Pesach 5781 | March 2021
Dr. Sarit Kattan Gribetz
Advanced Kollel Class of 2023
The Passover Seder formally begins and ends with a pair of hopeful declarations. Magid opens with Ha Lahma Anya, an invitation welcoming all those who have no place to eat and a declaration that this year we are here, but next year we hope to be in the Land of Israel; this year we are enslaved, but next year we hope to be free. Nirtzah, the final section of the Seder, likewise includes a similar (though notably not identical) declaration: “Next year in Jerusalem!”
The short yet powerful phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” orients the future both temporally (“next year”) and spatially (“in Jerusalem”). “Next year” promotes conceiving a better future, not in the distant future but in the imaginable future. A better time. The words “in Jerusalem” reinforce the notion of Jerusalem as a place of longing and encourage hope for return, but they also function metaphorically – Jerusalem as an idea. A better place. “Next year in Jerusalem” can thus mean at least two things simultaneously. First, literally, the hope that by next year redemption to Jerusalem will have arrived. And second, figuratively, the desire for a future that is better than the present in which we are currently living – that we’ll figuratively be in Jerusalem. In a better time and place.
This year is our second pandemic Passover. Last year, we imagined this year; this year, we imagine next year. What might the phrase “next year” mean this year? In the midst of an impossible year, what does it mean to focus on the future?
The History of “Next Year”
In a poem for the conclusion of Yom Kippur, the twelfth-century poet Judah ha-Levi asks God, as the sun sets and the day wraps up, to forgive Israel and assist those who are suffering. He ends the stanza with the hopeful phrase “Next year in Jerusalem!”
For ha-Levi, traveling to Jerusalem was more than a poetic fantasy. He desperately wanted to be in the city, writing to his friend Halfon ha-Levi that “I have no secret wish, only the open one that I made plain to you and that I laid out before your lofty presence – to go eastward as soon as possible, if God’s will grants me assistance” (trans. R.P. Scheindlin).
Ha-Levi’s desire to travel to Zion was indeed no secret: anyone who reads his writings learns how deeply he felt this urge, declaring most famously: “My heart is in the east, but the rest of me is far in the west.” This wish for Jerusalem emerged out of a long tradition of Jewish longing to return from exile. It also developed within ha-Levi’s own contemporary context, including the First Crusade and its aftermath, which prompted communities of Christians, Muslims, and Jews to renew their attachment to Jerusalem and enlivened their imaginations about it. Later in the same poem in which ha-Levi declares that his heart is in the east, he references Crusader Jerusalem explicitly: “How, in the bonds of the Moor / Zion chained to the Cross / Can I do what I’ve vowed to and must?” (trans. H. Halkin).
Ha-Levi’s poetic phrase – “Next year in Jerusalem” – is one of the very earliest instances of it in extant Jewish sources. A variation, “in Jerusalem next year,” appears in an eleventh-century piyyut for Shabbat ha-Gadol composed by the French Rabbi Joseph ben Samuel Bonfils, known in Hebrew as Yosef Tuv Elem, attested in Ashkenazi Mahzorim through the modern period. (Bonfils also authored Hasal Siddur Pesach, which was later incorporated into the conclusion of the Passover Seder. Even though in most contemporary Haggadot “Next year in Jerusalem” immediately follows Hasal Siddur Pesach, these two passages’ inclusion into the Haggadah seem to have unconnected histories – “Next year in Jerusalem” was included earlier, and at first they were two separate Seder customs.) Some early Geniza documents use the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” as well, often as a formulaic wish or greeting – including in a letter about Judah ha-Levi’s arrival in Alexandria on his way to Jerusalem in 1141!
Precisely when and where the practice of ending the Passover Seder with the hopeful “Next year in Jerusalem!” originated is unclear. It was certainly a medieval addition, perhaps emerging in a Crusader or post-Crusader European and Iberian context and becoming far more widespread in the centuries thereafter, though a more thorough search through the documents of the Cairo Geniza might reveal that the custom developed even before then. One of the earliest extant Haggadot to include the phrase is the Bird’s Head Haggadah from the early fourteenth-century Rhineland, a region devastated by the Crusades some decades earlier. This Haggadah includes the words “Next year in Jerusalem” in big letters before the final blessing on wine; an intricate depiction of Jerusalem’s gates, with people entering the city, appears on the facing page.
By the fifteenth century, the custom of reciting the phrase was more common – the phrase appears far more frequently in Haggadah manuscripts after the fourteenth century. The Barcelona Haggadah from Catalonia, dated to 1370, dedicates a full, ornate page to the words “Next year in Jerusalem, Amen.” The phrase also appears in large lettering in the Rothschild Haggadah (c. 1450) from Northern Italy and the Washington Haggadah (1478) from Germany. It was not confined to a single region, but is attested in a broader European landscape from Catalonia to Italy and the German lands. Many other Haggadah manuscripts from this period do not include the phrase, however, suggesting that it was by no means a universal custom to recite it. The fifteenth-century Rabbi Isaac Tyrnau records in his Sefer Minhagim that after drinking the fourth cup of wine and reciting the blessing after it, members of the seder say “Next year in Jerusalem”; he explains that this declaration, together with Hasal Siddur Pesach, formally ends the Seder and beckons participants not to eat or drink anything after reciting those words. Despite Tyrnau’s precise instructions for when to recite the phrase, its location shifts around in manuscripts and printed editions, all the way to the present day.
The custom of concluding the Seder by reciting “Next year in Jerusalem” became more widespread with time, almost the default practice, especially by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Jewish communities all over the world had easier means of sharing texts and traditions. Its meaning was adapted to numerous contemporary circumstances and contexts. Yet in many Haggadah traditions it was never added, and in some it was deliberately omitted. It did not gain the formal status that many other parts of the Haggadah did: the phrase has an especially exciting history precisely because it remained so flexible and could speak to so many circumstances.
“Next Year” This Year
In different years, different parts of the Haggadah resonate. There has been and continues to be so much death, illness, suffering, loss, despair, inequality, and injustice – it has truly been a year of plagues. As Passover approached last year, in the early and devastating months of the pandemic, I thought a lot about the concept of plague: I identified more with the enslaved Israelites, the Egyptians who suffered 32 the plagues, and with those who endured other plagues (biblical, medieval, modern), than with those who had been redeemed. I prayed for redemption from contemporary plagues. I also could not help but ask myself “what’s different – ma nishtana?” And of course the answer was “everything.” At the beginning of the pandemic, the situation was so new and different, and rapidly changing each day. We had never celebrated a Passover quite like it.
This year, we’re in a strange time and place: what was so different and new last year is now routine, even if we don’t like it. In many ways, this year is harder: to have endured so much, to be so isolated and apart, to have faced illness and death, to have forgotten what life used to be like. But there’s also hope, especially now with vaccination efforts underway – hope that we’ll get through this time, that the pandemic will end, that we will make the time to mourn and heal. That hope is uneven, more palpable in communities and countries with resources to acquire and administer the vaccine and less imaginable for those currently in the throes of tragedy; it is a tangible hope for some, and a more distant hope for others.
This year, I would propose, the focus is not primarily on the present – what is different – but on the future: declaring that next year (that is, the future) will be better, and hoping that we might eventually make it, next year or in some coming year, figuratively or physically, to our Jerusalem – whatever and wherever that is.
Making It Happen
Rabbi Tevele Bondi, in his 1898 commentary on the Haggadah titled Maarechet Heidenheim, explicitly connects the Ha Lahma Anya, found at the beginning of the Seder, to the final declaration of “Next year in Jerusalem,” placed at the conclusion of the Seder. Bondi writes that the Seder is bookended by these paired declarations because it is the merit of charity, exemplified by the Ha Lahma Anya, that will lead to an eventual return to Jerusalem. Action guided by the values of generosity and welcoming those who are enslaved, oppressed, impoverished, and hungry will facilitate the redemption promised by the evening’s conclusions, and by the Passover narrative itself. The beginning of the Seder encourages us to be driven in our actions and our words by our values, and the end of the Seder promises that doing so will eventually lead us to a better time and place.
At our Seders this Passover, we might wish to ask ourselves what we hope the next year will bring, where – literally and metaphorically – we would like to be a year from now, and what we can do to create this better future. We have, at last, reached a time when contemplating the future can offer hope rather than despair. And in hoping for a better year, we’ll be joining a long Passover tradition.
May you each have a healthy and happy Passover this year, and an even better one next year.
