This Shabbat, the Shabbat before Pesach is known as Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Shabbat. It’s the custom for rabbis to give a long (gadol) drash to prepare congregants for Pesach. There are different customs: one is to review laws of chametz, cleaning, and kashering for Pesach. In ancient times, this day, the 10th of Nissan was the day we were commanded to obtain our unblemished lamb for our Passover sacrifice. Another tradition, described as the Ashkenazi custom (Orech Chayim 430) in the Shulchan Aruch, the 16th Century code of law, is to recite on the afternoon of Shabbat HaGadol the middle part of the Hagadah, maggid, the part that tells the story of our freedom from slavery to prepare people for the meaning of Pesach.
So rather than telling you to make sure to clean under your stove top for chametz or discussing where you can find a good unblemished lamb, I’d like to read some of Maggid and share with you it’s significance to me, having just returned from Israel, as most of you know, with a wonderful group of people from Kol Shofar and Netivot Shalom.
The hagadah says: B’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza mimitzrayim. In every generation, we must see ourselves as having left Egypt. In other words, when we tell the story of yitziat mitzrayim, we are not reading ancient history; the seder is designed so that we experience ourselves personally leaving Egypt along with our ancestors.
The eternal story, the recurring story, THE story of the Jewish people reverberates in every step walked in the land of Israel, it echoes in every word spoken in Hebrew. Walking through the golden light of Jerusalem, the dust of the desert, the flowering tels, or hills, of green that cover layer upon layer of ancient cities, we feel the earth, ha’aretz,under our feet and the footprints there before us and know that this place was our destination when we left Egypt that first time. And that before that, it was the land that Abraham was told God would show him. In every exile, destruction, inquisition, pogrom, and attempt at genocide, this is the place that we turned our broken hearts to in prayer, this is the dream we ached for and hoped for. This is the place about which we said every year at seder, L’Shana Haba’ah Biyerushalayim. And Hineni, we are here.
The language and structure of the hagadah began with the rabbis, who in the 10th chapter of the Mishnah in Pesachim, describe the basic requirements and flow of the telling. Long before Maxwell house, Artscroll, Santa Cruz or anyone else gave us their own spin on the story, the rabbis said very simply the essential principle of maggid: Matchil Bignut um’sayem bishvach (Pesachim 10:4), begin with degradation and conclude with praise. Our storytelling should begin with how we were oppressed and conclude with how God freed us, how we suffered and how God brought us to rejoicing, how we were downtrodden and how God lifted us up. That’s the basic idea of maggid, and we should embellish the story. The traditional Haggadah text is filled with the rabbi’s version of elaborating on this story, which, honestly, most non-Talmud scholars don’t really understand.
But every day of our time in Israel was a telling of that story, beginning with degradation and concluding with praise. Praise to God for the countless miracles that took place for the State of Israel to be what it is today, and praise of the courage, hope, and resilience of the Jewish people throughout our thousands of years to rise up from suffering, exile, and attempts at wiping us off the face of the earth to new flourishing, creativity, and birth.
Our first day in Israel we visited the Kotel, the Western Wall, and the fairly recently excavated Southern end of the Wall. Two thousand years ago, the Romans destroyed our holy Temple with a force that you can only begin to imagine when you see the enormous stones piled up in a heap next to the wall and the huge crater left on the ground from the impact of the Temple falling by the Roman battering rams. For two thousand years, we’ve cried in sorrow as we’ve read Eicha and mourned the loss of the Temple: Jerusalem sits weeping like a widow; her roads once filled with Festival pilgrims are now empty. But now we sit in the Kotel plaza, filled with our people, and we sing Shir HaMaalot, a pilgrim’s song.When God returned the exiles to Zion we were like dreamers and our mouths were filled with song and joy. Just like we do every Shabbat and holiday, but now we are singing it in Jerusalem, in the very same place that the Levites sang it in the Temple as they ascended the very steps before our eyes. We begin with degradation - my father was a wandering Aramean - and conclude with praise, as the psalm continues, the nations will say: God did this for us and we rejoice.
This praise continued through Shabbat in Jerusalem where we sang the songs where King David was inspired to compose them and where we were part of the Jewish people enjoying a day of rest at the Shabbes tables of our brothers and sisters. The glorious and abundant food allowed us to be nourished and satisfied by the promised land. As it is written in the Birkat HaMazon, quoting the Torah, Kakatuv: V’achalta,V’savata, Uverachta Et Adonai Elohecha al ha aretz hatova asher natan lach. You shall eat and be satisfied, and bless your God for the good land which God gave you.
The awe of visiting Israel always has that twinge of sadness to it that leads to such pride for our people’s ability to survive hardship. Sunday, we visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and the Torochov Family, our adopted family whose 3 young girls are orphans due to terrorism. The Haggadah continues: V’he she’amda La’avoteinu v’lanu: Not only one has risen against us to annihilate us but in every generation they rise against us to annihilate us. But the Holy Blessed One rescues us. And here we are today, visiting Yad Vashem alongside Israeli teenagers - Am Yisrael Chai; the people of Israel lives - and they are speaking Hebrew - the language that for 2 thousand years of exile we used to cry out to God to save us, now this language we speak to each other in a country where we are at home. And as the Torochov family and the thousands of others like them reminds us, we pay a heavy price for being able to be at home, but that price only makes our home more valuable.
One part of the Hagadah that we all know is Dayenu. I guess the more the melody sounds like a kindergarten tune, the more likely we are to remember it. But the meaning is much more profound than you’d think from the jingle. Dayenu, it would have been enough. Each day in Israel was Dayenu, enough, to move us from G’nut to Shevach, Degradation to Praise:
It would have been enough to sing Lecha Dodi and to learn a little Lurianic Kabbalah in Tzfat, the holy city where these originated to see how those expelled from Spain in the Middle Ages created new hope, spirituality, liturgy, and poetry through a theology of tikkun olam - that our actions redeem a broken world and raise the sparks of the divine from out of the shattered vessels.
And it would have been enough to enjoy the lush, green Galilee to behold how our European great grandparents fled the pogroms of Europe to become the pioneers, farmers, and kibbutzniks whose religion was working the land, whose liturgy was poetry, and who tanned their pale faces while farming, building, and draining the swamps.
And it would have been enough to see the battlefield in the Golan Heights where in the Yom Kippur War a young brand new lieutenant and son of Holocaust survivors named Zvika Greengold with his single tank pushed off tanks of the Syrian Army for 20 hours at a ratio of 50:1.
And it would have been enough to hear our jeep driver, also a pilot, tell the story of being called up for reserve duty in 1991 to serve in Operation Solomon, flying one of the 34 jets, with seats removed for maximum capacity, that rescued thousands of Jews from Ethiopia. Another Exodus.
And of course it would have been much more than enough to reach the top of Masada, where our people chose to live and die in honor and in faith rather than in slavery to an enemy, and find my sweetie there to surprise me with a marriage proposal. Now I understand what it means to return home from exile.
For all these and many more, we experience the telling of the hagadah that says: L’fichach anachnu hayavim l’hodot, l’hallel, l’shabeyach. . .Therefore it is our duty to thank, praise, glorify, exalt, honor, bless, acclaim the One who performed all these miracles for our ancestors and for us. God brought us from slavery to freedom, from grief to joy, from mourning to celebration, and from darkness to great light, from servitude to redemption. So we sing halleluyah!
Finally, on the last day, we participated in an archeological dig at Beit Guvrin where we found pottery like this that we were uncovering for the first time in over 2000 years from underground caves. In the hagadah, we read a story of 5 rabbis: Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaria, Rabbi Akiva, and Rabbi Tarfon who were reclining at a seder, discussing the Exodus all night when finally their students came to tell them that it’s time for the morning Shema. You might wonder why they needed to be told that it was time for the Shema. Well, as our archeologist explained to us, they didn’t know it was morning because they were underground in a dark cave like the one we were in, probably celebrating their seder in secret, hiding from the Romans.
These rabbis in dark caves kept Torah going all night in the darkness, just like the rabbis invented the seder to keep the story being told from generation to generation in the darkness of exile. And we celebrate the seder in the darkness of the night, just like that first midnight of the first passover when we left Egypt. See, after degradation comes praise, after darkness comes light, and after exile comes return. After night comes morning, and again it’s time to say Shema Yisrael. . .to bear witness, just like the 5 rabbis of the seder, to the God who brings us out of Egypt again and again and again.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach.
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