Ten Things to Consider for Passover this Year, 5785: Part One

For years, I longed for the "right" kind of seder- a litany of divrei Torah and of songs sung by the whole table. I dreamt of a Seder where the intergenerational transmission of tradition went from old to young, rather than from young to old, which is how I (rather arrogantly) saw our Seder. The transposing of Soviet memory onto the text, at first, seemed inauthentic. It was as if the towers of the Kremlin were blocking my view of the pyramids of Pithom and Ramses.

Later did I realize that that was, in fact, the embodiment of "In every generation a person must see themselves as if they left Egypt themselves." Little did I understand that those memories, those stories of oppression, antisemitism, hunger, taking place across the landscape of Kiev, Kharkov, and the steppes of Northern Siberia- they were the ultimate fulfillment of the chiyuv, the obligation, to imagine.

The ability to imagine is an essential part of our religious experience. We are called upon to use our personal experiences to access emotional relevance to ritual; without stories, stories that feel intimate, the ritual risks feeling irrelevant, distant, academic even. It is our secret hardships which help us understand what Egypt is, and it is jubilant victories which help us understand the crossing of the Sea....

This idea is reflected in a special benediction recited on Shabbat and major Jewish holidays. Nishmat Kol Chai (literally “the breath of all life”) affirms a shared life force among all of God’s creations, a common breath that not only sustains physical life, but also serves to praise our single Creator.

This prayer is the closing benediction of Pesukei d’Zimra, the verses of song that are meant to spiritually prepare us for the heart of our morning prayers. The structure of the prayer is threefold: 1) affirming God’s universal sovereignty and power of salvation; 2) admitting the human inability to offer sufficient praise to God; and 3) reiterating God’s unparalleled power and our responsibility to offer prayer in response.

The prayer begins with this line: “The soul/breath of every living being will praise you, and the spirit of every mortal being will always glorify and extol You, our King.” Nishmat Kol Chai does not begin from a place of Jewish, or even human particularity, but with a profoundly universal assertion: all living creatures are united by breath. And it continues in this expansive tone: “We have no King but You, God of the first and the last, God of all creatures, master of all generations, glorified through great praise, who treats the world with love and all creatures with compassion.”

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Nishmat Kol Chai focuses our attention on the unifying life force of breath, which is also our primary vehicle to praise God. It reminds us of the great miracles of creation and redemption, and of God’s everlasting presence in our lives. But it also sets realistic expectations about our ability to praise a Divine force that is incomparable and beyond our comprehension.

Rabbi Elliot Dorff makes an important point about Nishmat Kol Chai’s humbling words. Acknowledging the limits of our praise does not mean that we are eternally lost, lacking, or worthless. Our need for God’s love and fidelity, and God’s constant supply of both, is what creates the Divine bond that gives our lives meaning. He writes: “God’s relationship to us lends our lives value. This notion contrasts sharply with some Christian (Augustininan and Calvinist) conceptions of human beings as being hopelessly depraved from the moment of birth (tainted with original sin), unable to earn salvation through deeds, and unworthy to be saved by God. Only faith in Jesus can save, and (in Calvinism) even that will save just the elect few. For Jews, by contrast, our lack of merit is balanced by our ongoing relationship with God, who values us.”

Nishmat Kol Chai reminds us of our limited capacity to understand God’s wisdom in its totality or to articulate the mysteries of the world, but it does not doom us to darkness. Rather, our need for God, and God’s appreciation of our heartfelt and full-bodied praise, provide the basis for a relationship that provides meaning, structure, and value to our lives as divine creations, human beings, and Jews.

Rabbi Luntschitz, generally referred to as the Keli Yakar, the name of his biblical commentary, expands on a verse in Deuteronomy which calls Matzah “lechem oni”.

The Talmud (T.B. Pesachim 115b-116a) brings the following explanation: leḥem oni is actually written without the letter vav, which means a poor person. Just as it is the manner of a poor person is to eat a piece of bread, for lack of a whole loaf, so too, here he should use a piece of matza. ‘This is the Poor Man’s Bread we ate in the Land of Egypt’- Why call Matzah poor man’s bread? The reason is that a wise person must know that all the good that happens to a human being in their lives is truly a free gift, in literally the same way that a poor man is given sustenance for free. All the good deeds we do are not the payment for the blessing we receive… for God owes us nothing, and we owe God everything (p.32).

Many years ago, I worked as a rabbi in a Jewish elder hostel program, many of them Holocaust survivors or American Jews who had lived through the Great Depression. In the dining room we always placed baskets of fruits and snacks for the participants. We noticed that within an hour all the food was gone. In time, we began to realize that some of the participants were not only taking food for now, but were filling their bags with food for later. I am sure many of us have seen this same phenomenon. Many of these people were upper middle class, wealthy enough to spend retirement years in elder hostel programs. Yet, the trauma of their youth, the fear of going without, continued to inform their lives even when there was plenty. In essence, scarcity was no longer a physical state, but a state of the mind. They were able to leave the physical vulnerability of their pasts, but understandably some could never completely free themselves from the psychological feelings of vulnerability. It is this psychological dynamic which the Talmud addresses. The matzah harkens back to our ancestors in Egypt, a time of scarcity. We are commanded in the seder ‘to see ourselves as having left Egypt ourselves”. The act of yachatz, of breaking the matzah and putting some back for later, in essence is a reenactment of this piece of Talmud. The ‘poor man’s’ bread is not a whole matzah, but a cracked matzah of rationed resources. The fact that this is really the meaning of the action is evidenced by the very next thing we say at the Passover night. We are told to raise this very cracked matzah and declare “This is the poor man’s bread our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt.” Like our Jewish slaves who felt vulnerable and insecure, we also feel vulnerable and insecure.

Inviting the People We Miss to Our Table, Noam Zion (Hartman Institute Supplement, 5784,https://www.hartman.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/In-Every-n Generation_Embracing-Brokenness_FINAL-4.5.2024.pdf)

The seder gives us a chance to tell the stories not only of our ancestors, but of those we once knew and loved who are now missing from our tables. They may be beloved parents and grandparents whose chairs are now empty; friends and relatives disconnected from Judaism and our worldwide Jewish family; or family members, friends, and loved ones who could not join us this year for one reason or another. Ritual can help heal the pain caused by these poignant absences. There are already many traditions around recognizing fellow Jews who are not present at our seders.

During WWII, the kibbutzim of Mandate Palestine began pouring a cup of wine “for the missing.” Those present at the seder would dedicate their fourth cup to the many kibbutz members who had volunteered to serve in the British Army fighting the Nazis. In the 1970s and 1980s, many left an empty chair at the table or added a fourth matzah for Soviet Jews and/or Syrian Jews who were not free to celebrate Passover or to make aliyah. This year, consider setting an empty place to acknowledge those massacred and kidnapped on October 7, and the Israeli soldiers who have died in defense of their homes and families.

It is necessary for speech to be liberated. This liberation is manifested in the ability for parents and children to speak to one another, something that is not possible for speech at the current moment. This kind of speech makes it possible for parents and children to recognize one another. It can be aroused from the question: “Who is this person who is so close to me yet so far from me?” Though it may be asked from a place of alienation, it functions as a springboard for deeper recognition and intimacy.

The basis of Passover is faith, and the night of Passover is the night of revelation of the Divine presence. It is the Rosh Hanshanah of faith. This is what the rabbis meant to say, in the adage, that they were redeemed from Egypt because of the merit of their faith [even though they had not yet deeds] and in the future, they would be redeemed as well. For the [spiritual] essence of Egypt is heresy, embodied in the first words uttered by Pharoah to Moses’: I do not know this God (Exodus 5:2)

The entire purpose of the Exodus and the Ten plagues were to powerfully uncover the clarity of faith. This is what it means when God tells Moses later [by Red Sea] “the Egyptians shall know I am God’. That is to say, that the revelation of faith will become so clear that even the Egyptians will know I am God.

In this same way [that the plagues were the keys to revealing the knowledge of God] so the process of redemption is through the power of faith. It is known that the Jewish people were on the 49th level of impurity in Egypt, and if they went, any lower they would never be able to redeem themselves, for the fiftieth level is parallel to faith itself. [In gematriah/ Jewish numerology, both emunah and the Hebrew letter nun (50) spelled plene have a value of 106.) [The upshot is, no matter how much the people had fallen, they held on to the gesture of faith, which was the key to the redemption. Their underlying faith is evidenced by the response to Moses in his first encounter] where it is stated “And they believed”.

It is for this reason that Passover is placed at the head of all the holidays, for faith is at the foundation of Judaism…. And given the fact that Passover is all about faith, therefore the primary mitzvah of the night is sippur yetziat mitzraim/ retelling the Exodus, and similarly telling your children, for both have to do with instilling faith [in ourselves and our children] For this reason, the haggadah says the more we speak about it the more worthy it is. Even if we are ‘all wise, all sages, and we all know the Torah’ we must still speak at length, something we do not find with other mitzvoth. Once you ‘fulfill the mizvah’ there is no obligation to continue. [Meaning, if the mitzvah was a simple retelling of events, once we have fulfilled the obligation why continue at length. What does that add?]

[But the answer is along the lines we have said:] the holiday of Passover is the beginning of faith, and the seder night represents the Divine revelation from which the heart of every Jew is inspired year round. Through the articulation of this Divine presence on this night one will merit the ability to live all year round in light of this faith. Thus we are commanded to tell the story of the Exodus, because through the act of telling we will instill within our hearts the faith that will light up our lives throughout the entire year. (Translation by Fred Klein)