I penned this piece ten years ago, back when I was on the faculty of CLAL. Reading it again, I am struck by the line:
"We are living in a time of war, shifting alliances, new dangers, increasing uncertainty and growing poverty."
Even more true today than a decade ago, methinks. Anyways - Andre Neher's words are still a powerful call:
Passover - The Unfinished Manuscript
By Daniel S. Brenner
In the last sixty years, the words of the Passover Haggadah have marked the flow of history. At a makeshift seder in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944 the leader recited, "This is the bread of our affliction!" At a seder on the beaches of Tel Aviv in 1948, new immigrants sang, "Blessed be the Guardian who kept his promise to Israel!" At a seder in a Black church in Washington, D.C. in 1969, young civil rights activists called out, "In every generation, every Jew must regard himself as though he, personally, had been brought out of Egypt." At the seder of Ethiopian Jews in a resettlement camp in 1992 families recited, "God brought us out from there, so that we are led to the land promised our ancestors!" And at seders last year, in the hours after the suicide bomber struck down 29 in Netanya, we said, "In every generation they have stood against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be, has delivered us from their hand."
Each year brings a new context to the seder, and the events on the front pages and on the front-lines cause ancient words to find new meanings. Yet the overall story does not change. No turn of events causes us to waver from our ultimate dream -- that all who are oppressed know freedom, that all who serve under Pharaohs know true justice, and that all who are exiled or abandoned can find a place to call home.
Andre Neher, the prolific Jewish scholar who was born in Alsace at the beginning of World War I, lived through cataclysmic changes. After surviving the destruction of much of European Jewry and then helping to rebuild it, he wrote the following words on the experience of Passover:
No Jew can pass the Haggadah untouched, for its style is not narrative, but interrogative. Its story is not told like a legend, but like a problem. One initial question is asked, and all the others follow from it: "What is the difference between this night and all other nights?" It is for the Jew to answer if he can, and if cannot, to feel that the question contains a challenge. Like an unfinished play, the night of the Exodus continues through the centuries, seeking actors to relive it perpetually, and to grasp its essential meaning.
(Moses and the Vocation of The Jewish People, 1959)
To take Neher's insight further, the Haggadah not only acts as a partially written script, but as a script whose lines take on new meaning every year. In that light, each year we must ask: What words will ring true this Passover? What new connections will resonate?
This year, it is uncertain what line will leap from the text of the Haggadah and grasp our attention. We are living in a time of war, shifting alliances, new dangers, increasing uncertainty and growing poverty. But we retain the hope that we will one day be able to truly say: Let all who are hungry come and eat; let all who are in need celebrate Passover with us.
On this night of questions, as you join your friends or family around the seder table, you might begin by asking each person to recall one news event from the past few months. As a group, pick one of these events and ask: How is the Exodus story being played out in the headlines? How can telling the story of the Exodus deepen our understanding of these events? How are we reminded that we "were once strangers in a strange land?”
As you read through the Haggadah, keep in mind Andre Neher's teaching that "the Exodus continues through the centuries, seeking actors to relive it perpetually, and to grasp its essential meaning." The more connections we draw, the closer we get to the essential meaning of Passover. May you be blessed with a festival of hope.
