More suggestions for Seder discussion:
We are, of course, the most free people in history. We can live where we want (even if the cars, streets, and shop signs make a thousand neighborhoods look the same); we can do what we want (though some days the choice seems to be between which brand of peanut butter to buy); we can believe what we want (even if few people believe anything with a passion that grips their lives, and those few, we know, are eccentrics).
“In every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he went out from Egypt,” says the Haggadah, “as is written, ‘for the sake of this, the Lord acted for me when I went out from Egypt.'” It’s easy to read on quickly, thinking of the historical Egypt and even of a metaphorical one, a country or a time in which our parents or grandparents did not have our freedoms.
Read more slowly:
In every generation, a person is obligated to see himself… To find yourself in the retold story, to relive it, you have first to see yourself. In the grand metaphors Egypt as the Pale of Settlement, Egypt as the days of Jew-badge and ghetto we see history, but can forget ourselves. “Where are you?” God asked Adam (Genesis 3:9), knowing well the answer, knowing well that Adam did not; the Haggadah repeats the question.
As if he went out from Egypt… Understood as a word, not a name, the Hebrew for Egypt means “the twice-narrow place.” It is a place of constraints and claustrophobia, a passage so constricted that a man or woman can only walk forward, from the given past to an unavoidable future, without being able to turn. “From the narrow place I cried out, Lord,” says Psalm 118, using another form of the word, “in the wide place the Lord answered me.” Egypt is a condition of the spirit; see yourself, and you may see your Egypt. And then comes the act of imagination that the Haggadah demands: to see yourself leaving, coming out from the river-cut walls of the canyon into the open plain.
The difficulty in imagining this may be what our age shares with the real Egypt. Dying, Joseph told the Israelites: “God will surely remember you” (Genesis 50:24). Not only did a king arise who knew not Joseph, but a generation of Israelites arose who knew not his promise of redemption. Or perhaps they knew it, but took it no more seriously than the rantings of an anarchist great-aunt as out of place as any message of a better world in our post-modern cynicism because Egypt was the pinnacle of civilization, and its society was the given order, if not the perfected order.
As if he went out… Imagine going, acting, and not just being taken. The Exodus began when, after decades of silent acceptance, “the children of Israel groaned from the servitude and cried out” (Exodus 2:23). The cry could come only when those in the narrow place imagined that there could be something, somewhere else; only then did Moses arrive, bearing a vision that could now be heard. “He who wakens to purify himself,” says the Zohar in another context, “is helped.”
But the cry was not enough. Still in Egypt, the Israelites had to slaughter lambs and spread the blood on their doorposts. Sheep were worshiped as gods in that country, says the midrash in Shmot Rabbah. Only he who had decided to go free could commit the heresy of that sacrifice and smear the evidence where all could see. To go out, he had to take the first step inside Egypt.
…As is written (Exodus 13:8), “for the sake of this the Lord acted for me when I went out from Egypt.” In the Biblical context, “this” refers to matzah. Countless mistranslations have made the verse say that we eat matzah “because of what the Lord did” in the Exodus. Ibn Ezra’s commentary gets it right: God took us out for the sake of eating matzah that is, for the sake of fulfilling his commandments. Those who leave the “twice-narrow place” are not only freed from adding bricks to Pharoah’s massive, meaningless cities, but freed to accept a system of meaning for life.
On this night, we leave Egypt. What place are you leaving; where will you go?
Reprinted from Seventy Facets: A Commentary on the Torah from the Pages of the Jerusalem Report
© Gershom Gorenberg
(Feel free to link. Please do not reproduce in full without permission of the author)
I was quite moved by your interpretation of the haggadah text, especially after yet another meanlingless and mindless Passover seder with the family. I would like to think that this type of thinking could be added to the seder so that we might be able to get in touch with some of the deeper mysteries of our faith that, as non-believing Jews, we abandon because of our total divorce from the Jewish establishment and Jewish Orthodoxy.