If you were to write a personal “book of life” to express your aspirations for growth in the year ahead, what would its title be? (photo from thisenchantedpixie.org)
In the face of the immense sadness and devastation of the past 11 months, and the suffering that seems to know no bounds, I find it difficult to even register that Elul, the last month on the Jewish calendar, has arrived. But, as the Jewish year inevitably advances, I seek solace and meaning in two practices that have helped me prepare for new years past.
The first is writing my “book title,” for a family ritual we created years ago to facilitate the work of reflection, forgiveness and imagination that are core to themes of the High Holidays. The Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgies tie our teshuvah, our annual returning to our best selves, to our desire to be inscribed in a celestial “Book of Life.” Using this image, my family gathers around the Rosh Hashanah lunch table each year to share the titles of our personal “books of life” and to express our aspirations for growth and desires to be held accountable by one another in the year ahead.
The second is to dust off my shofar and sound the first blast, as I will continue to do, in keeping with tradition, each morning of the month of Elul, until the holidays arrive. Each day, I will I close my eyes and coax out the sounds that the shofar has been compared to: Sarah weeping for Isaac, a call to battle, the blasts that signal God’s presence on Mount Sinai, the callof justice that cracks open the hardness of the universe, the hardness in our hearts and in the hearts of our political leaders and awakens in us a renewed sense of purpose and possibility. By doing this, I hope I will be prepared, both physically and spiritually, for the full complement of 100 blasts, short and long, that will sound over the holidays themselves.
In the past, each of these rituals has given me hope, hope that change is possible, that I can do better, that collectively we can do better and that a better future is possible.
This Elul, I am finding it more difficult, as I imagine many of us are, to muster a feeling of hope. Last Elul, we could not have imagined the challenges of the past year: the slaughter of Oct. 7; the long and devastating war in Gaza; the plight of the hostages; the loss of friends and allies; the fractious polarization within the Jewish community; the rise in antisemitism. All of this on top of the many issues we continue to work on globally, from hunger to homelessness to climate change. Hope feels at best elusive; in our most cynical moments, it feels naïve.
Hope requires of us that we allow for the possibility of a variety of better futures, futures that are as yet unexperienced and perhaps even unimaginable. Hope requires that we acknowledge that a catastrophe that may feel imminent is not a forgone conclusion. Hope demands the humility to recognize that we just don’t know what will be, and the audacity to own our role in shaping it. Human imagination, intention and action forge a line between this present and the better future for which we long.
“People often confuse optimism and hope,” said Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l. “They sound similar. But, in fact, they’re very different. Optimism is the belief that things are going to get better. Hope is the belief that, if we work hard enough together, we can make things better. It needs no courage, just a certain naïvety to be an optimist. It needs a great deal of courage to have hope.… And hope is what transforms the human situation.”
In Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit describes a commitment to hope as essential to the work of activism toward social change. She shares example after example of times when the future (now history) unfolded because of the powerful imagination, agency and organizing of people who held on to hope. “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen,” she writes, “and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”
Elul reminds us that we don’t know what will happen but that we have the tools individually and collectively to shape the future. The practices of reflecting on the year past and imagining the year ahead that are built into the Jewish holiday cycle offer us the “spaciousness of uncertainty” we need that can spark hope and move us to action. I rely on my two Elul rituals to facilitate this process of reflection and imagination. Whether it’s journaling, reading, speaking to a colleague or friend, or listening to music, I’m sure that each of us has tools for creating space for the kind of reflection and imagination that makes hope, and the attendant action it demands, possible. And our hopefulness has the potential to inspire others. We can hold possibility for them when they feel discouraged and they can do the same for us.
Elul reflection pushes us to awaken ourselves to new possibilities even in the face of despair, fatigue, anger and overwhelm. And this awakening of hope makes it possible to act.
I consider my book title as I blow the shofar each morning in Elul. I’m leaning toward making it “Hope.”
Questions for reflection
• What practices or rituals will help awaken you to new possibilities this month and coming year?
• What is your book title for the coming year, and who do you want to share it with?
Rachel Jacoby Rosenfieldis chief executive officer of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America (hartman.org.il). Earlier this month, the Hebrew month of Elul, Olam (“a network of Jewish individuals and organizations committed to global service, international development and humanitarian aid” – olamtogether.org) asked her to share her thoughts as a profoundly challenging year for the Jewish people ended.
Erev Rosh Hashanah, from Shalom Hartman Institute’s Memory and Hope. For each holiday and Shabbat evening in Tishrei, the institute suggests we light a memorial candle before kindling the holiday and Shabbat lights, and offers an intention to recite before lighting this candle and a text to read afterward (both in English and in Hebrew).
Each year during Elul, the month leading up to the High Holidays, the women of medieval Ashkenaz would measure each of the graves in their community cemeteries with string. They would then dip these lengths of string in melted wax that had been collected from candles lit throughout the year in the synagogue when the community gathered to pray, to study, to cook and to connect. They would light these new candles, each made from string representing the dead and wax representing the living, on Yom Kippur as yahrzeit candles, a way of honouring and remembering deceased relatives.
On Rosh Hashanah, we will welcome a new year. And then, in the midst of the 10 days of repentance that lead up to Yom Kippur, we will reach the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7 and, with it, the anniversary of the day on which at least 1,139 people were killed by Hamas terrorists and more than 240 people were taken hostage. We will pray for the return of the remaining captives, and we will mark the start of the war that has since killed so many in Israel and Gaza.
We have struggled to fully mourn these losses as this war continues to unfold and expand; as not all the hostages have yet returned home; as, in North America, many of us navigate antisemitism in our communities and shifting relationships with local allies. And yet, we feel the need to grieve. The chaggim (holidays) offer us a pause in which we can reflect, cry and pray.
The Shalom Hartman Institute has developed two rituals for the anniversary of Oct. 7, one that spans most of the month of Tishrei, for individuals to use at home, and one for communal gatherings on Oct. 7 or on Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.
Commemorating Oct. 7 at home
Every week, we begin Shabbat by lighting candles. Every Tishrei, we usher in Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah by lighting candles. Our ritual for commemorating Oct. 7 at home is woven into these traditions.
More specifically, for each holiday and Shabbat evening in Tishrei, we suggest that you light a memorial candle before kindling the holiday and Shabbat lights. We offer an intention to recite before lighting this candle each night and a short text to read afterward. These materials – inspired by the work of Hagit Bartuv and Rivka Rosner of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Ritual Centre in Israel and in collaboration with Maital Friedman, Masua Sagiv and me from the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America – connect us with some of the central themes of the last year. Our hope is that the light of the memorial candle, the ner neshamah, literally a soul candle, and light of the festive candles flickering together will connect the strands of our grief and celebration.
Like the candles dipped by the women of Eastern Europe, this ritual honours both the dead and the living. It brings us back to the devastation of Oct. 7, and it also celebrates the artists, soldiers, teachers and ordinary people who helped us through a difficult year. Similarly, while memorial candles are traditionally lit to remember the dead, the ritual invites us to use these candles to light the way for the living – for peace, healingand hope.
While many Israeli Jews light candles on seven evenings from Rosh Hashanah through Simchat Torah, many diaspora Jews light candles on nine, the two additional candles marking the second night of Sukkot and for the start of Simchat Torah. As a statement of Jewish peoplehood, this home-based ritual is for seven nights of candlelighting, so that it will be used in Jewish homes around the world on the same days. If you want to use this ritual to accompany your candlelighting on the second night of Sukkot or on erev Simchat Torah, you might repeat an intention and text or offer an intention and reflection of your own.
Developing this ritual led us to ask about the meaning of memorializing Oct. 7. Is this ritual only about Oct. 7 or is it about everything that occurred that day and since? What do we mean by “heroism” at this time? Are we referring to military bravery or to the ways civilians stepped up to support and protect one another this year as well? Can the entire Jewish world share this one ritual, or have our experiences of this year been too different? What is the right balance between particularistic and universalistic yearnings?
For many of these questions, we looked to our Israeli colleagues to set the tone in creating a ritual that met their needs for their grief and vulnerability this year, as well as their sources of hope and comfort. For other elements, we offer suggestions to adapt the framing or created a slightly different version in the English that we thought might be better suited for those outside of Israel. You may want to use this resource exactly as is, but you may also find yourself adding different texts or focusing on different themes. We encourage creativity and would love to hear from you about how you adapt it to meet your needs for this moment.
Commemorating Oct. 7 in community
Many communities in North America will gather to mark the anniversary of Oct. 7, whether in synagogues, JCCs, Jewish federations, Hillels, schools or other Jewish centres. Our second resource is a collection of texts and prayers to be used in a communal ritual context, including suggestions of three different ways to use these rituals in your community.
The supplement also gave us the opportunity to add more texts, prayers, songs and perspectives, including texts with expressions of grief for the suffering of Palestinian civilians, which did not fit in the more particularistic framework of the home ritual above.
This Elul, as we reflect on the past year and gather up the wicks that measure our lives and our communities, may we continue to find ways to bind our wicks together, to find strength in community and ritual, and may all who mourn this tragic anniversary find comfort among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. Shanah tovah.
Rabbi Jessica Fisheris the director of rabbinic enrichment at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. To read and download various Hartman Institute resources, including Memory and Hope: Rituals for Tishrei 5785 and accompanying resources for commemorating Oct.7 in community, visit hartman.org.il.
Rabbi Carey Brown of Temple Sholom (photo from templesholom.ca)
Rabbi Carey Brown of Temple Sholom will be part of the next cohort of Shalom Hartman Institute’s Rabbinic Leadership Initiative (RLI).
The intensive three-year fellowship program immerses North American rabbis of all denominations in the highest levels of Jewish learning, equipping them to meet contemporary challenges with ever-increasing intellectual and moral sophistication. It is one of the few structured frameworks for ongoing rabbinic study, enrichment and intellectual leadership training. In addition to rigorous study, the program fosters a deep sense of community for diverse rabbis in an environment of open dialogue, collaboration, peer-learning and personal support. The next cohort begins next month.
“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.
Just as in life outside shul we don’t understand everything we encounter, we don’t all necessarily understand the Torah reading and other parts of the High Holiday service. The High Holidays serve as a metaphor for life itself. (photo from flickr / Lawrie Cate)
Throughout the High Holidays, we repeat in the liturgy pronouncement after pronouncement about our lack of control: we are born against our will, we die against our will, we are but clay in the hands of God, we turn our eyes heavenward as children before a parent, and as slaves before a master. It would be dissonant in such an environment to try to assert our autonomy, to try to shape the experience around our own emotional needs.
And, while we want the High Holidays to be relatable for people, the season by necessity must not be customized to the individual. This is because their meaning lies precisely in the challenge of giving up our individual sense of entitlement in favour of something more important: meaning.
The High Holidays serve as a metaphor for life itself. During this season, we enter into an experience that has been curated for us, that existed before we ever did and which has elements that we are comfortable with and elements that challenge us. I may find myself standing in a synagogue next to people I don’t know, reciting words that I don’t know or would never have written, on a date that means very little to me personally except as a construct of the Jewish calendar.
This is true to life in general: I participate in a world that I don’t completely shape, with others who think differently than I do, within a system that I did not create. We do not choose to be born, nor to which families, nor under what circumstances or accompanied by what baggage. We likewise do not choose what natural successes or tragedies befall us. And, while we do our best to shape our lives, so much of the table is set for us and is beyond our control.
The High Holidays then bid us instead to think about meaning, about the control we do have. If life is not about what we choose, it is about how we choose to engage with what we encounter. We choose how we are going to interpret and how we are going to make meaning of it. How will we choose to see life, and how will our attitudes guide our actions? We may choose to read what we experience charitably or stingily, optimistically, realistically or nihilistically, or more often a messy combination of all of the above. But make no mistake: it is our own choices that will give rise to what we make of those lives that are given to us, to those circumstances that challenge us.
Eschewing a sense of entitlement and control in favour of a sense of meaning and potential is the work of the High Holiday season. It allows us to reflect on how and why we get in our own way, how our sense of entitlement, whether consciously or subconsciously, overrides our good judgment. This helps us to understand the idea of repentance, which is at the core of the High Holidays.
The talmudic sage Rava declared: those who are willing to forgive others easily will likewise be forgiven by God. The language attributed to him is literally, “One who overlooks his/her measurements, [God will overlook all of their sins].” Forgiveness, too, is about letting go of what we may still feel we are owed in favour of building relationships with others. Rather than standing on ceremony over what could have been, I am willing to loosen the reins, to be open to what might emerge. Oftentimes what needlessly keeps us from forgiveness is a focus on what we deserve, what we are entitled to. And, when this happens, we find ourselves once again getting in our own way and holding on to a vision of complete control over what happens or does not happen to us.
Letting go of trying to control the experience is hard. But it can also be liberating. For the High Holiday season, it relieves us of the expectation that we need to relate to everything. More importantly though, for life itself, it relieves us of the expectation of perfection – from ourselves, from others, from life itself.
At the same time, it reminds us of the depth of the human heart and the power of our own will in deciding how we will chart our path forward: that we can come to synagogue not only to be forgiven, but also to forgive; not only to be moved, but to choose to move ourselves.
Wishing all a meaningful New Year.
Dr. Elana Stein Hain is the director of faculty and a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, where she serves as lead faculty, directs the activities of the Kogod Research Centre for Contemporary Jewish Thought and consults on the content of lay and professional leadership programs. Articles by Stein Hain and other institute scholars can be found at hartman.org.il. This article was first posted on Times of Israel.
This Chanukah, kindle the light of liberation, not just for you and your loved ones, but for all people whose freedom of expression is threatened. (photo by Robert Couse-Baker / flickr.com)
In a time of identity searching, introspection and anticipation, Chanukah can be an inviting space to reflect and refract the light before us. From the Chanukah that was to the Chanukah we arrive at, the world has shifted and we are not the same. This holiday of chocolate, oil and games of dreidel beckons us into a moment of contemplation.
Chanukah expresses a language of novelty, innovation and a miraculous expansion from what we thought was possible. The ease and accessibility, the simplicity of candles, the sense that Chanukah is predictable and performative belies the very creative, radical nature of the Festival of Lights.
The annual Chanukah experience, at its core, is an opportunity to receive new insight, empowerment and opportunity to overcome the forces that oppress, debase and deny our most essential identities. Had the few Maccabees not searched to provide that light for the many, none of us would have a miracle to celebrate today. Even though we are privileged to be able to publicly observe our traditions, Chanukah reminds us that our work is not complete until everyone can safely and freely express their identities.
Visibility and proximity
One of the unique aspects of Chanukah is that it is the only festival that occurs in two different months. It is literally positioned between Kislev and Tevet to help us be aware and adapt to changing times. In the light of the candles, it is possible to see our roles anew, clarifying our commitment to ensuring that the privilege and expression of being is available to everyone.
When the Talmud explores modalities of the mitzvah of lighting the chanukiyah, it says that each and every person should have a candle. It continues to explain that an even greater beautification of the mitzvah is when everyone is able to increase the light with each additional day. When everyone has their own chanukiyah, when everyone is able to light all the candles on each night, then everyone is bringing the fullest light possible. This is the hope: with so much light, the world is relieved of darkness.
Our rabbis teach that this attribute of adding is connected to Joseph, whose story we read on Shabbat Chanukah. Joseph’s name means to increase, and his story reveals the relationship between proximity and visibility. The Talmud, Shabbat 22a, juxtaposes the narrative of Joseph being thrown into a pit with the laws detailing the proper placement of the menorah and the limits on how far off the ground it can be.
In Genesis 37:18, Joseph’s brothers “saw [Joseph] from afar … and they conspired against him.” They throw him into a pit, which Genesis 37:24 says “was empty and didn’t have water.” But the rabbis disagree, arguing that, while “empty” implies that the pit didn’t have water in it, it was not without venomous pit-dwellers. There were snakes and scorpions that the brothers didn’t know about, because they were not close enough to the pit to see.
Moreover, the distance at which the brothers first saw Joseph approaching made it easy for them to plot against him. In not one, but two cases, the brothers’ lack of proximity leads to actions that degrade and humiliate. If only they waited to see their little brother up close before acting, they might have changed their plan. If only they approached the pit to look inside, they might have seen the snakes and scorpions. The Torah is clear: proximity and visibility lead to responsibility.
It is for that reason the Talmud instructs us that we cannot place a menorah too far off of the ground – we must be close enough to see and be affected by the candles. If the menorah can’t be seen, we miss the message of the miracle, and the opportunity to take responsibility is lost.
The Hasmoneans were descendants of Aaron, who, the Mishnah tells us, was a lover of peace, pursuer of peace and lover of peoples.
Judaism is a religion of action, and we must be practitioners of our tradition’s wisdom by taking responsibility.
Today, even with technologies that keep us connected across oceans and continents, we understand the challenge and, more so, the threat of being too distant. Jews have a response to prevent the dehumanization that often comes when we are distanced from the lived experience of others – draw in close.
A great miracle happens with allyship
The Hebrew words behind the story of Chanukah and Joseph also reaffirm the holiday’s charge to increase visibility, to be an ally. The rabbis saw our world as created through speech and language and, thus, all Hebrew letters represent hidden truths. Just like the story of Joseph in the pit, the closer you look, the more that is revealed.
The mystics teach that the Hebrew letters for Greece (Yavan is spelled yud, vav, nun) are three lines that descend as the word progresses. The great and mighty culture that claimed elite thought and refinement was in fact a culture that debased and denigrated. Greek leadership prioritized the body over the spirit; what was seen on the outside was of greater value than that which was within. Thus, it could be said that Greece, by elevating the external, actually debases it, a message hidden within the descending letters: yud, vav, nun.
The Hebrew word for Joseph, Yosef, begins with the same first two letters. But the third letter is where the comparison is stark. Instead of a nun sofit (a nun at the end of a word), which is a straight line going down, we have the round letter samech, a symbol for equality. Unlike the hierarchy of the nun, the circle of the samech allows every point on its circumference to be equidistant to the centre. Joseph chooses to chaver (friend) up and stops the descent by treating others as equals.
The nun and samech form the word miracle, nes. The first letter, nun, is the only letter in Hebrew that doesn’t appear in the alphabetical acrostic of the prayer Ashrei. Our rabbis explain that this letter stands for nefela, falling, and, therefore, is omitted. The next letter in the alphabet is the samech and it starts the Ashrei verse, “samech l’chol hanoflim,” “supporting all those who have fallen.” Jews in those days, as in ours, had a choice between the “nun” and the “samech” – to align with the oppressors and feel secure or to ally with those who needed support. In choosing the latter, a great miracle (nes) happened there.
Kindling the light
As the story and words of Chanukah convey, the Jewish response to oppression is not just to be free but to dismantle the system of oppression and provide equality for others. Today, we place a menorah in the window in order to publicize our engagement in the ancient and ongoing story of this struggle. We stand up in broken places of despair and hopelessness to rededicate ourselves and our institutions to this cause. Now, when we see an injustice, when we are proximate to the dehumanization of a child of G-d, we not only see the unholy act itself but also we recognize the imperative to respond.
This Chanukah, kindle the light of liberation, not just for you and your loved ones, but for all people whose freedom of expression is threatened. Kindle a light to banish the darkness of hatred, racism, transphobia and misogyny. Kindle a light that signals to outsiders that you are a home (or an organization) committed to rededication and the recreation of holy space, particularly in the most broken of places.
Chanukah was not immediately established as a holiday. The Talmud teaches that the rabbis waited until the following year to institute a permanent commemoration. When they realized that the miracle could be replicated – that, in every generation, Jews could learn to take the little they had and turn it into something miraculous – they created the holiday. That is the holy ask of Chanukah: to be the light that can extend and expand, to be the miracle that someone else needs.
Michael Walzer writes that “wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt,” but that there is a Promised Land, and the only way to make it across the wilderness is by “joining hands, marching together.” The story of oppression and liberation is also a story of allyship. We will not survive without hands to support and guide us, to hold and elevate us. This year, on Chanukah, be the light and bring the light out of the closet and into the world.
Rabbi Mike Moskowitzis scholar-in-residence of trans and queer Jewish studies at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York and Rabbi Dara Frimmer is senior rabbi at Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles. This article was originally published in the Jewish Journal and articles by other Shalom Hartman Institute scholars can be found at shalomhartman.org.
Imagine that you are sitting at your kitchen table, sewing masks for your family so that you can go outside. There are no more masks left in stock in any store near you so you are left to make them on your own. Suddenly, as you attach a button to the fabric, you hear loud shouting outside. You run to your door and cautiously peek out to see what has caused all the uproar.
You are confronted by an extraordinary sight: people are filling the streets, singing, dancing and embracing. You put on your unfinished mask and venture a little closer, but still six feet away, and ask one of the revelers what happened. She replies: “They found a cure for coronavirus. It is going to be available immediately. Everyone who is sick will immediately recover, and a vaccine will protect the rest of us.”
You stuff your half-finished mask into your pocket and join the revelry, rejoicing that the coronavirus nightmare has come to an end.
When you come back into your home the next day, you carefully place your mask on the mantel. In later years, when visitors ask why you have a piece of fabric with one button and a rubber band featured prominently in your living room, you tell them your story of how you found out that you were saved from the coronavirus pandemic, and how the fear and anxiety completely dissolved. Every time you look at that piece of fabric, you remember that your situation can change in an instant, that fear and loss can be replaced by comfort and hope.
This story may seem like wishful thinking, but it is the story we tell at our seder every Passover. Our ancestors were slaves, oppressed and fearful. They suffered and thought their suffering would never end. And then everything changed.
We recite at the seder: “This matzah – why do we eat it? To remind ourselves that, even before the dough of our ancestors in Egypt had time to rise and become leavened, the King of Kings, the Holy One Blessed be He, was revealed and redeemed them.” In less than the time it would take to bake a loaf of bread, our ancestors’ lives were totally transformed. The mightiest empire in the world was defeated by the slaves’ G-d. They became free people, about to leave their land of oppression for their own land. The bread that they had started baking in captivity became the bread that they would always associate with their liberation.
We can relate to this experience of life-altering moments in our personal lives. Think of a moment when you received a phone call or met someone and your life immediately changed. Sometimes, yes, the phone call or encounter brought sorrow or pain. But, sometimes, it brought new opportunities for joy or freedom that you never expected, and your life was never the same. Maybe, the day after despairing you would ever find a soulmate, you met the person with whom you would spend the rest of your life. Or perhaps you were at a professional crossroads and an opportunity came your way out of the blue.
Of course, the mask sitting on your mantel is not a simple thing to contemplate. It invites much more than joy. Your thoughts are so complex when you look at it. On one hand, it symbolizes recovery and deliverance and, sometimes, when asked about it, you tell about the magical moment when you learned that a cure had been found. But, other times, you recall the dark days of the virus, the many people we lost, the overwhelmed emergency rooms, our crumbled illusions that our technological competence could protect us from epidemic.
The matzah, too, is complex. The Talmud, in Pesachim, suggests that matzah is called lechem oni because it is bread that invites much discussion: “lechem she’onim alav devarim harbeh,” “bread about which we answer many things.” There is so much to say about it because it brings up so many conflicting thoughts and emotions. It reminds us of our slavery in Egypt, when we had no control over what happened to us or to the people we loved. And it also reminds us that our lives can turn around in an instant, in less than the space of time that it takes for dough to rise. It is at once both liberating and deeply unsettling. It gives us hope and it frightens us. It forces us to acknowledge that we have but an illusion of control.
At our Pesach seder, we model to the next generation how to respond to a world that is beyond our control. We try to create structure and order (seder). We acknowledge our vulnerability (“ha lachma anya” – “this is the bread of our affliction”). We help others in need, feeding them and including them at our table (“kol difchin yetei veyechol” – “all who are in need, come eat with us”).
We fight against oppression (the episode of the five rabbis in Bnei Brak). We express gratitude for all the good we have in our lives (“Dayenu”). We delve deeply into these questions and reaffirm the possibility of redemption (“and, even if we are all wise, it is still incumbent upon us to tell the story”) and share our wisdom with our children (“vehigadeta l’vincha” – “and you shall tell your children”).
We commit ourselves to building a redeemed world (“l’shana haba’ah beyerushalayim” – “next year in Jerusalem”). And, as we eat our matzah, we acknowledge with faith and humility, that we never know what will come next.
Aliza Sperlingteaches Talmud at the Yeshivat Maharat/Yeshiva Chovevei Torah Beit Midrash Program and directs Svivah’s HerTorah, an inclusive and open women’s learning community. She serves as a Shalom Hartman Institute research fellow and a Wexner faculty member, and articles by Sperling and other institute scholars can be found at shalomhartman.org. This article was originally published on blogs.timesofisrael.com.
Like many of you, I approach the New Year and Yom Kippur with a heavy heart. Ashamnu. We have sinned. Much is not well, not as it should or can be. Our communities are filled with anger, fear, hatred, pain, and acrimony.
Our tradition placed a heavy burden on us. Atonement is only attainable when accompanied by a commitment to change one’s behaviour. The burden is doubly heavy, for we are not merely responsible for our individual failings, but for our societal ones. Ashamnu. We have sinned. Yom Kippur is not merely a day of prayer in search of Divine forgiveness, but a day of taking responsibility for the world that we have created.
There are so many places to start this process and, for those who don’t know where, the Jewish prayer book provides guidance. Ashamnu. Bagadnu. Gazalnu. Dibarnu dofi. We have sinned. We have betrayed. We have taken that which is not ours. We have spoken evil.
This year, I will begin with the sin of certainty. The certainty that I have the truth and others do not. The certainty that I am right and others wrong. The certainty that I am good and others bad. The certainty that I love my country and others do not.
“Our God and God of our ancestors, we are neither so insolent nor so obstinate as to claim in your presence that we are righteous, without sin; for we, like our ancestors who came before us, have sinned.” (Yom Kippur Machzor)
Inherent to every social structure is the reality of difference. Members, adherents, citizens, who join or are joined together by blood, race, gender, ideology, religion, culture or nationality, inevitably find themselves disagreeing over issues both minor and major. Differences are a permanent and inevitable reality of life. By themselves, they do not undermine social cohesion. What threatens unity is how we respond to the reality.
The three conceptual tools for reflecting on difference are pluralism, tolerance and deviance. When those who are different are classified as deviant, the possibility of a shared society with them comes to an end. It is here that the sin of certainty spreads its destructive poison. The hubris of certainty allows one to shun and shame those who do not share in the truth as you know it, and to move them to the margins of society, if not outside it. Armed with certainty, acts of blatant aggression are clothed with the garments of self-preservation and sanctioned as acts of group loyalty.
A certainty of a different form is played out in the category of pluralism. We are pluralistic toward those differences that we assume to be of equal value to our own positions – “These and these are the words of the living God.” With pluralism, we accommodate difference that we believe is equally authentic and that we can associate as being on par with our truth, our knowledge and our beliefs. These and these are the words of the living God, but not those and those. And the one who decides is us.
Why tolerate that which I believe to be wrong?
The danger that lies with the sin of certainty is that it attempts to create social life around the categories of pluralism and deviance alone. Difference to which I ascribe value is accommodated and welcomed as my friend. Difference that I do not, is rejected and ostracized as my enemy. I and my certainty are the ultimate arbiters of who is in and who is out, who is valued and who is not, who is to be cared for and who is not, who is to be respected and who vilified.
It is tolerance, the often-derided category, that is most absent in much of contemporary social discourse. One does not tolerate that which one values, but rather that which one thinks is wrong. Tolerance can only take root in those places where we are able to relinquish our claim to certainty. Why tolerate that which I believe to be wrong? Because I know it is possible that my belief may also be wrong. Because I believe that truth, knowledge and enlightenment will only grow when I expose my certainty to the critique of others; when I am open to learn from others’ truths, knowledge and experience.
Why tolerate that which I believe to be wrong? Because I and those like me do not have a monopoly over the “true” identity of our society. It is theirs just as much as it is ours. We are destined to live with those who believe and do that which we hold to be intolerable. In some cases, judgment of deviance is both called for and necessary and, without boundaries, our societies will dissolve and lose any purpose, meaning and identity.
Which difference do we tolerate, and which do we not, is the question. The sin of certainty both blinds us to this question and renders us incapable of such discernment. The price? The price is the dysfunctional harmful social discourse and behaviour dominating our lives today.
“Our God and God of our ancestors, we are neither so insolent nor so obstinate as to claim in Your presence we are certain.”
Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartmanis president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and author of the 2016 book Putting God Second: How to Save Religion from Itself. Articles by Hartman and other institute scholars can be found at shalomhartman.org.
“The Crossing of the Red Sea” by Nicolas Poussin, 1634. (photo from wikimedia)
We are a people with many memories, many stories, and who we are has been shaped by the stories we remember and tell.
More than any other holiday, Pesach is about remembering and passing that memory down to the next generation. Every Jew is commanded to see themselves as if they came out of Egypt, and to tell their Egypt story to their children. The telling of this story is not mediated by teachers or rabbis, nor is it told in a communal framework. The setting of the seder is one of family and immediate friends, and the responsibility is upon every one of us to decide how we convey the story.
What makes this particularly challenging is that, beyond the complicated family dynamics, a Haggadah that is deeply problematic and different sensibilities with regard to what needs to be done, we have inherited two different stories. The challenge is not merely how to tell the story, but which story to tell.
One story, which dominates much of the Haggadah, not to speak of the story as told in the Torah, focuses on Pesach as a story of exodus, of the Jewish people being freed by God from the slavery of Egypt. “I am the Lord. I will free you from the labours of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements. And I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God.” (Exodus 6:6-7)
More than freedom and salvation, Pesach is a story of the election of the Jewish people, as God pours down God’s wrath on those who enslave the chosen ones and redeems us out of the hands of Egypt to be God’s chosen people. Each plague, told and magnified, is an expression of love, a gift of betrothal of God to us, an offering that bonds us to one another. “I the Lord am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage: you shall have no other gods besides me.” (Exodus 20:2-3)
One of the core consequences of this election narrative under Jewish law is the sanctioned discrimination between Jew and non-Jew, between the Children of Israel and the nations of the world. Because God saved us, all of us, from the slavery of Egypt, Jews are all equal, and no Jew can take another Jew as a slave. However, those who are not the recipients of the gift of exodus, the non-Jews, can become our slaves (Leviticus 25). When we go to war, even wars of aggression, the God who took us out of Egypt will always fight on our side, because the moment of election creates an us-them dichotomy in which God is always with us (Deuteronomy 20). Idolatry is neither false nor futile. It is the worship allotted by God to the non-elected. We, the chosen people, are alone commanded to worship God. The God who saved us in Egypt is our God alone (Deuteronomy 4).
This tale of the story of Egypt finds its culmination in our traditional Haggadah, in which one of its concluding prayers is a petition to God to “Pour out your wrath on the nations that do not know you…. Pursue them with anger and destroy them from beneath the heavens of the Lord.”
There is a second story of Pesach, a story in which neither the exodus nor its accompanying plagues takes central stage, but rather the hundreds of years of our subjugation in Egypt. It is to this memory that the core symbols of the holiday – matzah, the poor person’s bread, charoset, the paste that resembles mortar, and maror, the bitter herb, which cause us to relive the experience of pain – all direct us.
It is this memory that shapes the most-repeated commandment in the Torah: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens: you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt.” (Leviticus 19) The story of Egypt is not one of us-them, but of us being them, of us being members of the community of the downtrodden, and the subsequent obligation to treat all who are in need, Jew and non-Jew alike, as equal members of our society.
In an interesting twist on this story, the Ten Commandments obligate us to rest on the Sabbath, “so that your male and female slave may rest as you do. Remember that you were a slave in the Land of Egypt, and the Lord your God freed you from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm: therefore, the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.” (Deuteronomy 5)
It is not merely that because we once were slaves we are bonded to all those in need. The redemption from Egypt is no longer exclusively the moment of election of us, but rather an expression of God’s care and compassion for all who are enslaved. Both our slavery and our salvation unite us with God, in a common mission to bring freedom and equality to our world.
It is with this idea that we begin to tell the story of Egypt in the traditional Haggadah. “This is the bread of affliction that our forefathers ate in the Land of Egypt. All who are hungry let them come and eat.” All, and not merely fellow Jews.
Pesach is a tale of two stories. Each has shaped who we are. As we tell our stories and pass them down to the next generation, it is our obligation to take responsibility for what will define us in the future and what will determine our religious and national identity. The choice is ours. As you tell the stories this year, choose wisely. Our future and the future of Israel depend on it.
Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartmanis president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and author of the 2016 book Putting God Second: How to Save Religion from Itself. Articles by Hartman and other institute scholars can be found at shalomhartman.org.
