story. Don’t fret about its moral ambiguities. There is a time for self-critique, a time for feeling the weight of the world’s burdens. But not on this night. The seder is not the night to relive the suffering of being slaves. It is the night to relive the joy, the elation of that moment when we left slavery behind to embark on a new journey, full of promise and possibility. Looking at the open vistas around us, knowing that we were once slaves, how can we keep from singing?
Joshua Cahan compiled and edited the Yedid Nefesh Bencher and the Yedid Nefesh Haggadah. This article appears in the Spring 2023 issue of Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, an award-winning print and digital journal (sourcesjournal.org) published by the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America (hartman.org.il) that promotes informed conversations and thoughtful disagreement about issues that matter to the Jewish community.
This introduction appears in In Every Generation: A Haggadah Supplement for 5784, recently published by the Shalom Hartman Institute (hartman.org.il).
The injunction, “Bekhol dor vador chayav adam lir’ot et atzmo keilu hu yatzah mimitzrayim,”“In every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as if they had participated in the Exodus from Egypt,” is one of the most evocative lines in the Haggadah. It is a call to empathy, to feel the suffering and redemption of our ancient ancestors as our own. It is also a command to use the story to bring meaning into our own contexts, as we imagine ourselves being lifted out of despair and into freedom.
Every year, we see ourselves in this story in a different way – this is part of what makes the seder such a lasting and powerful ritual. This year, the reverberating trauma of Oct. 7, ongoing war in Gaza, thousands of Israelis displaced from their homes, rising antisemitism and weakening bonds of allyship around the world give us new lenses for understanding the Exodus story. In some cases, the words of the Haggadah feel more relevant; in others, the Haggadah’s proclamations clash with reality. How can we celebrate a holiday of freedom when more than 100 people are still held captive in Gaza? How do we call for all who are hungry to come eat at our tables when so many Israelis are not at their own seder tables and millions of Palestinians are on the brink of famine?
While there are no definitive answers to these questions, the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America has developed : A Haggadah Supplement for 2024, a collection of readings, essays and questions inspired by The Israeli Haggadah: Special Edition (Hebrew, 2024) by Mishael Zion and Noam Zion, celebrating the 20th anniversary of their 2004 Israeli Haggadah, later released in English as A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices. We encourage you to read In Every Generation as you prepare for the holiday and then to bring it to your seder table … to re-enter a generation-spanning conversation and envision ourselves anew in the Exodus story’s themes of persecution, resilience and redemption.
After Oct. 7, Mishael Zion began collecting and reading haggadot from the founders of the kibbutzim next to Gaza, finding strength in their determination and in the contemporary resonance of their additions to the Haggadah. He writes, “Reading their words, I was reminded that the power of the Exodus is not only in the covenant of common fate that we forged, but also a covenant of destiny…. It affirms that in every generation we can, and we must, change history.”
These haggadot include one created by founding members of what would become Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the kibbutzim in the Gaza Envelope that was attacked on Oct. 7, 2023. The nascent group related to the Exodus story of suffering and redemption and, like generations of Jews before and since, they added new layers to the ancient texts, recording their aspirations for their new community through supplemental texts and illustrations. As Yigal Zorea describes in Lines and Dots, his blog about Kibbutz Be’eri, several years after that first Passover, the kibbutz members hired designer Paul Kor to embellish their initial efforts. The image [on this page] comes from the end of Kor’s version of the Haggadah. It depicts groups from ancient history, including those scattered from the Tower of Babel, the Israelites enslaved in ancient Egypt and the ma’apilim arriving in the land of Israel during the British Mandate period, all arriving and merging into one collective at Kibbutz Be’eri, where they receive comforting verses from the prophets, affirming that their hardship will be rewarded and the Jewish people will be gathered together once more.
A page from the Kibbutz Be’eri Haggadah, designed by artist and author Paul Kor (1926-2001). (image from Shalom Hartman Institute)
The people who created the Kibbutz Be’eri Haggadah were in the early stages of building a safe and self-sustaining home in the desert, and their conditions were precarious. The Passover’s story of biblical enslavement and salvation served as the foundation for their own resilience. Their Haggadah is just one example from a rich history of Jews adapting the framework of the Haggadah to suit their contexts and to foster meaningful contemporary conversations. Many kibbutzim across Israel still make their own haggadot for Passover, timelessly drawing on the same hopes and questions that the founders of Kibbutz Be’eri included in 1946. But this year, six months after the kibbutz communities of the Gaza Envelope were attacked, it is particularly powerful to bring voices from these kibbutzim – their worry and their optimism – into our seder conversations, preserving this history of storytelling, even as the buildings and communities they built stand empty this Passover.
We invite you to use some or all the materials from In Every Generation to bring contemporary questions to an ancient ritual and story, and we encourage you to invite guests to bring their own supplemental materials, too. Like the founders of Kibbutz Be’eri, who created a Haggadah depicting the lush fields that surrounded them and quoting biblical texts, we hope the resources of In Every Generation will help you tell the story of the Exodus in a way that reflects the values, challenges and aspirations of Jews today. The supplement includes excerpts from kibbutz haggadot; essays on understanding and responding to the “wicked child”; pieces on the role of hope in Jewish history and in the present; and more.
This year, when we say “leshana haba’ah beyerushalayim,” “next year in Jerusalem,” may we do so with the intention and prayer that, next year, Jerusalem will be at peace. To download In Every Generation, visit hartman.org.il.
Rabbi Jessica Fisheris the director of rabbinic enrichment at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
For the this year, Steveston, B.C., artist Merle Linde, chose to create a Haggadah cover that would look old and hand drawn. To achieve this authentic feeling, Linde used Taiwan linen paper, traditional Chinese watercolour paints and brushes.
The calligraphy letters in solid black Hebrew-like text feature peacock blue flashes, often seen in antique manuscripts. Yom Tov candles sit on candleholders that borrow their design from ancient Egyptian columns. The traditional Four Cups of Wine are inspired by a set of old silverware featuring raised grapevine leaves and grapes. And a silver seder plate holder has space for the three traditional shmura matzot, the shank bone, the burnt egg, haroset, bitter herbs, green vegetable and salt water for dipping.
One PJ Library holiday offering is Passover is Coming by Tracy Newman and Viviana Garofoli.
Long a trusted resource for Jewish families in more than 35 countries around the world who receive their free books each month, PJ Library offers fresh reading, audio stories and tasty treats for families celebrating Passover this year, April 15 to 23.
Hundreds of thousands of children are receiving new books this month, each providing a carefully curated selection of age-appropriate reading related to Passover. New this year, families will also receive a colourful illustrated “Matzah Mania” fold-out that includes recipes for homemade matzah, matzah trail mix, and matzah pizza lasagna, along with ideas for serving a seder grazing board. The keepsake fold-out includes culturally inclusive information about seder traditions, and the Four Questions of the seder, which are printed in English and Hebrew.
PJ Library’s Haggadah is available in five languages, including English and French. As well, PJ Library has many other Passover resources, such as children’s books about the holiday.
In the PJ Library program, which was created by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, families who sign up may receive free books for children from birth through age 8. For kids ages 9 and up, PJ Our Way allows kids to select and review books on their own each month.
In April, two new Passover-themed episodes of the PJ Library Presents podcast network will launch. These new podcasts bring Jewish traditions, culture, holidays and values to life through audio storytelling. On April 4, Kiddo Learns about Passover will be the latest Afternoons with Mimi audio story, and Humpty Dumpty and the Passover Feast will be the newest tale in the Beyond the Bookcase series. Families may listen to the award-winning podcasts on all major streaming sources, and more information is at pjlibrary.org/podcast.
PJ Library has become one of the leading sources for family-friendly Haggadot, with its illustrated In Every Generation: A PJ Library Family Haggadah. Since 2018, the organization has shipped more than 675,000 individual Haggadot to more than 110,000 PJ Library families for free. (For non-subscribers, the printed Haggadah is available for purchase via Amazon.) PJ Library also offers a digital version that can be downloaded in five languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and French. This Haggadah is filled with songs, blessings and explanations and is available as a free printable PDF from pjlibrary.org/haggadah.
This year, PJ Library has updated its Passover hub – pjlibrary.org/passover – with new book lists and dozens of fresh ideas and resources for families, including stories and songs, games, activities and recipes.
“Moses and Aaron Appear before Pharaoh,” from Gustave Doré’s English Bible, 1866. (image from Wikimedia Commons)
Stubbornness is a complex and harsh characteristic. It is no surprise, then, that Pharaoh, who is considered to be one of the most wicked characters in the Torah, is shown as being very stubborn. We see Pharaoh repeatedly refusing to engage with the reality that he is faced with and, stubbornly, over and over, refusing to send the Israelites out of Egypt.
Pharaoh is the paradigmatic stubborn person in the Exodus story, yet parashat Vayeira also points to other characters in the story who are not considered wicked in any way but who are nevertheless portrayed with this characteristic of stubbornness. This implies that perhaps stubbornness is not all bad. What can we learn about this character trait from our parashah and when it might make sense to employ it?
We’ll start with Pharaoh, the paradigm of stubbornness. Repeatedly, we see him refusing to yield, to listen to Moses and Aaron’s pleading, as the text says: “Pharaoh’s heart stiffened and he did not heed them.” (Exodus/Shemot 7:13) He appears equally stubborn in the conversations between God and Moses: “And God said to Moses, ‘Pharaoh is stubborn; he refuses to let the people go,’” (7:14) and in his response to the first plague: “Pharaoh turned and went into his palace, paying no regard even to this.” (7:23) Again and again, Pharaoh’s stubbornness – at least at a particular stage – is portrayed as having been almost thrust or forced upon him. God says as much to Moses: “But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart … and he will not heed you….” (7:3-4)
Indeed, as events are taking place and described, it appears that God is actively strengthening or hardening Pharaoh’s heart: “God stiffened the heart of Pharaoh, and he would not heed them, just as God had told Moses.” (9:12) This strengthens our resolve to discover what this stubbornness is really about, why it is so critical and what role it plays in the story.
Samson Raphael Hirsch suggests that this stubbornness or “hardening” that Pharaoh experiences can be divided into three types, based on the language that the Torah uses to describe it: “I will harden,” “I will make heavy” and “I will strengthen.”
1) Hard: being rigid, without registering any influences, without being influenced by anything that passes us.
2) Heavy: being a person of weight, able to be influenced, but with a significant gap between the actual impression and the willingness to act based on it. Sluggish.
3) Strong: steadfast, fully opposing to submit despite a full recognition, totally obliterating the influence.
Hirsch describes the three different, but similar, forms of this attribute and how it manifests itself in Pharaoh.
The first is characterized by rigidity, that is characterized itself by an ignoring of the environment, a rigidity that blocks any outside influences. This kind of behaviour can be seen when Pharaoh is completely unimpressed and unmoved by Moses’s pleading, the suffering of Israel, or even the plagues that affected him and his people directly.
The second is characterized by heaviness. This heaviness is not about ignoring – someone whose heart is heavy can absorb information from his surroundings, but this is insufficient to influence him, to get him to act upon those potential influences. They don’t propel him to act in the direction where the information points. This phenomenon is evident in the way that Pharaoh reacts to the second plague of frogs. This plague is described in all of its gross and gory details:
“If you refuse to let them go, then I will plague your whole country with frogs. The Nile shall swarm with frogs, and they shall come up and enter your palace, your bedchamber and your bed, the houses of your courtiers and your people, and your ovens and your kneading bowls.… The frogs died out in the houses, the courtyards and the fields. And they piled them up in heaps, until the land stank.” (7:27-8:10)
Despite this horrifying scene, Pharaoh is unfazed: “But when Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he became stubborn….” (8:11) He is not moved to eject the Israelites from Egypt. Instead, he is weighed down (perhaps wilfully) and unmoved.
Lastly, Pharaoh exhibits strength. According to Hirsch, behaviour that is defined by strength is self-aware and defiant. The lack of change in it is not defined by being weighed down or passive inertia, but rather an active refusal to be moved. He is aware that he doesn’t want to move or change because these actions are perceived by him as giving in. For example, during the third plague of lice (kinim):
“Then God said to Moses, ‘Say to Aaron, hold out your rod and strike the dust of the earth, and it shall turn to lice throughout the land of Egypt.’… The magicians did the like with their spells to produce lice, but they could not … and the magicians said to Pharaoh, ‘This is the finger of God!’ But Pharaoh’s heart stiffened and he would not heed them.…” (8:12-15)
Even when Pharaoh’s people tell him explicitly that they are all witnessing the finger of a mighty god, and all that Pharaoh needs to do to resolve the situation is let the people go, Pharaoh digs in his heels and will not give up and will not give in.
Pharaoh is not alone in his stubbornness, in his unwillingness to accept that the slavery is ending and the exodus is immanent. Even without a divine hardening of their hearts, the Israelites also show a stubbornness. It says about Pharaoh, “he didn’t heed” (e.g. 7:10-13) and it also says about the Israelites, “and they did not heed.” (6:9)
Even though it seems that Pharaoh and the Israelites are exhibiting the same behaviour – they both are stubborn in refusing to accept the reality that God is going to redeem the Israelites through Moses’s leadership – the contexts for their behaviour are quite different, almost opposite. Pharaoh is holding onto the Israelites and enslaving them. He is insisting on a continuation of the suffering and backbreaking labour, which he initiated. The Israelites, on the other hand, are described as refusing to listen because they themselves are suffering, “their spirits crushed by cruel bondage.” (6:9)
Pharaoh is mired in a lack of morality; Israel is mired in a lack of faith. What they have in common is that they refuse to accept what seem like the futile fantasies of Moses about the Israelites leaving Egypt with him, and moving from bondage to freedom.
Israel needs to be convinced that this idea of the exodus, of actually leaving Egypt, is real, implementable and viable. They need to believe in it. While deep in the heart of slavery, it’s hard for the Israelites to imagine a different reality. Their insistence on relying on the here and now as opposed to a promise for the future stems from despair. How much hope are they supposed to keep?
Pharaoh also refuses to accept the future as described by Moses and, in this way, his stubbornness, in all its strength, weight and difficulty, is close to the Israelites’ despair. Pharaoh refuses to see what the Israelites cannot.
In contrast to both of these images of stubbornness, Pharaoh’s refusal and the Israelites’ despair, there is a third image. This third character needs to be even more stubborn, strong and resolute – this character is God. God’s stubbornness is characterized by steadfastness, insistence and resoluteness in the face of those who don’t believe in his presence and his promise. God needs to stand against those who refuse him, who repeatedly reject the vision of the future that He presents.
At the very beginning of the story, God makes a promise: “God spoke to Moses.… ‘I appeared to Avraham … and I have remembered My covenant. Say, therefore, to the Israelite people: I am God. I will free you … and deliver you … I will redeem you … and I will take you … and I will bring you into the land….’” (6:2-8)
A few verses later, God speaks to Moshe again: “Go and tell Pharaoh, king of Egypt, to let the Israelites depart from his land.” (11)
God is always responded to with negativity and refusal. “The Israelites would not listen to me, how then should Pharaoh heed me?” (12) God continues with his own steady perseverance: “So God spoke to both Moses and Aaron in regard to the Israelites and Pharaoh, king of Egypt, instructing them to deliver the Israelites from the land of Egypt.” (13)
God’s stubbornness is instructive and holds a lesson for all of us who dream of a world that looks different than the one we now inhabit. Maybe anyone who dreams about a different reality, anyone who believes that it is truly possible that our existence can be transformed, needs a form of stubbornness. They need to be unrelenting and steadfast in holding onto their dreams, rejecting the people who resist change, on the one hand, and who are too beaten down to have faith, on the other.
God’s character in the story emerges for the benefit of dreamers, to call us to be constant and steadfast in our faith that, indeed, tomorrow can be different. And, if we are not dreamers but rather are those who listen, God’s voice is charging us to bear the difficulty, the heaviness, the strength of those who are dreamers. Because it is in the merit of those divine representatives, such as Moses and Aaron, that we became able, we became brazen enough, to imagine what a life beyond slavery would look like, to see it and even live it.
Rabbi Avital Hochsteinis president of Hadar Israel and a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. She received rabbinic ordination from the institute in 2016. Articles by Hochstein and other institute scholars can be found at shalomhartman.org.
Pages from the 1500s Passover Haggadah that was recently sold to the National Library of Israel. (photo from Sotheby’s)
On the right, a man sits and prays holding a liturgical book. On the left, a rabbi is seen explaining the story of the Exodus to a child. These images were printed on the pages of a Passover Haggadah in the city of Prague in 1556.
This nearly 500-year-old Haggadah, one of only two remaining copies, is part of the Valmadonna Trust Library collection that was recently sold to the National Library of Israel, with the help of philanthropy from the Haim and Hana Salomon Fund.
The line to view the Valmadonna collection outside Sotheby’s in New York, before the collection was sold to Israel’s national library. (photo from Sotheby’s)
“The Haggadah is the most widely published book in Jewish history,” said Sharon Mintz, senior consultant for Judaica at Sotheby’s auction house, which arranged the sale to the Israeli library. She told JNS.org that more than 3,000 editions of the Haggadah have been printed during the last several centuries – more than the Bible.
The Valmadonna collection’s 1556 Haggadah is a rare, luxury edition with Yiddish interpolations that “constitute the earliest examples of such texts,” said Marc Michael Epstein, professor of religion and visual culture and the Mattie M. Paschall (1899) and Norman Davis Chair at Vassar College in New York.
Just a few decades after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440, printing spread to the Jewish world, beginning in Rome and then moving throughout Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. Scholars tend to refer to the era of early printing, before 1501, as the Incunabula period.
Jews were “tremendously excited” to be able to print multiple books, Mintz explained. “They viewed it as a gift of God,” she said.
The earliest printed Haggadah was printed in Spain in 1482. Another early Haggadah dates back to roughly 1486, and was published by the Soncino family, named for the Italian town where the family ran its printing operation. These early Haggadot were not illustrated. The earliest known illustrated Haggadah was printed in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) around 1515, but only a few pages of this Haggadah remain.
Jewish printing spread to other parts of Europe in the 1500s, which also led to a growth in competition among printers.
“The cradle of Hebrew printing is, of course, Venice. But the printing of Jewish books north of the Alps began in Prague in 1512 in the circle of Gershom ben Solomon Kohen and his brother Gronem,” said Epstein, who is the author of Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts and The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative and Religious Imagination.
“Due to the humanistic patronage of the Holy Roman Emperor and a general climate of relative tolerance and free trade, Prague in the 16th century was a place of vibrant Jewish communal and cultural life, and thus – along with Venice – a crucial centre of the newly developed art and craft of Hebrew printing,” he said. “Jewish printing spread from Prague throughout Western as well as Eastern Europe, the next great centres being in the Polish communities such as Lublin.”
Rabbi Dan Moskovitz, left, and Dr. Harold Troper. (photo by David Berson)
The current refugee crisis – and Canada’s responses to past crises – was the topic of an interfaith panel recently, which raised issues especially relevant as Passover approaches.
Our Home and Native Land? A Multi-Faith Symposium on Refugee Settlement featured a keynote presentation by Dr. Harold Troper, co-author of None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948. The event, on March 18, also included a panel discussion that featured Rabbi Dan Moskovitz of Temple Sholom. Catalina Parra brought a First Nations perspective, Imam Balal Khokhar spoke from a Muslim point of view and Rev. Dr. Richard Topping spoke as a Christian.
Troper recalled being part of a Canadian group that traveled to eastern Germany two decades ago, after the Berlin Wall fell. States in the east of the newly reunified Germany were seeing an upsurge in migration from countries further to the east. A group of Canadians was invited to listen and give advice on Canada’s experience integrating newcomers. At one point, a local official thanked Troper for his comments, but asked, “What do you do with your foreigners?”
Troper expounded on the concept of “new Canadians,” a formulation perhaps unknown in any other country, in which people arriving with the intent of making Canada their home are acknowledged not as foreigners or as migrants, but as people becoming part of our polyglot population already on a path to inclusion.
Of course, Troper acknowledged, this was not always so. None is Too Many, published in 1983, was a seminal book that has had lasting impacts on Canadian views of migration and refugees. The title comes from a quote from an anonymous Canadian immigration official who responded with these words to the question of how many post-Holocaust refugees to admit. The words have been attributed, in some tellings, to F.C. Blair, Canada’s then-director of immigration. However, while this is not provable, Blair’s actions were in line with the words.
Recounting this country’s exclusionary policies toward the desperate Jewish populations of Europe in the prewar period, but also a similar disregard after the war, the book has been held up as an object lesson in how not to respond to people in crisis. Troper said he didn’t know until years later the impact the book had had on one very significant episode in Canadian history.
In 1979, Troper and Abella sent an academic paper that preceded the book to Ron Atkey, Canada’s immigration minister. Atkey was a member of Joe Clark’s cabinet and, though that Progressive Conservative government lasted only nine months, it was during Clark’s term as prime minister that the decision was made to welcome 60,000 Vietnamese refugees, known as “boat people.” Troper said he found out later that the manuscript they sent played a role in the decision.
“We hope Canada will not be found wanting in this refugee crisis the way it was in the previous one,” the authors wrote in a note accompanying the manuscript. They expected no response and they received none. But, several years later, Troper said, Atkey told him that he had read it.
“He told us he was shocked and dismayed when he saw the political parallels between the Vietnamese and Jewish refugee crises,” Troper recalled. “Then and there, Atkey told us, he decided he was not going to go down as the F.C. Blair of the boat people.”
Already predisposed to encourage his cabinet colleagues to take a generous approach, the article stiffened his resolve to stand firm against ministers who disagreed. The government initiated a joint federal-private sponsorship program.
“It today serves as the prototype for Canada’s Syrian refugee program,” said Troper.
Now, as refugees are coming from North Africa, Asia and, most notably, the Middle East, fleeing civil war and ruin in Syria and Iraq, Troper sees parallels between the fears expressed now and those of seven decades ago.
“The fears are not only around the expenses of accommodating these refugees, but that the intake of a population of different race, religion and cultural assumptions and social expectations will destabilize destination countries,” he said.
Not dissimilar, he said, were fears that European Jews might bring socialism, communism, anarchism – even Nazism – with them.
“Foreshadowing the kind of anti-refugee arguments commonly heard today,” Troper said, “reports of persecution were dismissed as exaggerated if not bogus, fabrications designed to justify an end-run around Canadian immigration restrictions. And who were these refugees anyway? Were they really innocent victims? Surely they must have done something to turn their fellow citizens against them. Why make Europe’s problem our problem? And weren’t Jews in Canada already a pesky problem? Do we want more? And who’s to say that communists or even Nazis would not pose as refugees to infiltrate as subversives into Canada? Keeping Canada strong and united meant keeping Jews out.”
Another haunting parallel was the galvanizing photo of the 3-year-old Kurdish child who washed up on a Turkish beach and a photo Troper came across decades ago in his research for None is Too Many while going through archival boxes in the Toronto office of the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society. The boxes were filled with prewar letters from European Jewish parents who, knowing that entire families were unlikely to be granted admission to Canada, begged that their children might be taken in by a Canadian family. In each case, a terse response told the desperate parents that Canada was not admitting any Jews but that the request would be held on file in case something changed.
“Going through these files, I came across a letter that impacted me the way I imagine the photo of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi lying facedown in the sand of a Turkish beach impacted on all of us,” he said. “The letter was from a father begging for some shelter for his two daughters. A picture of two smiling children was attached. As I read this letter, my eyes began to tear; you see, I am also the father of two girls. At the time they were 3 and 5 years old. For a split moment, it was as if I was that desperate father, his children were my children and his fears were my fears.”
As part of the panel that followed, Moskovitz spoke of the bread of affliction.
“How inappropriate it might seem to hold up a matzah when we sit around a seder table filled with food, and to think that we are supposed to connect with this when we have so much,” the rabbi told the Independent after the event. “The point is to remind us that there was a time in our lives when we didn’t have so much.
“Each of the faith traditions,” he said, “spoke about that lens of empathy, of remembering historically that we once ate the bread of affliction, that we once didn’t have much and so we have to share with those who do.”
Religious perspectives are critical in this discussion, he added.
“Left to our own devices, society will often do what they think is in [their] own immediate best interest, which is often isolationism – we’re seeing that in the U.S. elections today – and fear of the other,” he said. “The role of religion is to compel us to do what is morally right and good, what is spiritually elevated, what is holy. It’s a religious foundation that is compelling us to love the stranger, because our political reality, especially in the wake of the terrorist attack in Brussels, is telling us to fear the stranger.”
For Jews, he said, the plight of refugees is not a momentary news story.
“This is not just a headline that has come and gone,” said Moskovitz. “Our Passover Haggadah makes it a headline for Jews every year, that we are reminded to see the world through the lens of a refugee every single year. It’s the most observed Jewish holiday in the Jewish calendar – that says something about how important the status of a refugee is in Jewish tradition.”
The multi-faith symposium was organized by the Inter-Religious Studies program at Vancouver School of Theology and facilitated by Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan, the program’s director.
The website haggadot.com offers numerous template options.
The Hebrew word haggadah means narration or telling. As the Passover seder’s instruction manual, the Haggadah is perhaps the most important tool for fulfilling the Passover mitzvah of telling the story of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt – a mitzvah that is mentioned six times in the Torah.
The Rambam (Maimonides) in his Mishneh Torah explains that relating the miracles and wonders that were done for our ancestors in Egypt on Passover night is a positive commandment, and that it is a mitzvah to inform our children about it. Many interpret this to mean that telling the Passover story is actually two mitzvot: a mitzvah to tell the story among adults and a mitzvah to teach children about the story.
ArtScroll and Maxwell House have done their parts to make a simple seder manual accessible and inexpensive. But sometimes just reciting the words of the seder isn’t enough to engage seder participants – or even to help them understand the Passover story.
“What I learned is that my family had never really understood the service they had been using for many, many years,” said
Barbara Bayer of Overland Park, Kan., who about 30 years ago decided to write a Haggadah, which she continues to revise each year. “I went to simple sources that told the story simply and succinctly and the family loved it and still does.”
Making your own Haggadah is not as complicated as one might think. For starters, there are many web platforms that allow you to create a customized seder manual by providing curated sources from across the Jewish community. Haggadot.com, for instance, offers readings, artwork and video clips to enliven the seder. The clips can be assembled in one of the website’s templates.
Other sites, such as livelyseders.com, allow users to download an English translation of the complete traditional Ashkenazi Haggadah text, which can be cut and pasted to create your own piece. Jewishfreeware.org carries a range of editions of Haggadot, each one directed to specific interests and needs, in terms of the Haggadah’s length and rituals of choice. All the files are downloadable and some are editable.
Once you’ve found your base, personalizing the Haggadah for your seder experience can be loads of fun and really creative, according to those who do it.
Renee Goldfarb of Solon, Ohio, said one year she set up a laptop, projector and screen at the Passover table and showed a relevant video for each of the 15 steps of the seder.
Suzanne Levin-Lapides, on the other hand, compiled her family Haggadah from the texts of various seders for women she had attended in her Baltimore community, adding an orange to her seder plate as a symbol of feminism, as well as the inclusion of LGBT individuals and other marginalized groups within the Jewish community.
At the Katz family home in Kemp Mill, Md., the Passover seder has been turned into a play by their 12-year-old daughter, Abigail.
