All three taken from the Jonathan Sacks Haggada. As Passover ( Pesach) approaches I thought it would nice to share some wonderful and inspiring quotes from the book “Pesach Haggada” with Essays and Commentary by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. What makes this book so unique is how clear and concise the commentary contributes to the understanding of our continuity of the Past with the Present, projecting it into the future by our every day actions in HOPE and not in despair. We as a People/nation as well as individuals have a choice and we constantly are reminded to choose LIFE.
Passover
How it tells its story:
If you want to understand a people, listen to the way it tells its stories. In the literature of humanity there are many kinds of stories. Some – we know them from childhood – end with the words, “ And they all lived happily ever after.” We call them fairy tales, fantasies, myths. In the artificial reality they conjure up, the evil dragon is slain, the wicked witch defeated, the curse lifted, the conflict resolved. Judaism has no such stories because it does not believe in myth. In the Jewish narrative, the battle against evil is never complete. The messianic age has not yet come. Until then we live in a universe in which, though there is liberation from Egypt, after Pharaoh comes Amalek, and after Amalek, other tyrants. Injustice must be fought in every generation. The legacy of the Exodus is not a world in which “they all lived happily ever after.” There is no closure, no “sense of an ending.” Instead there is something more real and at the same time more radical: Shabbat – a world of rest that is temporary but no less utopian, where one day in seven we experience pure, unmediated freedom and gain the strength to continue the journey, to take up the struggle.
Beyond myth, there is a second great literary genre that we owe to the Greeks, namely tragedy. Tragedy tells the story of human beings, with their aspirations and ambitions, in a world governed by impersonal forces. To be human is to wish, to plan, to dream. But our dreams are destined to crash against the rocks of a reality fundamentally indifferent to our existence. They are Hubris, and are always punished by nemesis. Oedipus and the other great figures of Greek drama fail to defeat the forces of fate, as they were bound to do. Tragedy is the consequence of a vision of the sheer abyss between humanity and the gods. Zeus, like other ancient deities, had no special affection for human beings. They disturbed the peace. They threatened to steal his secret knowledge. The gods of polytheistic cultures tended to be at least mildly irritated by, at worst actively hostile to human beings. A tragic universe is a place where bad things happen for no particular reason; where there is no ultimate justice and no expectation of it; where we learn to accept, with Stoic courage, the random cruelties of circumstance. As Aristotle put it, a tragic hero is one whose fortunes change “ from happiness to misery; and the cause of it must lie not in any depravity, but in some great error on his part” (poetics).
…There is – there can be – no tragedy in Judaism. That is not because there are no disasters, crises, catastrophes. Manifestly there are. Jewish history, as often as not, has been written in tears. Nor is it because in a Jewish story there is always a happy ending. That , to repeat, is the structure of myth, not Judaism. But there is always hope, grounded hope, justified not by optimism, innocence, or a “Whiggish theory” that sees history as constant progress, but by the terms of the covenant between heaven and earth. Judaism is the principled rejection of tragedy in the name of hope.
In the lexicon of civilization, there are deep commonalities but no less profound differences. Every culture makes music but only some produce symphonies. Every people tells stories but not all create novels, let alone those of Dickens or Tolstoy. Each individual has memories but only in certain ages and societies do they write autobiographies. Every map of the human condition must find a place for emotion, but not every culture generates, or even finds meaningful the emotion called hope. In the West, we tend to take it for granted as if it were a universal phenomenon. It is not. It has deep conceptual preconditions that are, if anything, exceptional rather than normal. What must we believe if we are to hope?
Hope is born when people first come to believe the following: that there is an author of the universe; that He is not merely the first cause, prime mover, initiator of the big bang, but that He is actively involved in history; that He is personal, meaning one who understands us; that He brought the world into existence not out of mere curiosity or for some reason unfathomable to us, but out of love, as a parent gives birth to a child; that, despite the chasm between God and us, the infinite and the miniscule, the eternal and the fleeting, there is communication, God speaks; that God binds Himself to the same rules of ethics He gives to us; and that therefore, having given His word, He will not fail to honor it. These are massive beliefs. They constitute the metaphysics of Judaism and have left their trace on its daughter monotheisms, Christianity and Islam. But without them, there is no hope, and with them, though there may be misery, injustice, and pain, there is no tragedy in the Greek sense, for tragedy means the absence of hope.
“Begin with shame and end with praise” – in this quintessentially anti-tragic formula the rabbis specified how the Pesach story should be told. They disagreed on details. According to some, the narration should be along the lines of the reply to the wise son in the book of Deuteronomy(6:21), “We were slaves to Pharoah in Egypt, and the Lord our God brought us out.” According to others it should echo Joshua’s final address to the Israelites, “Long ago your ancestors – Terah, the father of Abraham and Nahor – lived on the other side of the Euphrates and worshipped other gods” (Josh. 24:2). I explain in my commentary what is at stake between these two views; and in fact, we do both. However, all agree that in telling the story we must start with the bad news (slavery, idolatry) and end with the good (liberation, revelation). In this simple rule, the rabbis were doing more than outlining the form of the Haggada narrative. They were summarizing the structure of the Jewish imagination. A nation’s emotional tonality is expressed in how it tells its story.
The Unasked Question:
Pesach is a night of questions, but there is one we do not ask, and it is significant. Why was there a Pesach in the first place? Why the years of suffering and slavery? Israel was redeemed. It regained its freedom. It returned to the land its ancestors had been promised centuries before. But why the necessity of exile? Why did God not arrange for Abraham or Isaac or Jacob simply to inherit the land of Canaan? If the Israelites not gone down to Egypt in the days of Joseph, there would have been no suffering and no need for redemption. Why Pesach?
The question is unavoidable, given the terms of the biblical narrative. The Torah indicates that there was nothing accidental about the events leading up to Pesach. Centuries before, Abraham had been told by God in the ‘covenant between the pieces,’ ‘Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and ill-treated for four hundred years’ (Genesis 15:13). We make repeated reference in the course of the Haggadah to the fact that the whole sequence of events was part of a pre-ordained plan. God ‘had already calculated the end’ of suffering. When Jacob went down to Egypt he was, we say, anus al pi ha-dibbur, ‘forced by divine decree.’ God himself told Jacob, ‘Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there’ (Genesis 46:3) without giving him an intimation of the sufferings his children would endure. The sages say that at the end of his life, when Jacob wanted to tell his children what would happen to them ‘at the end of days’ the gift of prophecy was taken from him. Without knowing it, the Israelites were part of a narrative that had been scripted long before.
A midrash – one of the few places in which the sages expressed their disquiet about this strange stratagem of providence – expresses the problem very acutely:
The Holy One blessed be He sought to bring about the decree He had spoken of to Abraham, that ‘your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own.’ So He arranged that Jacob should love Joseph more than his other sons, that the brothers would be jealous and hate Joseph, that they would sell him to the Ishmaelites who would bring him down to Egypt, and that Jacob would hear that Joseph was still alive and living there. The result was that Jacob and the tribes went to Egypt and became enslaved. Rabbi Tanhuma said: To what can this be compared? To a herdsman who wishes to place the yoke on a cow, but the cow refuses to have it placed on her. What does the herdsman do? He takes a calf from the cow and leads it to the field where ploughing is to take place. The calf begins to cry for its mother. The cow, hearing the calf cry, rushes to the field, and there, while its attention is distracted and it is thinking only of its child, the yoke is placed upon it. (Tanhuma, Vayeshev, 4)
The script God writes for His people is sometimes circuitous and terrifying. The sages applied to it the pointed phrase ‘How awesome is God in His dealings with mankind’ (Psalm 66:5). Why did He want His people to experience slavery? Why was exile in Egypt the necessary prelude to their life as a sovereign nation in the promised land?
The Book of Jonah tells a strange story. Jonah has been asked by God to convey a warning to the people of Nineveh. Their ways are corrupt; the city will be destroyed unless they repent. Jonah flees from his mission, and in the course of the book we learn why. He knew, he says, that the people of Nineveh, hearing the words of the prophet, would repent and be forgiven. For Jonah, this was unjust. When people do wrong, they should suffer the consequences and be punished. This was particularly so in the case of Nineveh, a city of the Assyrians who were to be the cause of so much suffering to Israel. God’s forgiveness conflicted with Jonah’s sense of retributive justice. God decides to teach Jonah a moral lesson. He sends him a gourd to give him shade from the burning sun. The next day He sends a worm that makes the gourd wither and die. Jonah is plunged into suicidal depression. God then says to him: ‘You have been concerned about this gourd, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?’ (Jonah 4:10-11).
God teaches Jonah to care by giving him something and then taking it away. Loss teaches us to value things, though usually too late. What we have, and then lose, we do not take for granted. The religious vision is not about seeing things that are not there. It is about seeing the things that are there and always were, but which we never noticed, or paid attention to. Faith is a form of attention. It is a sustained meditation on the miraculousness of what is, because it might not have been. What we lose and are given back we learn to cherish in a way we would not have done had we never lost it in the first place. Faith is about not taking things for granted.
This is the key to understanding a whole series of narratives in the book of Genesis. Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel long to have children but discover that they are infertile. Only through God’s intervention are they able to conceive. Abraham goes through the trial of the binding of Isaac, only to discover that God, who has asked him to sacrifice his child, says ‘Stop’ at the last moment. This is how the covenantal family learns that having children is not something that merely happens. It is how the people of Israel learned, at the dawn of their history, never to take children for granted. Jewish continuity, the raising of new generations of Jews, is not natural, inevitable, a process that takes care of itself. It needs constant effort and attention. The same is true of freedom.
Freedom in the biblical sense – responsible self-restraint – is not natural. To the contrary, the natural order in human societies, as it is in the animal kingdom, is that the strong prey on and dominate the weak. Nothing is rarer or harder to achieve than a society of equal dignity for all. Merely to conceive it requires a massive disengagement from nature. The Torah tells us how this was achieved, through the historical experience of a people who would ever afterward be the carriers of God’s message to mankind.
Israel had to lose its freedom before it could cherish it. Only what we lose do we fully pay attention to. Israel had to suffer the experience of slavery and degradation before it could learn, know, and feel intuitively that there is something morally wrong about oppression. Nor could it, or any other people, carry this message in perpetuity without reliving it every year, tasting the harsh tang of the bread of affliction and the bitterness of slavery. Thus was created, at the birth of the nation, a longing for freedom that was at the very core of its memory and identity.
Had Israel achieved immediate nationhood in the patriarchal age without the experience of exile and persecution, it would – like so many other nations in history – have taken freedom for granted; and when freedom is taken for granted, it has already begun to be lost. Israel became the people conceived in slavery so that it would never cease to long for liberty – and know that liberty is anything but natural. It requires constant vigilance, unceasing moral struggle. Israel discovered freedom by losing it. May it never lose it again.
Passover
To purchase Rabbi Sack’s Haggada Commentary and Essays go to: http://www.korenpub.com/EN/categories/holiday/pesah/
The Jewish Task:
Pesach is the oldest and most transformative story of hope ever told. It tells of how an otherwise undistinguished group of slaves found their way to freedom from the greatest and longest-lived empire of their time, indeed of any time. It tells the revolutionary story of how the supreme Power intervened in history to liberate the supremely powerless. It is a story of the defeat of probability by the force of possibility. It defines what it is to be a Jew: a living symbol of hope.
Pesach tells us that the strength of a nation does not lie in horses and chariots, armies and arms, or in colossal statues and monumental buildings, overt demonstrations of power and wealth. It depends on simpler things: humility in the presence of the God of creation, trust in the God of redemption and history, and a sense of the non-negotiable sanctity of human life, created by God in His image: even the life of a slave or a child too young to ask questions. Pesach is the eternal critique of power used by humans to coerce and diminish their fellow humans.
It is the story more than a hundred generations of our ancestors handed on to their children, and they to theirs. As we do likewise, millennia later, we know what it is to be the people of history, guardians of a narrative not engraved in hieroglyphics on the walls of a monumental building but carried in the minds of living, breathing human beings who, for longer than any other have kept faith with the future and the past, bearing witness to the power of the human spirit when it opens itself to a greater power, beckoning us to a world of freedom, responsibility and human dignity.
First, close examination shows us that the Torah narrative of Genesis from Abraham to Jacob is a series of anticipations of the exodus, focussing our attention on, and heightening our anticipation of, what would eventually take place in the days of Moses.
Second, remembering “that you were once slaves in Egypt” is the single most frequently invoked “reason for the commands.” The exodus was not just an event in history. It forms an essential part of the logic of Jewish law.
Third, key elements of Jewish law and faith are best understood as a protest against and alternative to the Egypt of the pharoahs even where the Torah does not state this explicitly. Knowledge of that ancient world gave us fresh insights into why Judaism is as it is.
Fourth, sustained meditation on the contrasts between Egypt and the society of the Israelites were called on to create reveals a fundamental choice that civililsations must make, then, now and perhaps for all time. There is nothing antiquarian about the issues Pesach raises: slavery, freedom, politics, power, state, society, human dignity and responsibility. These are as salient today as they were in the days of Moses. Pesach can never be obsolete.
At the heart of the festival is a concrete historical experience. The Israelites, as described in the Torah, were a fractious group of slaves of shared ancestry, one of a number of such groups attracted to Egypt from the north, drawn by its wealth and power, only to find themselves eventually its victims. The Egypt of the Pharaohs was the longest-lived empire the world has known, already some eighteen centuries old by the time of the exodus. For more than a thousand years before Moses, its landscape had been dominated by the great pyramid of Giza, the tallest man-made structure in the world until the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889. The discovery in 1922 by the English archaeologist Howard Carter of the tomb of a relatively minor pharaoh, Tutankhamun, revealed the astonishing wealth and sophistication of the royal court at that time. If historians are correct in identifying Rameses II as the pharaoh of the exodus, then Egypt had reached the very summit of its power, bestriding the narrow world like a colossus.
At one level it is a story of wonders and miracles. But the enduring message of Pesach is deeper than this, for it opens out into a dramatically new vision of what a society might be like if the only Sovereign is God, and every citizen is in His image.It is about the power of the powerless and the powerlessness of power. Politics has never been more radical, more ethical or more humane.
Heinrich Heine said, “Since the exodus, freedom has spoken with a Hebrew accent.” But it is, as Emmanuel Levinas called it, a “difficult freedom,” based as it is on a demanding code of individual and collective responsibility. Pesach makes us taste the choice: on the one hand the bread of affliction and bitter herbs of slavery; on the other, four cups of wine, each marking a stage in the long walk to liberty. As long as humans seek to exercise power over one another, the story will continue and the choice will still be ours.
* Passover A detailed explanation of the following points is included in the sections that follow this extract in the introduction to Rabbi Sacks’ Pesach machzor.
To purchase Rabbi Sack’s Haggada Commentary and Essays go to: http://www.korenpub.com/EN/categories/holiday/pesah
Passover
