Finding (an) order in pandem(on)ic times

We’re thrilled you’ve joined us for this second seder of Pesach 5780 (2020).

Our family accepted an invitation from our shul and to host a traditional seder that would speak, broadly, to social justice, for folks of every age.

To that end, we’ve assembled this companion to your own Haggadah. We’ll move through the seder traditionally, yet pause before each step to read reflect on, and respond to selected texts. We hope they’ll spark conversation!

The texts feature a range of themes: liberty, bondage, power, and oppression; silence, voice, language, and narrative; boundaries and our passages through (and over) them; brokenness and repair; imagination, dream, and reality…

… but our overarching theme is time. Time is of crucial importance to the seder. There’s the ’ extended commentary on the time it should be held; there’s also its stress on timelines, lineages, ancestors, and generations.

Yet the COVID-19 pandemic has turned our sense of time upside down. It’s difficult for many of us to keep track of what day it is, never mind what hour. קֶדֶ֥צ קֶדֶ֖צ ,How do we continue to pursue justice (per the Torah’s injunction in the midst of such troubling times? How do we find the time for ( ֹדְּרִתּ ףְִֹ֑ advocacy and action? And when we do find it, how do we best use it?

And we’re (even more) interested in themes you see and want to discuss, especially in the face of the many challenges of life in a time of pandemic.

Speaking of time: we’ll go as long as people choose to stick around. For those of you who have younger kiddos, you might (like us!) need to take a break to put them to sleep. Feel free to duck out (and back in) as you like. And yes, seder literally means “order,” but there’s no reason why we can’t double back to selections you’ve found interesting, but at the time found yourself not quite ready (or quite too hungry!) to speak to. Please participate however you like. This is your seder every bit as much as it ours!

Chag Pesach Sameach!

Josh, Michal, Ziv, & Stav Kadesh (Sanctification): Even in Isolation, Solidarity

May our Seder be Joyous and Soulful

May it have moments of loudness and moments of quiet

May it create space to feel the pain of our own oppression and that of others

And may it create space to celebrate the liberation we have won, and the liberation we will win

May our seder lean to the past and branch out to the future

But may it be rooted in the present

May it be Diasporist

May it be revolutionary

And may it not last too long because the food is getting cold and we don’t want to delay the revolution any longer

Welcome comrades to our Seder!

[For Jews concerned with social justice] Pesach is naturally the highlight of the year… the chag of liberation. It is a festival of both celebration and mourning and struggle. The Seder takes us through the story of the oppression and the liberation of our ancestors. We are invited to rejoice in our freedoms, while holding close to the stories of those who are still not free and the ways in which we are still not free.

If Pesach is the essence of our Jewishness, the Seder is the serum: Diaspora Jewishness in 2020, reduced down into one evening of song, bruchos, stories, and food.

Each year during the Seder we tell a story. In fact we tell the same story every year. Year after year after year, we tell the story of the liberation of Jewish slaves from Egypt.

But why? Why has this story been passed down to us, and why are we here tonight retelling it anew? Why should we remember that our ancestors were slaves in Egypt?

(Adapted from “A Jewdas Haggadah”) st Cup of Wine): On Liberty 1) א Kiddush

[As we prepare to drink our first cup of wine]:

T]o understand the meaning of this evening, let us compare it to… the Japanese tea ceremony.

People gather to drink tea according to a very precise and well organized ceremonial order.

The way the water is heated, the number of tea leaves placed in the water, the order of the repast, the walks one takes before and after drinking the tea, the placement of the flower decorations and the plates in the room, the words that one says, and so on.

Everything possesses precise significance that must be respected to make the ceremony succeed. Numerous works, guides, and manuals exist to allow the perfect execution of the tea ceremony, by which initiates enter “The Way of Tea,” the Tchai-Do.

Similarly, the Seder is a ceremony by which the “initiates” enter “The Way of Liberty,” by which they accomplish a passage: Passover.

This ceremony, whose form lies somewhere between theater and liturgy, is an apprenticeship in liberty and creativity through play, questions, mime, song, and an ensemble of symbols.

The Seder ceremony is very structured. It follows an exact plan of words and gestures that must be spoken and performed according to a certain order, which is the meaning of the Hebrew word “seder.”

It is a paradox of liberty that it can only be attained within the framework of order, of rules, of words and symbols of extraordinary precision.

(From the commentary to the Assouline Haggadah by Marc-Alain Ouaknin) Urchatz (1st Handwashing): Silence & Voice

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Ludwig Wittengenstein wrote complicated philosophy. He was also a complicated person with a complicated lineage. Three of his grandparents were Jewish. But his mother’s mother was not one of them, and he was brought up Catholic. He wrote about himself as a Jewish thinker. But he did so self-deprecatingly, even, to some critics, antisemitically. In this respect, he echoed his more-famous predecessor, Karl Marx.

So why bring Wittgenstein (or Marx) into a social-justice seder?

Because we Jews, qua Jews, cannot wash our hands of them. We can’t ignore them. We can’t pretend they were not who they were, or that they didn’t say what they said. They are too easily demonized. And they are a reminder of how our past has so often been silenced, and our identities held against us.

And so, as we wash our hands this first time, in silence (i.e. saying no berakha), it’s worth taking time to reflect on the tension held in these Jewish non-Jews, these non-Jewish Jews, and to give it voice. Isaac Deutscher spoke to this in an essay appropriately titled, “The Non-Jewish Jew”:

“They are all determinists because having watched many societies and studied many ‘ways of life’ at close quarters, they grasp the basic regularities of life. Their manner of thinking is dialectical, because, living on borderlines of nations and religions, they see society in a state of flux…. None of them believes in absolute good or absolute evil. They all observed communities adhering to different moral standards and different ethical values…. [They] have yet another great philosophical idea in common – the idea that knowledge to be real must be active…. Finally, [all] believed in the ultimate solidarity of man; and this was implicit in their attitudes towards Jewry.”

These non-Jewish Jews force us to think about what it means to be Jews who believe in the ultimate solidarity of all people, and how our attitudes, and our actions, reflect this. They force us to consider the obverse of Wittgensetin’s famous aphorism: “Whereof one can speak, thereof one must not be silent.” Karpas (Dipping Vegetables): Passing Fancies

Here, in the midst of our Pesach Seder, we find a reference to Purim! What does it mean?

“[T]o understand the meaning of a word, one must see in what context if first appears… That is the rule of first appearance…. [W]hen a word appears only once, it is designated by the Greek term ‘hapax legomenon.’

‘Karpas’ is such a word. It appears just once… in the Book of Esther (1:6). [It] is a Persian word designating a sumptuous cloth…. Esther is also a name derived from the Persian, ‘Astarte.’ In Hebrew, it is understood as ‘concealment’ (Talmud, Hulin, 139b), because in Hebrew ‘aster’ means ‘I will conceal’….

This invitation to pass from the text of the Haggadah to that of the Book of Esther by this intertextual play is in itself the first commentary on karpas.

This ‘passage’ from one text to another is the very meaning of ‘Hebrew’ (ivri), which comes from the root, ‘la’avor,’ ‘to pass.’ The Hebrew is thus a ‘passer.’ For the Hebrew, to be is to become. The Hebrew is in a constant becoming, a be-coming that is a future, a to-coming….

In Hebrew, the word for ‘river bank’ is ‘safa’ which also means ‘language.’ Passing from one bank to another is to pass from one language to another, translating into an action that karpas is a Persian word….

Another word for river bank is ‘gada.’ The direction of movement toward a bank, the opposite bank, can be called, ‘haggadah’….

Two Talmudic sages, Rabbi Chiya Rabba and Rabbi Shimon ben , discuss whether one should consider the karpas-veil as the curtain of a theater or as the sail of a boat.

Karpas is… a theater curtain that hides and unveils… [and] a sail [that] allows the boat to move forward thanks to wind power. That power is, however, invisible.”

(Quoted passages from the commentary to the Assouline Haggadah by Marc-Alain Ouaknin) Yachatz (Breaking the Matzah): Brokenness & Repair

(From “Simple Suggestions for the Seder: A Haggadah Companion”) Maggid (The Story): Accounts Count

The Pesach story is full of counting. Children counting (and recounting) questions, and being counted. Rabbis counting hours and days and plagues. All of us counting the growing number of Israelites, and the years of our oppression, and of our wandering in the desert, and, in the end, of our blessings (which are both enough and never enough). Numbers, measured and beyond measure.

Right now, numbers matter vitally to many of us the way they never have before. We’ve spent countless hours poring over charts and graphs, trying to wrap our heads around epidemiological terms that just a month or two ago might as well’ve been written in Aramaic. Incidence; prevalence; case- fatality rate. It is easy, sometimes, too easy, to forget what the numbers mean.

So perhaps it’s worth recalling why all of those numbers from the maggid matter. It’s not all just abstruse academic arguments. The sages argued about the numbers, the children count their questions, we count ourselves and our years and our blessings, because they speak to our way of life.

What gets counted, counts. Who gets counted, counts. And who does the counting also counts. It is no coincidence that the first thing that’s recounted, after the Israelites leave Mount Sinai, is a census. A census provides that most valuable of statistical components: the denominator. (As in, “common denominator.”) It does not inform us how we should distribute what we have, but it does tell us the number of people across whom we will be distributing it. And for that reason, how we count, counts, a great deal.

For Americans, Census Day 2020 was April 1. It comes with all sorts of questions about who will be counted, and how. Immigrants. Races. Ethnicities. For the first time, people who consider themselves “white” will be asked if they wish to elaborate. This has led to much soul-searching among American Jews (including some as young as six). Do we announce our Jewishness on the census? Does it matter? Isn’t the more important question among who else we stand up to be counted, when the time comes? Those we stand with, in solidarity. Saying, “Every person counts. Every life counts. Every death counts. These are the stories we will add to our history, to be told and retold by our children’s children…” nd Cup of Wine): Serious Plagues 2) ב Kiddush

For Americanized Ashkenazim, the Eser Makkes [Ten Plagues] are taken quite lightly: kids sing silly songs about frogs, people make silly animations on YouTube in the weeks preceding Pesach, and people may make Makkes jokes at the seder….

However, traditionally, the Plagues filled people with dread. A few years ago I had at my seder a close friend who comes from a traditional Turkish Sephardic family. After the Eser Makot, she poured out and re-filled her cup of wine, as is her family’s tradition – because of a feeling that the cup is cursed. [S]he went and washed her hands, to wash off any shemez of curse.

… I had grown up with the sanitized idea that we take out drops of wine from our cup because we feel sorry for the Egyptians. As far as I know, this sanitized idea is not traditional at all. The old texts all explain the ritual thus: “We take out drops of wine out from our cup, because… we do not want to be drinking those plagues ourselves. Let them stay only upon our Egyptian oppressors, yimmah shemam. I knew this, but before I saw that seder guest pour out all the wine in her cup and wash her hands, I had never seen anyone with that instinctive reaction in real life….

“Anyone who expands upon the Exodus from Egypt, behold, this is praiseworthy.” In the list of the plagues, we have only ten items, consisting of eleven words (because the final plague, Makath Bekoroth, consists of two words). Are we meant to fill in the words with the stories, to “expand” on them?... Or should we not expand upon this particular portion of the story, because of the dread and curses contained therein?

… What about when it is not the seder? How should we, if at all, pass on these stories to children?... How many other scary things are there which we must tell children, but it is dangerous or frightening, so we can transmit them only in the safe environment of Leil Shimmurim [the night of the seder]. The seder is the time par excellence for transmitting information to children.

(From the Haggadah “I Will Sing and I Will Recite With Desire”) Rachtzah (2nd Handwashing): Reflections on Care

Why do we was our hands a second time? Didn’t we just do this already?

The reason for the second washing transcends our collective dedication to personal hygiene. Rather it is to wash off the effects of patriarchal erasure and the erasures that result from all other oppressive systems.

How do we know this is true?

Because when our ancestors were getting hopelessly lost in the desert, the washing basin used in the Tabernacle, our handy portable shrine, was made from the mirrors of the Tzovot.

Who were the Tzovot, you might ask? And why didn’t I learn about them in cheder?

The Tzovot were the women who served in an official capacity at the gateway to the Tabernacle and later at the gateways to other holy shrines – i.e., priestesses! See Exodus 38.

Exodus 38:8 (https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.38.8?lang=bi&aliyot=0):

ַיַּו שַׂﬠ֗ ת֚ ֵא רוֹ֣יִּכַּה ֹחְנ תֶשׁ֔ תֵ֖אְו וֹ֣נַּכּ ֹחְנ תֶשׁ֑ ֙תֹאְרַמְבּ ֹצַּה ֹאְב֣ ת֔ רֶ֣שֲׁא וּ֔אְבֽ ָצ חַתֶ֖פּ לֶה֥ ֹא וֹמ ׃דֽ ֵﬠ

He made the laver of copper and its stand of copper, from the mirrors of the women who performed tasks at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.

As we wash our hands, we remember the sacred work of women and those of other marginalized genders, so often rendered invisible, and we uplift their stories for the sake of collective liberation.

(From “A Jewdas Haggadah”) Motzi-Matzah: The Oven of Democracy

Consider an oven, cut lengthwise into segments, with sand placed between each segment. Are we allowed to bake matzah (or anything else) in it?

This is known as the oven of akhnai. The sages taught: When the rabbis discussed this matter, Rabbi Eliezer answered all possible answers in the world to support his opinion, but the rabbis did not accept his explanations.

So Rabbi Eliezer said: “If the halacha is in accordance with my opinion, this carob tree will prove it.” And the carob tree was uprooted from its place. The rabbis replied: “One does not cite halakhic proof from the carob tree.” Rabbi Eliezer then said: “If the halacha is in accordance with my opinion, the stream will prove it.” And the water began flowing in the opposite direction. The rabbis responded: “One does not cite halakhic proof from a stream.”

Rabbi Eliezer then said: If the halacha is in accordance with my opinion, the walls of this hall will prove it. The walls began to fall. Rabbi Yehoshua scolded the walls: “If scholars are contending with each other over halakha, why are you intervening?” The walls did not fall because of Rabbi Yehoshua, but they did not straighten because of Rabbi Eliezer, and they remain leaning.

Rabbi Eliezer then said: “If the halacha is in accordance with my opinion, Heaven will prove it.” And a Heavenly Voice said: “Why are you differing with Rabbi Eliezer, as the halacha is in accordance with his opinion?”

Rabbi Yehoshua stood up and said: “It is written: ‘It is not in heaven’” (Deuteronomy 30:12). Rabbi Yirmeya says: “Since the Torah was already given at Sinai, we do not regard a Divine Voice, as You wrote at Sinai: ‘After a majority to incline’” (Exodus 23:2). Since the majority disagreed with Rabbi Eliezer, the halacha is not ruled in accordance with his opinion.

Years after, Rabbi Natan encountered Elijah the prophet and said to him: “What did the Holy One do at that time, when Rabbi Yehoshua issued his declaration?” Elijah said to him: “The Holy One smiled and said: ‘My children have triumphed over Me; My children have triumphed over Me.’”

(From the Talmud, Beva Metzia, 59b) Maror (Bitter Herbs):

The Flavor of our Labor

(From the “Passover Haggadah Graphic Novel”)

Korech (Hillel’s Sandwich): ’s Sandwich

Did Shammai have a sandwich?

Hillel, the famous first-century sage, we know best perhaps for his aphorism: “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” – and for his response to a man who asked him to teach “the whole Torah, while standing on one foot”: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your friend – this is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn.”

Many of us are, perhaps, less familiar with Shammai: Hillel’s contemporary and rival, who was sterner and stricter. (When the same man asked Shammai to teach the Torah on one foot, Shammai chased him away with a yardstick.)

The Talmud tells us: “For three years, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai argued. One said, ‘The halacha is according to our position,’ and the other said, ‘The halacha is according to our position.’ A heavenly voice spoke: ‘These and those are the words of the living God, and the halacha is according to the House of Hillel.’ A question was raised: Since the voice declared: ‘Both these and those are the words of the Living God,’ why was the halacha established to follow… Hillel? It is because the students of Hillel were kind and gracious. They taught their own ideas as well as the ideas from the students of Shammai [and] they even taught Shammai's opinions first.”

And yet, according to the famed Kabbalist, Issac Luria: “[While] Hillel represents kindness and Shammai severity… [w]hen the Messiah comes the advantage of the severity will be revealed and therefore the law will be in accordance with Beit Shammai. Beit Shammai comes from such a high level this present world is incapable of withstanding it, and only when the Messiah comes will we be able to follow their opinion.”

What do we make of this? It seems wrong, somehow, that in the most joyous of times, severity will rule. As wrong as a Shammai sandwich: matzah in the middle, maror and Pesach on the outside? Perhaps this should lead us to reflect on what “the advantage of the severity” might be, and what it would mean for us to not just anticipate, but actively work to realize it, as we pursue justice of all forms? Shulchan Orech (The Meal): All Who Are Hungry

During any other Pesach, when we recite the words, “Let all who are hungry, come and eat; let all who are in need come and share the Pesach meal,” we might remind ourselves of those who are not at our table, and not as fortunate as we are, who go hungry on a regular basis. We might make a note to donate to a food pantry, or deliver Meals on Wheels or cook or serve at a homeless shelter. But we would not, even as we open our door for Eliyahu HaNavi, expect anyone to come into our house, unexpectedly, and join us.

And this Pesach, confined to our quarters, still less. That might intensify our desire to give, to relieve hunger. It’s a righteous impulse. We might fulfill it through donations to institutions providing food aid (http://bit.ly/foodmad) or related efforts. And that’s laudable. But we should also take a moment and think of our own hungers and our own needs to come and share.

Because it is not just that (as the world’s most famous Jew was quoted as quoting, from Devarim 8:2-3), “one does not live by bread alone.” It’s that we must question why we live in a world that “subjected [us] to the hardship of hunger and then gave [us] manna to eat, which neither [we] nor [our ancestors] had ever known” – and to wonder what it means that this was “in order to teach us that one does not live on bread alone, but… may live on anything decreed.”

We’ve repeatedly been told, lately, that we’re all in the same boat. But what does this mean? Think on that most famous of boating disasters: the Titanic. We know we must avoid the temptation to rearrange deck chairs. And, too, to resist the call to see our common vessel as a great equalizer. For we know that those most fortunate get the lifeboats; and we know, equally, that without serious structural change, the numbers of the fortunate will dwindle. Are we sure we’re among them? We might ponder the most famous boat in the Torah, Noah’s ark, and the countless lives that life-saving vessel left behind.

If we do that, we might realize that we must have bread, but we must have Rose Schneiderman, too. Which is to say, we need to ask about not just what we can give, this Pesach, but what we can give each other: to ask what it might mean to truly engage in mutual aid. And about what a true Pesach sacrifice might give us in return. Tzafun (Dessert): On the Joy of the Search

The seder gives all of us a chance to be like children, seeking for the afikoman: to find justice, to imagine our just deserts, to bring what has been broken and make it whole again. But this requires we have a dream. It requires us to pass over (and back again) between the real and imagined.

~~~

“The Hagaddah is the story of the Exodus… [n]ot only from a physical Egypt, but also… from the Egypt of the banality of the day-to-day…. The essential problem of banality is the disappearance of the imaginary and of the dream, and because of that, the disappearance of the projection toward somewhere else, toward another scene, a projection that is the very movement of a person’s humanity. To be is not merely ‘to be’ but to be able to be differently. This is the true meaning of liberty! The search for that space between being and being able to, between saying and being able to say, between reality and dream, is at the center of the Passover story, and it is to that search that we devote this book.”

(From the commentary to the Assouline Haggadah by Marc-Alain Ouaknin)

~~~

“In many haggadoth… there is an essay with the title, “Epistle of the Holy Rabbi Samson of Ostropolia”… R. Samson cites fictional books… throughout his writings…. real-life and dream-life were all mixed together in his intellectual world; not only did R. Samson not distinguish between the two, he had no interest in distinguishing between the two…. ‘In every generation, one is obligated to view oneself as if one had personally left Egypt.’ In fact, in the physical, real world, we did not just leave Egypt, for we are reclining here, in our house, and telling stories... What greater role- model do we have than R. Samson, to teach us the way to live on the plane of imagination, of the mind, to free ourselves from dry reality? [His] imaginary books… tear us away from our everyday reality, and bring us closer to the narrative world, the supernatural world of the Pesach haggada. Truly, this night is different from all other nights, for on it, the boundaries are blurred between dream life and waking life; between story and reality; and between the texts that are being interpreted, and us who are interpreting them.”

(From the Haggadah “I Will Sing and I Will Recite With Desire”) Barech (Postprandial Grace): Blurry Boundaries

In place of the standard birkat, we’re using Gabriel Wasserman’s presentation of a “piyyutized” version from the Geniza fragments. Why?

As Dr. Avi Shmidman notes, “In most Jewish homes today, there is nothing special about the section ‘barekh’ [=birkath ha-mazon] on the night of the seder; they simply say the regular version that is recited every day of the year. But R. Gabriel Wasserman deserves a doubled and redoubled commendation for having restored this glorious practice of reciting the piyyutized birkath ha-mazon that… blurs the boundaries between the Exodus from Egypt and our days, and strengthens the experience.

From Wasserman himself:

“In the piyyut in each berakha of our composition, the first lines concentrate on the story of the Exodus. In line 1, we report that God listened to our cries in Egypt… and in lines 2-3 we tell how God protected us, in the merit of the Pesach-sacrifice. Therefore, when we reach line 4, we expect it to be a continuation of the story: “God fed me the richness of mazza-food.” And indeed, at first blush, this seems to be talking about the mazza that our ancestors ate when they left Egypt. However, these words apply also to the people participating in the current seder, who need to give thanks to God, birkath ha-mazon, for the mazza they have eaten at the seder….

Thus, there is a certain blurring of boundaries between the first Pesach, in Egypt, and the one we are celebrating here and now; line 4 applies to both of them. It is certain that this double meaning is intentional – for indeed, we read in the haggada: “In each generation, one is obligated to view oneself as if one had personally left Egypt,” and thus, the mazza of the Exodus and the mazza of this evening are one, and we are eating mazza today only as a way of embodying our ancestors, who left Egypt eating mazza. Therefore, the poet is right on target in his choice to present the giving of thanks for the food – the topic of the first berakha of birkath ha-mazon – as part of the telling of the story of the Exodus.”

(Adapted from the Haggadah “I Will Sing and I Will Recite With Desire”)

3rd Cup of Wine): On Houses of Bondage) ג Kiddush

“The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro's understanding. It increases the Negro's rage.

For it is not here, and not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered, and he is never despised, here, as the Negro is, because he is an American. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American….

In this situation, it is not the American Jew who can either instruct him or console him. On the contrary, the American Jew knows just enough about this situation to be unwilling to imagine it again.

[W]hat the American Negro interprets the Jew as saying is that one must take the historical, the impersonal point of view concerning one's life and concerning the lives of one's kinsmen and children. ‘We suffered, too,’ one is told, ‘but we came through, and so will you. In time.’

In whose time? One has only one life. One may become reconciled to the ruin of one's children's lives is not reconciliation. It is the sickness unto death….

What is really at question is the American way of life. What is really at question is whether Americans already have an identity or are still sufficiently flexible to achieve one. This is a painfully complicated question, for what now appears to be the American identity is really a bewildering and sometimes demoralizing blend of nostalgia and opportunism….

If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself. I know that my own oppression did not ennoble me…”

(From James Baldwin’s 1967, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White”) Hallel (Praise): Words, Words, Words

We have finished retelling the story of the Exodus; we have finished our meal, and the blessings after. We have just one cup of wine left before we conclude with our wises for next year and beyond. The time of the seder dwindles; the boundaries between now and then are thin. As we move into Hallel’s words of praise, what might we take away from them?

“We are going to look at the history of a single textual variant in the berakha of redemption… We shall see that…the textual variants are not random; rather, hidden in them are stories from the history of our people. Just as the Pesach Hagaddah tells the story of the Exodus from Egypt in a general sense, so does every specific detail in it – even the smallest letter, the ‘little serif on the letter yod,’ contain stories from various periods of Jewish history.

It says in the Mishna: One must conclude [Hallel with a berakha] about redemption. say: ‘Blessed art Thou O Lord God… who has redeemed us and our ancestors from Egypt, and brought us to this day’… R. Aqiva says… ‘Blessed art Thou O Lord God… redeemer of Israel.’

Thus, we see that in the Mishna, there are different texts… some manuscripts have go’el (‘redeemer’), and others have ga’ol (‘[who] redeemed’).

What difference does this make?

Perhaps it’s the difference between the accomplished act and the in-process one: between seeing ourselves as having been redeemed from one house of bondage and recognizing that we now live in another. What might redemption look like from within it? Shammai and Hillel famously argued over what to do with a house built with a stolen beam. Shammai argued it must be ripped down; Hillel that the value of the beam must be paid for. And then there was Audre Lord, who famously observed: “[T]he master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those… who still define the master's house as their only source of support.”

(First quoted passages from the Haggadah “I Will Sing and I Will Recite With Desire”) 4th Cup of Wine): Angels Past and Future) ד Kiddush

VIII The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule…. [A]mazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the [our] century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge — unless it is the knowledge that [this] view of history is untenable.

IX A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel… His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

A [N]o fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, though events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

B … We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

(From Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” Nirtzah (Conclusion): Resumption

We have just concluded the Pesach Seder. Now comes, again, the time to reflect on what is just beyond this table. How might we work for justice outside our four walls when we so seldom leave them?

We have just fulfilled all the Seder’s rules, ordinances, and laws. Now comes, again, the time to reflect on the rules, ordinances, and laws of our cities, states and countries. How might we work to see them justly applied?

We’ve been given the opportunity to speak about our own release from bondage and oppression. Now comes, again, the time to reflect on how we might use our own liberty to release others. How might we work to see freedom truly ring?

“Growing up, when we arrived at Nirtzah, the final step of the Pesach Seder, my dad would always announce, ‘Chabad do not do Nirtzah.’ The Seder is never-ending. It is never concluded. We go out from tonight’s Seder into the world, without needing to conclude it….”

~~~~~

We go out into the world having said, as American Jews, “next year in Jerusalem”; now comes, again, the time to reflect on what we meant by that.

We might start with the literal meaning of Jerusalem – according to scholars’ understanding, Shalem’s city: city of dusk, the evening star, sunset, peace, completion. How appropriate, for Jews at the end of the Seder, to invoke the city that lies between the end of one day and the beginning of the next.

Or we might mean that next year we want to come to Jerusalem, “the place we’ve always desired and run to.”

Or playing off the root, “Sh-N-H” we might mean that we seek change to come to Jerusalem.

Or playing off that root’s other meaning, we might mean that we seek to repeat our coming to Jerusalem. We might mean, then, what the Haredim mean. “For a chossid, Jerusalem is not a geographical place, but the heart, the center of being.… So when we say next year in Jerusalem, we are asking for a place that is whole and inherited, a place close to our hearts, from which we can act and freely be our most radical selves.” Or we might mean what the Bundists mean. For a Bundist, “Jerusalem is not a geographical place,” but the place we are now. So when we say “next year in Jerusalem,” we are embracing doikayt and imagining our place as “whole and inherited, a place close to our hearts, in which we can act and freely be our most radical selves.”

And so we maybe we mean to say: “Next year, wherever we are!”

(Quoted passages and theme from “A Jewdas Haggadah”) http://bit.ly/ale_brider

Sources

All passages from the Torah and Talmud from https://www.sefaria.org/

Baldwin, James. 1967, April 9. “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html

Benjamin, Walter. 1942. On the Concept of History. (Translated by Lloyd Spencer). https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/concept2.html

Deutsch, Jessica Tamar. 2020. Simple Suggestions for the Seder: A Haggadah Companion.

Deutscher, Isaac. 2017/1968. The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays. London: Verso Books.

Gorfinkel, Jordan B. and Zadok, Erez. 2019. Passover Hagaddah Graphic Novel. (Translated by David Olivestone.) Jerusalem: Koren Publishers.

Jewdas. 2019. The Jewdas Hagaddah. London: The Pluto Press.

Ouaknin, Marc-Alain, and Garouste, Gérard. 2001. Haggadah: The Passover Story. (Translated by Jeffrey Green.) New York: Assouline Publishing, Inc.

Wasserman, Gabriel. 2015. The Pesach Hagaddah: “I Will Sing and I Will Recite With Desire”