I always loved being at seder. It was one of the few times each year that I had so many members of my family under one roof. Being a kid who loved to eat… well, let’s just say that I was always very happy with my mom or my aunt’s cooking.
Seder was also a time for showing off my Hebrew. At our seders, we felt a sense of obligation to get through the entire text of the haggadah. Everything had to be read, and the only other rule was that it had to be done quickly. We would zoom through the Hebrew, with my Israeli cousins the longer parts and my taking a paragraph here or there. We slowed down when it was time for songs, and of course, when it was time to eat. I loved these seders.
Then, beginning in rabbinical school, I discovered a new kind of seder, and one where though I missed the camaraderie of my family back home—and certainly the cooking—I encountered something new and delightful: there is seriously powerful and potentially-life changing substance to the texts of the haggadah. Every year, we are expected to ask the basic questions of freedom. When we nourish ourselves from the words of the seder, we explore what it means to be enslaved and to be free. This nourishment means tasting the meaning beyond the simple text and chewing through its ideas in conversation and question. The seder provides us with food for our bodies and our souls. I realized, at my first seder as a rabbi-to-be, that there was a very important dimension to Pesach that I was only then discovering.
And now, I’m once again realizing that there’s something else I’ve been missing. There’s a famous passage in the Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 116a:
אמר ליה רב נחמן לדרו עבדיה עבדא דמפיק ליה מריה לחירות ויהיב ליה כספא ודהבא מאי בעי למימר ליה אמר ליה בעי לאודויי ולשבוחי א”ל] פטרתן מלומר מה נשתנה פתח ואמר עבדים היינו:
Rav Nahman asked his slave Daru: ‘When a master liberates his slave and gives him gold and silver, what should he say to him?’ ‘He should thank and praise him,’ replied he. ‘You have excused us from saying “Why [is this night] different?”’ observed he. [Thereupon] he commenced by reciting, ‘We were slaves.’ (trans. Soncino)
Rav Nahman, at the meal celebrating our freedom, turns to his slave to ask how one would thank his or her master [which to Nahman is God], and Daru [whose master is Nahman] answers, with Hallel! With praise and song and gratitude! Of course we should give all that we can to that master to demonstrate how thrilled we are at our freedom. And Nahman, not realizing how he has just asked his slave about the freedom that Nahman was not actually granting Daru, showed his appreciation by remembering the time his people were slaves. (Remember, the four questions are only the sample questions for the seder. If you can come up with your own question, there’s no reason for the four.)
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I’ve recently been learning with an organization called T’ruah: the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, a group heavily involved in fighting human trafficking, known alternatively as modern slavery. Thousands of years after our Exodus from Egypt, we have yet to obliterate slavery from this world. When we fail to address this at our celebrations of freedom, we miss the point.
Knowing that we were slaves in Egypt means that we know the plight of those who remain enslaved. Being free means we have the ability to enjoy freedom, and the obligation to share it with others.
This Pesach, download T’ruah’s Modern-Day Slavery Haggadah to find out what you can do bring deeper meaning to our festival of Freedom.
Chag Pesach Kasher v’Sameiach.
(Published in the April 2015 edition of Temple Emanu-El of Edison’s Kolaynu.)
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