The seder service on pesach is the oldest surviving ritual in the Western world, dating back some 3,300 years to the night, possibly in the reign of Ramses II, when the Israelites ate their last meal in Egypt, preparing for their journey to freedom. Certain features still remain from biblical times: the matzah and maror, the reminder of the paschal offering (a mere reminder until the rebuilding of the Temple), the questions asked by a child, and the explanations given by an adult. In some, especially oriental, communities it is still the custom to dress as the Israelites did then, ‘your loins girded, your shoes on your feet and your staff in your hand.’ The seder is, of course, more than a ritual. It is an act of remembering, the telling of a story – the Haggadah – and none has been more lovingly sustained. Each age has added something of its own. In the course of a single night, as well as biblical passages, we encounter Hillel in the days of the Second Temple, the second century sages at their seder in Bnei Brak, the teachings of the Amoraim of the third and later centuries, poems by Yannai and Kalir from the post-talmudic period, an addition from Ashkenaz provoked by the terrible sufferings of the First Crusade, and children’s songs from medieval Germany. Every word we say has a history. Even the mah nishtanah, the questions asked by a child, go back some two thousand years. The weaving together of these many contributions into a single narrative is the achievement of no ordinary author. It is the collective voice of the Jewish people through centuries and continents as it has encountered and responded to the word of God.
Telling, connecting
Through the Haggadah more than a hundred generations of Jews handed on their story to their children. The word haggadah means ‘to relate, to tell, to expound.’ But it comes from a Hebrew root that also means ‘to bind, to join, to connect.’ By reciting the Haggadah, Jews gave their children a sense of connectedness to Jews throughout the world and to the Jewish people through time. It joined them to a past and future, a history and destiny, and made them characters in its drama. Every other people known to mankind have been united because they lived in the same place, spoke the same language, were part of the same culture. Jews alone, dispersed across continents, speaking different languages and participating in different cultures, were bound together by a narrative, the Pesach narrative, which they told in the same way on the same night. More than the Haggadah was the story of a people, Jews were the people of a story.
During Israel’s early history – the biblical era – the Exodus narrative embodied their collective memory as a nation, forged in slavery and led miraculously to freedom. Not only was it the record of their past; it was their template of ideals for the future, their aspiration to create a society dedicated to liberty under the sovereignty of God. But its infl uence did not end with the collapse of Jewish sovereignty in Israel. If anything, during the long centuries when Jews were scattered throughout the world, its effect was more remarkable still. It sustained Jewish identity, linking one generation to the next through the bonds of shared memory. In times of suffering – and there were many – it kept hope alive, the hope expressed at the very beginning of the Haggadah that though ‘this year we are slaves, next year we will be free; this year we are here, next year we will be in the land of Israel.’ In ages of prosperity, it became a tutorial in mutual responsibility. It taught the great lesson of human solidarity, that we cannot enjoy the food of affl uence while others eat the bread of affl iction. We are not fully free if others are oppressed…
… The great message of Pesach is that history is not what Joseph Heller once called it: ‘a trashbag of random coincidences blown open by the wind.’ It is, or can become, a journey toward a place where people are valued not for the wealth they own or the power they wield, but for who they are – a trace of God in a world that so often seems to deny His presence. In ways that remain obscure yet still majestic, a whole series of individuals – beginning with Abraham, reaching a culmination in Moses, and continuing through an almost unending sequence of prophets, visionaries, sages, saints, philosophers, poets, jurists and commentators – was inspired by a vision of society in which simple acts, relationships and lives could become vehicles of the Divine presence. As we sit around the seder table on Pesach, rehearsing the journey from the bread of affliction to the wine of freedom, we commit ourselves to a momentous proposition: that history has meaning. We are not condemned endlessly to repeat the tragedies of the past. Not everywhere is an Egypt; not all politics are the exploitation of the many by the few; life is potentially something other and more gracious than the pursuit of power. Though we have not yet constructed the perfect social order and despite the fact that the messianic age with its reign of peace remains over the horizon, we are not wrong to travel in that direction, however long it may take before we reach our destination…
At the core of being …
Throughout history there has been no shortage of those who claimed that ideals are illusions and hope a form of hubris destined to end in failure. Today that view is as likely to come from science (specifi cally ‘scientism,’ the belief that science is all there is) as anywhere else. We are, on this view, a mere concatenation of chemicals, cosmic dust on the surface of infi nity, living out lives that are no more than infi nitesimal disturbances in a blind and purposeless universe that came into being for no reason, and for no reason will, billions of years from now, cease to be.
Judaism is now, as it has been since its earliest days, a protest against such despair in the name of humanity and of God whose breath we breathe and whose voice, if we listen, we can still hear through the echoes of time. The universe is not blind to our hopes, deaf to our prayers. Somewhere at the core of being is a personal presence, a transcendental Thou, who created the world in love, brought us into being as a parent does a child, who spoke to Abraham and Sarah, asking them and their descendants to undertake a long and momentous journey, and who is with us on the way. Pesach is the festival of faith, the faith of our ancestors as they followed that voice across the wilderness of space and time in search of a freedom that honours the presence of God in the affairs of mankind.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth.
This slightly abridged text is taken from:
The Haggadah by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Maggid Books, Koren Publishers, Jerusalem, spring 2013