Some New Questions for Passover
“How is this night different from all other nights?” This one question turns out really to be four, each about the reason for a ritual in the Seder. In the Haggadah, as we know, the four questions are asked and answered.
But the most interesting questions have no easy answer. They are in the Haggadah, too, but they are harder to find. Here are two that struck me this year:
“Why would we celebrate our freedom by restricting it?”
Yesterday one of my teen children asked me this question, in our anticipation of the upcoming holiday – and the dread of observing its rules . I began to try to give a simple answer, and then I realized this question is a central message of the Seder. The entire holiday places freedom alongside bondage. We enjoy a feast that took days to prepare, and yet we refrain from any yeast that had time to rise. We tell the story of our suffering in slavery, while reclining on pillows and drinking wine. Personally, I look forward to the week of giving up bread, not because of what I cannot eat, but because of all of the other things I do eat during this week (including multiple jars of peanut butter along with my matzah!) At the same time, the combination of celebrating what we have and mourning what we didn’t have, and what many others still don’t have, is for me the essence of Passover. The Seder and the weekly observance serve to keep this tension as a question in our minds.
“What is meant by the sentence, ‘Arami Oveid Avi?’”
One of the opening lines of the traditional Haggadah’s Magid section (the telling of the story) is the sentence, Arami oveid avi. Arami means, “an Aramean.” Avi means, “my father.” The word in the middle, oveid, can mean “perish,” or “lost.” In addition, the verb’s form is not clear in the Hebrew. So, the phrase could mean, “My father (Jacob) was a wandering Aramean,” or, “An Aramean (Laban) tried to destroy my father (Jacob).” There are multiple questions that come from this brief statement! Are we recalling Jacob’s migration from Haran to Canaan, or his near destruction by his own father-in-law? The rabbis do not agree, and we do not know. More broadly, which story are we telling tonight? The story of the exodus from Egypt, or the story of the origin of our people many generations before? Or, is the Haggadah’s true agenda to get us to mine our people’s past, all of our families’ pasts, and the experiences of our neighbors, for the stories we long to tell?
Wishing you a meaningful Pesach,
Rabbi Jeffrey Saxe
