Pesach
Family Edition

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הָא לַחְְְמָא עַנְְְיָא

HA LACHMA ANYA

IN A NUTSHELL

It is a mitzvah to tell the story of the Exodus on Seder night. We call this mitzvah maggid, and it is the key to Seder night. This is why the Haggadah begins with Ha Lachma Anya, which is an invitation to others to join our Seder and tell the story with us. This paragraph is written in Aramaic (instead of Hebrew) because this was the spoken language at the time the Haggadah was written. To make it a genuine invitation, it is important that it is stated in a language that is understood.

If we examine the wording of the invitation, we notice something strange: “This is the bread of oppression our fathers ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come in and eat.”

What sort of hosts offer the hungry a taste of suffering? This may seem odd, but in fact it is a profound insight into the nature of slavery and freedom. Matzah represents two things: it is both the food of slaves, and also the bread eaten by the Israelites as they left Egypt in liberty. What transforms the bread of oppression into the bread of freedom is the willingness to share it with others.

Sharing food is the first act through which slaves become free human beings. Someone who fears tomorrow does not offer their bread to others. But those who are willing to divide their food with others have already shown themselves capable of fellowship and faith, the two things from which hope is born. That is why we begin the Seder by inviting guests to join us. Bread shared is no longer the bread of oppression. By reaching out to others, by giving help to the needy and companionship to those who are alone, we bring freedom into the world, and with freedom, God.

Commentary on ‘This is the Bread of Affliction’
The Jonathan Sacks Haggada

FURTHER THOUGHTS

Ha Lachma Anya is the beginning of the Seder narrative, known as Maggid. The word maggid has the same root letters as the word ‘haggadah‘, meaning relate, recount, declare, or proclaim. The story of the Exodus is known as the Haggadah because of the verse “You shall tell (vehigadeta) your child on that day, ‘[I do this] because of what the Lord did for me when I went out of Egypt’” (Shemot 13:8). However, the word ‘haggadah‘ derives from a verb that also means bind, join, connect. The story of the Exodus is more than a recounting (sipur) of things that happened long ago. It binds the present to the past and future. It connects one generation to the next. It joins us to our children. Jewish continuity means that each successive generation commits itself to continuing the story. Our past lives on in us.

Commentary on ‘This is the Bread of Affliction’
The Jonathan Sacks Haggada

A STORY FOR THE NIGHT OF STORIES

Primo Levi survived the horrors of Auschwitz. In his book, If This is a Man, he describes his experiences there. According to Levi, the worst time of all was when the Nazis left the concentration camp in January 1945, fearing the Russian advance. All prisoners who could walk were taken with them on the brutal “Death Marches.” The only people left in the camp were those too ill to move. For ten days they were left alone with only scraps of food and fuel. Levi describes how he worked to light a fire and bring some warmth to his fellow prisoners, many of them dying. He then writes:

When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed.

Only a day before, a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager [concentration camps] said: “eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbour,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the law of the Lager was dead.

It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Haftlinge [prisoners] to men again.

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מַה נִּשְׁתַּנָּה

MA NISHTANAH

There are four places in the Torah where it speaks of children asking questions about Pesach – and each of these four verses are the sources for the Four Children’s questions. This inspired a tradition that the story of the Exodus from Egypt must be told, wherever possible, in response to the questions asked by children, and this is where the idea for the four questions in Ma Nishtanah comes from. The origin of the text is the Mishnah (Pesachim 10:4) although the words have changed slightly over time to reflect our changing practices (for instance, since the destruction of the Temple, we can no longer bring the Korban, so the fifth question (on serving roast meat) is no longer included in Ma Nishtanah).

The Torah has two words for inheritance, yerushah and nachalah, and they represent the two different ways in which a heritage is passed on across the generations. The word nachalah comes from the root nachal, which also means ‘river’. It represents an inheritance that is merely handed down, without any work on the part of the recipient, as water flows in a river. Yerushah, by contrast, means active inheritance. R. Shimshon Raphael Hirsch pointed out that lareshet, the verbal form of yerushah, sometimes means ‘to conquer’ or ‘to capture’. It means actively taking hold of what one has been promised. An inheritance for which one has worked is always more secure than one for which one has not. That is why Judaism encourages children to ask questions. When a child asks, they have already begun the work of preparing to receive. Torah is a yerushah, not a nachalah. It needs work on behalf of the child if it is to be passed on across the generations.

Commentary on Ma Nishtanah,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

Religious faith has often been seen as naive, blind, accepting. That is not the Jewish way. Judaism is not the suspension of critical intelligence. To the contrary: asking a question is itself a profound expression of faith in the intelligibility of the universe and the meaningfulness of human life. To ask is to believe that somewhere there is an answer. The fact that throughout history people have devoted their lives to extending the frontiers of knowledge is a compelling testimony to the restlessness of the human spirit and its constant desire to go further, higher, deeper. Far from faith excluding questions, questions testify to faith – that history is not random, that the universe is not impervious to our understanding, that what happens to us is not blind chance. We ask not because we doubt, but because we believe.

The Art of Asking Questions,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

A STORY FOR THE NIGHT OF STORIES

Isidor Rabi won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1944. When he was asked why he became a scientist, he replied:

“My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other mother would ask her child after school: ‘So? Did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. ‘Isi,’ she would say, ‘Did you ask a good question today?’ Asking good questions made me a scientist.”

Rabbi Sacks often used this example to illustrate the importance of learning by asking questions. Whereas other religions teach children to have unwavering, unquestioning faith, Judaism teaches us from a very young age to ask questions, and it all begins with parents teaching their children “Mah Nishtanah”.

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עֲבָדִים הָיִינוּ

AVADIM HAYINU

IN A NUTSHELL

This is the start of the act of Maggid – the actual telling of the story of the Exodus. It is also the start of the response to the questions asked in the Ma Nishtanah. Before we delve into the depths of the story of the Exodus itself, the Haggadah makes sure we realise how we are personally affected by this historical event. It reminds us that if not for the Exodus, we would still be slaves in Egypt! This passage also explains that the mitzvah of telling the story of Exodus is for everybody, (even the old and wise) and the story should be told at length to make it impactful.

DEEP DIVE

One of the rules of telling the story on Pesach is that each person must feel as if they had personally left Egypt. History becomes memory. The past becomes the present. At this stage, therefore, we speak of the continuing consequences of the past. Had the Exodus not happened, and the Israelites stayed in Egypt, none of the subsequent events of Jewish history would have occurred. What and where we are now is the result of what happened then.

There is a fundamental difference between knowing and telling the story. We do not tell the narrative of the Exodus to know what happened in the past. We do so because each telling engraves that event more thoroughly in our memories, and because each year adds its own insights and interpretations. Judaism is a constant dialogue between past and present, and since the present always changes, there is always a new juxtaposition, a new facet of the story. The Sages said, ‘There is no house of study without chiddush, some new interpretation.’ The story of Pesach never grows old, because the struggle for freedom never ends, and therefore each generation adds its own commentary to the old-new story.

Commentary on Avadim Hayinu,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

FURTHER THOUGHTS

To be a Jew is to know that over and above history is the task of memory. As Jacob Neusner eloquently wrote: “Civilisation hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learnt from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their fall collapses the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding” (Neusner on Judaism: Religion and Theology). More than any other faith, Judaism made this a matter of religious obligation. Pesach is where the past does not die, but lives in the chapter we write in our own lives, and in the story we tell our children.

History and Memory,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

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אַרְבָּעָה בָנִים

THE FOUR CHILDREN

IN A NUTSHELL

The section of the Four Children in the Haggadah is based on the four different verses in the Torah which describe children asking their parents about the story of the Exodus. Rather than seeing these as just four examples of asking the same question, the Rabbis noticed four distinctive personalities from the different ways the verses are phrased – and this inspired the idea for four kinds of children.

DEEP DIVE

The four children are a vignette of the Jewish people. One asks because he wants to hear the answer. A second asks because he does not want to hear the answer. A third asks because he does not understand. The fourth does not ask because he doesn’t understand that he doesn’t understand. Ours has never been a monolithic people.

Yet there is a message of hope in this family portrait. Though they disagree, they sit around the same table, telling the same story. Though they differ, they stay together. They are part of a single family. Even the rebel is there, although part of him does not want to be. This, too, is who we are.

The Jewish people is an extended family. We argue, we differ, there are times when we are deeply divided. Yet we are part of the same story. We share the same memories. At difficult times we can count on one another. We feel one another’s pain. Out of this multiplicity of voices comes something none of us could achieve alone. Sitting next to the wise child, the rebel is not fated to remain a rebel. Sitting next to the rebel, the wise child may share his wisdom rather than keep it to himself. The one who cannot ask will, in time, learn how. The simple child will learn complexity. The wise child will learn simplicity. Each draws strength from the others, as we all draw strength from belonging to a people.

Commentary on The Four Children,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

FURTHER THOUGHTS

Through the Haggadah, more than a hundred generations of Jews have handed on their story to their children. The word “haggadah” means “relate,” “tell,” “expound.” But it comes from another Hebrew root, [a-g-d] that means “bind”, “join”, “connect”. By reciting the Haggadah, Jews give their children a sense of connectedness to Jews throughout the world and to the Jewish people through time. It joins them to a past and future, a history and destiny, and makes them characters in its drama. Every other nation known to humankind has been united because its members lived in the same place, spoke the same language, were part of the same culture. Jews alone, dispersed across continents, speaking different languages and participating in different cultures, have been bound together by a narrative, the Pesach narrative, which they tell in the same way on the same night. More than the Haggadah is the story of a people, Jews are the people of a story.

The Story of Stories,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

A STORY FOR THE NIGHT OF STORIES

When I was a baby I wouldn’t talk. I was the youngest of five children, so I was surrounded by people who doted on me and gave me whatever I wanted. All I had to do was make a noise and point to get what I wanted. So it took me much longer to learn to talk. It worried my parents, and they took me to specialist doctors to make sure there was no deeper cause behind my late development.

When I started going to school, I couldn’t sit still and focus for a minute. My mind would wander and then my body would wander, and next thing I knew I was being told off, or worse, I would be sent to the Headteacher’s office. I wasn’t trying to be mischievous or rude. I just couldn’t sit in one place for long.

When I was a teenager I got angry. Angry about all the injustices in the world, about the way the government didn’t care enough about the environment, and angry that the school administration didn’t do enough to make everyone feel valued and included in our school. I organised all sorts of demonstrations and one day I even led the students in a strike. The school didn’t like that one bit, and I almost got expelled for it!

Then I went to university, and I took my passion for making a difference in the world and channelled it into my studies. Today I am a lawyer who represents the under-privileged and disadvantaged in society, and my dream is to one day become a judge.

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עֶשֶׂר מַכּוֹת

THE TEN PLAGUES

IN A NUTSHELL

One of the most exciting and colourful parts of the story of the Exodus is the Ten Plagues. There is a custom to spill a drop of wine as we say the name of each plague. There are many reasons given for this, but the most beautiful is that of Abudraham, (a 14th century Rabbi from Spain who is best known for his commentary on the siddur), who interprets it in accordance with the verse, “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls” (Proverbs 24:17). We give thanks for the miraculous plagues which brought our ancestors out of Egypt and granted them freedom, but at the same time, we also shed a symbolic tear for those who suffered.

DEEP DIVE

The plagues occupy the borderline, so common to the Torah, between the natural and the supernatural. Commentators have been divided between those who emphasise their miraculous character and others who have sought to provide a scientific account of the disasters in terms of a series of chain reactions to an initial ecological disaster, possibly the appearance of algae in the Nile, which turned the water red and caused the fish to die. Which view speaks more compellingly to us will depend on whether we understand the word “miracle” as a suspension of the laws of nature, or an event that occurs within nature but that, by happening when and to whom it does, reveals a providential pattern in history.

Commentary to The Ten Plagues,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

FURTHER THOUGHTS

The plague of lice is a sardonic comment on the monumental scale of Egyptian architecture. The Egyptians believed the gods were to be found in things that are big. God shows them His Presence in something so small as to be almost invisible. The irony recurs in the division of the Red Sea, where Pharaoh’s greatest military asset, the chariots, prove to be his undoing, as their wheels sink into the mud. The key to the plagues – as in God’s covenant with Noach – is the principle of reciprocity: ‘As you do, so shall you be done to.’ Those who harm others will themselves be harmed. Nations that begin by depriving others of their liberty in the end destroy themselves. Historically, this was so. Egypt never again recovered the greatness it had enjoyed in the earlier part of Ramses II’s rule.

Commentary on The Ten Plagues,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

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דַּיֵּנוּ

DAYEINU

IN A NUTSHELL

Dayeinu is a song which explores the kindnesses of God to His people on the long journey from slavery to freedom. There are fifteen stages described between leaving Egypt, reaching the Promised Land, and building the Temple in Jerusalem. This song is a tikkun, a “putting-right”, for the ingratitude of the Israelites in the Wilderness. At almost every stage of their journey they complained: about the water, the food, the difficulties of travelling, the challenge of conquering the land. It is as if we are saying where they complained, let us give thanks. Each stage was a miracle. And each miracle would have been enough to convince us that Hashem is behind all the events in our history.

DEEP DIVE

Why is Shabbat specifically mentioned in Dayeinu?

Shabbat is the ultimate expression of a free society, the antithesis of slavery in Egypt. On this day, all relationships of dominance and subordination are suspended. We may not work, or command others to work, “so that your manservant and maidservant may rest as you do” (Devarim 5:15). At many times in history, people have dreamed of an ideal world. The name given to such visions is “utopia” meaning “no place”, because at no time or place have these dreams been realised on a society-wide basis. Shabbat is the sole successful utopian experiment in history. It is based on the simple idea that utopia (in Judaism, the messianic age) is not solely in the future. It is something we can experience in the midst of time, one day in seven. Shabbat became the weekly rehearsal of an ideal world, one not yet reached but still lived as a goal, of a world at peace with itself, recognising the createdness, and thus the integrity, of all people and all forms of life. If Egypt meant slavery, Shabbat is collective freedom, a “foretaste of the World to Come.”

Commentary on Dayeinu,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

FURTHER THOUGHTS

The Exodus was more than an event in the past. It was a precursor of redemption in the future. Israel, as Moshe warned, would not dwell securely in its land. It would forget its moral and spiritual vocation. It would be attracted to the pagan culture of its neighbours. By so doing it would lose its reason for existence and find itself unable, at times of crisis, to summon the shared vision and collective energy needed to prevail against neighbouring imperial powers. It would suffer defeat and exile. But despair would never prevail. In the past, God had brought His people from slavery to freedom and from exile to the land, and therefore He would do so again. The Jewish people never completely lost faith in God, because its Prophets knew that God would never completely lose faith in His people. History intimated destiny. What happened once would happen again. That is what lies behind the words with which the Haggadah begins: “Now we are here; next year in the land of Israel. Now – slaves; next year we shall be free.” The Jewish people kept the vision alive. It is not too much to say that the vision kept the Jewish people alive…

That is what Pesach was during more than eighteen centuries of exile and dispersion: a seed planted in Jewish memory, waiting to be activated, to grow. Without it, Jews would certainly have disappeared. Lacking hope of return – hope tempered by faith into a certainty-like steel – they would have made their peace with their condition, merged into their surrounding societies and ambient cultures, and vanished, like every other culture deprived of a home. Pesach, like a seed frozen in suspended animation, contained the latent energy that led Jews in the twentieth century to create the single most remarkable accomplishment in the modern world, the rebirth of Israel, the land, the state, the nation, and the people. Michah’s vision, and Yechezkel’s, and Moshe’s, came true.

Pesach and the Rebirth of Israel,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

A STORY FOR THE NIGHT OF STORIES

Natan Sharansky is a hero of the Jewish people. Growing up in the Soviet Union, when it was almost impossible to live a Jewish life, he knew the term “Jew” only as something to hide. But then in 1967, following Israel’s dramatic victory in the Six-Day War, Jews began to reconnect to their ancestral faith with pride. Many began to dream of returning to their homeland but were prevented by the Soviet authorities. They became known as refuseniks. Sharansky, who was arrested at the age of 29 for his Zionist activities, was arguably the most famous refusenik, with thousands of people campaigning for his release from the Soviet Gulag prison system in Siberia. He gained his freedom in 1986 and realised his lifelong dream to immigrate to the State of Israel.

At the beginning of the coronavirus global pandemic, when many Jews around the world were facing the notion of a Pesach Seder without their family around the table for the first time, he was interviewed about his experience of Pesach in the Gulag. The Soviet authorities knew the importance of Seder night, and cruelly ensured that Sharansky was in solitary confinement, where he was served nothing but three pieces of dry bread and three cups of water per day.

“I decided my three cups of water would be my wine and my three pieces of dry bread would be my matzah,” Sharansky recalled. “And my salt would be my maror. I found out that this is the great place to feel the unique struggle of the Jewish people – to be connected with every Jew in the world, and to enjoy thinking that this year we are slaves and next year we [will be] free people in Jerusalem.”

Sharansky concluded his interview by emphasising that even if we are not with our family on Seder night, we are still connected, for we are one big family, a people with a shared history, a shared future and a very special role in this world.

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פֶּסַח מַצָה וּמָרוֹר

PESACH, MATZAH, AND MAROR

IN A NUTSHELL

These are the three mitzvot on Seder night which involve eating. Although we no longer eat the Korban Pesach, back when there was a Beit HaMikdash this was a biblical command. Normally, mitzvot are fulfilled by performing the required act with kavanah, with the intention of observing the commandment. To fulfil the duty of succah, for example, we do not have to tell the story of the wandering of the Israelite in the desert. We just have to plan to sit in the succah, and then we sit and say the brachah there. However, in the case of Pesach two commands coincide: the first, to eat the festive meal; the second, to tell the story. Rabban Gamliel argues that the two are connected. The story explains the food; the food allows us to relive the story.

The Torah states: “When you enter the land which the Lord shall give you as He promised, you shall observe this rite. And if your children should ask you, ‘What is this service you observe?’ you shall say, ‘It is a Pesach offering to the Lord, for He passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt while He struck down the Egyptians, but saved those in our homes’” (Ex. 12:25–27). Thus, from the very outset there is an intrinsic link between eating, asking, and explaining, and it is this connection on which Rabban Gamliel bases his view that all three elements of the Pesach meal must be explained.

Commentary on Pesach, Matzah, and Bitter Herbs
The Jonathan Sacks Haggada

DEEP DIVE

The Pesach lamb symbolises freedom. The bitter herbs (maror) represent slavery. And the matzah combines both. This was the bread the Israelites ate in Egypt as slaves. It was also the bread they ate when 12 leaving Egypt as free people. Why do the symbols of freedom precede the bitter herbs of slavery? Surely slavery preceded freedom? The chassidic masters explained the answer: only to a free human being does slavery taste bitter. Had the Israelites forgotten freedom, they would have grown used to slavery. “The worst exile is to forget you are in exile.”

Commentary on Pesach, Matzah, and Bitter Herbs
The Jonathan Sacks Haggada

FURTHER THOUGHTS

In the Torah, the festival of Pesach is more often called by different names. It is consistently described as Chag haMatzot, which translates as ‘The Festival of Unleavened Bread’. The name Chag haPesach, in the Torah, applies specifically to the fourteenth of Nissan, the day prior to the Seder, when the Paschal sacrifice was brought.

Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev gave a beautiful explanation for this dual terminology. The name Pesach signifies the greatness of God, who “passed over” the houses of the Israelites. The name Chag haMatzot suggests the greatness of the Israelites, who followed God into the desert without any provisions.

In the Torah, God calls the festival Chag haMatzot in praise of Israel. The Jewish people, though, calls the festival ‘Pesach’ in praise of God.

Commentary on Matzah
The Jonathan Sacks Haggada

A STORY FOR THE NIGHT OF STORIES

Under the communist government in Russia, it used to be illegal to practice Judaism. There was once a Jew who was caught maintaining a whole network of Jewish education during these years, and in punishment he was sent to the harsh prison in Siberia. When he was finally released, he returned and told his friends:

“It was difficult to observe Pesach in the labour camp. One year we had no matzot. Another year we had no wine. But of bitter herbs, we were never short!”

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הַלֵּל

HALLEL

IN A NUTSHELL

At this stage in the Seder, we have finished telling the story of the Exodus, and just like the Israelites 3,300 years ago, we feel an overwhelming need to thank and praise Hashem for bringing us out of Egypt. So we begin to say Hallel (which is split into two sections, half before the meal and half after). This is one of the transitional moments of the Haggadah, when we move from story to song, from prose to poetry, from recitation (Maggid) to praise (Hallel).

DEEP DIVE

Song plays a vital part in Judaism. At the end of his life, Moshe gave the Israelites the 613th mitzvah – that in every generation we should write a new Sefer Torah. On that occasion he used an unusual word. He called the Torah a “song” (Deut. 31:19).

Words are the language of the mind. Music is the language of the soul. Whenever speech is invested with deep emotion it aspires to the condition of song. This is why we do not merely say our prayers; we sing them. We do not read the Torah; we chant it. We do not study Talmud; we intone it. Each kind of text, and each period of the Jewish year, has its own melody. We learned this from Moshe, who called the Torah a song, to teach us this important message: if we want to transmit Torah across the generations as a living faith, it must be not just a code of law, but also the song of the Jewish people.

Commentary on ‘Therefore it is Our Duty to Thank’
The Jonathan Sacks Haggada

FURTHER THOUGHTS

Hallel (Psalms 113–118) is the great song of deliverance that, according to the Talmud, was sung at all the great triumphs of Jewish history. In more recent years we have added two new occasions when we say Hallel: on Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, and Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day.

The late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik asked an interesting question about the recitation of Hallel at the Seder table. The Talmud states that we do not say Hallel on Purim because “the reading of the Megillah is equivalent to saying Hallel” (Megillah 14a). Why do we not apply the same reasoning to Seder night? We have recited the Haggadah, the counterpart of the Megillah on Purim. Surely, then, the recital of Hallel is superfluous.

The answer I would give is that there are two different commands to say Hallel. The first is at the time of a miracle. The second is as a form of remembrance on the anniversary of the miracle. Thus, at the time of Chanukah the Maccabees said Hallel at the moment of victory. The next year they established it as an annual obligation. The two forms of Hallel arise from different psychological states. The first is expressive, the second evocative. The first gives voice to an emotion we already feel. The second creates that emotion by an act of memory, recalling an event that occurred in the past.

Telling the story of a miracle, as we do on Purim, is equivalent to the second form of Hallel. It is an act of memory. On Pesach, however, we do not merely tell the story. We relive it. We eat the bread of oppression and the bitter herbs. We taste the wine of freedom. We recline as free people. “Generation by generation, each person must feel as if they themselves had come out of Egypt.” The Hallel we say on the Seder night is therefore of the first kind, not the second. It arises out of the emotions we feel having lived through the event again. It is a “new song.” This kind of Hallel is not cancelled by telling the story.

Commentary on Hallel
The Jonathan Sacks Haggada

A STORY FOR THE NIGHT OF STORIES

Following the splitting of the Reed Sea, when the Israelites were finally safe from the pursuing Egyptians, Miriam the Prophetess took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her song and dance with their own timbrels, in praise and thanks to Hashem.

The Rabbis in the Midrash ask why the women had musical instruments to hand (was this really a priority to take with them when they left Egypt in haste?) They answer their own question by praising their faith in Hashem. The women had deep faith that Hashem would perform miracles in the desert, to protect them and pave the way for their safe passage, and so they ensured they had instruments ready and dances prepared, so they could express their gratitude and praise Hashem.

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נִרְצָה

NIRTZAH

IN A NUTSHELL

Nirtzah means parting, and with this passage we reach the concluding section of the Haggadah. We pray that next year we may be able to celebrate it in a rebuilt Temple according to the original biblical rituals (which we can no longer fulfil). This passage is taken from a liturgical poem (kerova) composed by Rabbi Joseph Tov Elem in the eleventh century CE. Originally it was said in the synagogue on Shabbat haGadol, the Shabbat preceding Pesach, to conclude a detailing of the laws of Pesach, and it was transferred to the Haggadah in the fourteenth century.

Commentary on ‘The Pesach Service is Finished’
The Jonathan Sacks Haggada

DEEP DIVE

As at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, so here – at the two supreme moments of the Jewish year – we pray Leshanah haba’a biYerushalayim habenuya, “Next year in Jerusalem rebuilt.” Nothing in the imaginative life of peoples throughout the world quite compares to the Jewish love for, and attachment to, Jerusalem. A Psalm records, in unforgettable words, the feelings of the Jewish exiles in Babylonia two and a half thousand years ago: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept as we remembered Zion… How can we sing the Lord’s song on foreign soil? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy” (Tehilim 137:1–6).

Wherever Jews were, they preserved the memory of Jerusalem. They prayed toward it. They spoke of it continually. At weddings they broke a glass in its memory. On Tisha B’Av they sat and mourned its destruction as if it were a recent tragedy. They longed for it with an everlasting love.

The French historian Chateaubriand, visiting Jerusalem in the early nineteenth century, was overcome with emotion as he saw for the first time the small Jewish community there, waiting patiently for the Messiah. “This people,” he wrote, “has seen Jerusalem destroyed seventeen times, yet there exists nothing in the world which can discourage it or prevent it from raising its eyes to Zion. He who beholds the Jews dispersed over the face of the earth, in keeping with the Word of God, lingers and marvels. But he will be struck with amazement, as at a miracle, who finds them still in Jerusalem and perceives even, who in law and justice are the masters of Judea, to exist as slaves and strangers in their own land; how despite all abuses they await the King who is to deliver them.” Noting how this “small nation” had survived while the great empires who sought its destruction had vanished, he added, “If there is anything among the nations of the world marked with the stamp of the miraculous, this, in our opinion, is that miracle.”

Next Year in Jerusalem
The Jonathan Sacks Haggada

FURTHER THOUGHTS

Jerusalem is a place, but it is more than a place. It became a metaphor for the collective destination of the Jewish people. A city is what we build together, individually through our homes, collectively through our public spaces. So Jerusalem became a symbol of what Jews were summoned to build by creating a city of righteousness worthy of being a home for the Divine Presence. Its stones would be good deeds, and its mortar, relationships of generosity and trust. Its houses would be families; its defensive walls, schools and houses of study. Shabbat and the festivals would be its public parks and gardens. For Jews believed that, even in a violent and destructive world, heaven could be built on earth. It was their most daring vision. The architect of the city would be God. The builders would be ordinary men and women. It would be a Jewish city, but it would be open to all, and people from all faiths would be ordinary men and women. It would be a Jewish city, but it would be open to all, and people from all faiths would come and be moved by its beauty.

So Jerusalem, the “faithful city” (Yishayahu 1:27), became the destination of the Jewish journey, which began with Avraham and Sarah and will be complete only at the end of days. This is how the Prophet Yishayahu envisioned it, in words that for millennia have captured the human imagination:

In the last days

The mountain of the Lord’s Temple will be established

As chief among the mountains;

It will be raised above the hills,

And all the nations will stream to it.

Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

To the house of the God of Jacob.

He will teach us His ways, So that we may walk in His path.”

For the Torah shall come forth from Zion,

And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

He will judge between the nations

And settle disputes for many peoples.

They will beat their swords into plowshares

And their spears into pruning hooks.

Nation will not take up sword against nation,

Nor will they train for war anymore.

Yishayahu 2:2-4

These words, among the most influential ever written, sum up much of Jewish faith. They epitomise what it might be like to “perfect the world under the sovereignty of God” (Aleinu). And as they journeyed through the centuries and continents, Jews carried this vision with them, believing that their task was to be true to their faith, to be loyal to God, to exemplify His ways to humankind, and to build a world at peace with itself by learning and teaching how to respect the freedom and dignity of others.

An Afternoon in Jerusalem,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggada

A STORY FOR THE NIGHT OF STORIES

Rabbi Sacks once wrote about a very special Shabbat he had experienced with his family:

It happened in Jerusalem, one Shabbat afternoon toward the end of the Gulf War. Our family had gone to the Holy City to find peace. Instead we found ourselves living in the midst of war. Within weeks of our arrival it became clear that the Middle East was yet again about to be engulfed in conflict. Yet as we stepped out into the Jerusalem sunlight that day, there was peace. The city breathed the stillness of Shabbat. The late afternoon sun was turning the houses of Jerusalem stone into burnished gold. As we looked across the valley to the walls of the Old City we could understand why, long ago, people had called this the city of peace and why, even when it lay in ruins, Jews were convinced that the Divine Presence had never left Jerusalem.

We had been invited by our neighbours to Se’udah Shelishit, the third Shabbat meal. When we arrived we discovered that they had also invited a group of Romanian Jews who had recently come to make their home in Israel. They had made the journey together, as a group, because they were a choir. In Romania they had sung the songs of Jewish hope and longing. Now, in Jerusalem, they began to sing again for us around the Shabbat table.

Then a rather moving thing happened. As the sounds of the choir reverberated around the alleyways of our quiet corner of Jerusalem, people from the neighbouring houses began to appear, drawn by the music. One by one they slipped in through the open door and stood around as, hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence, they joined the singing. Here was an Israeli artist, there a new arrival from Russia, here an American investment banker, there a family from South Africa, and in the doorway a group of tourists who happened to be walking by and had stopped to see what was happening and then found themselves drawn in by the warm atmosphere. No one spoke; no one wanted to break the mood. We continued to sing the songs of Shabbat afternoon. As the sun began to set behind the hills, I could feel the Divine Presence among us, joining our words to those of a hundred generations of Jews, uniting them into a vast choral symphony, the love song of a people for God, and I sensed something of the mystery and majesty of the Jewish people, and I knew that it was this that I had come to Jerusalem to find.

We had come together, each of us as the result of a long journey, in some cases physical, in others spiritual, and in many, both. We each had stories to tell of how we came to be in Jerusalem that afternoon. But just as our individual voices had united to sing the words of our ancestors’ songs, so our stories were part of a larger story. Our personal routes were stages on the most remarkable journey ever undertaken by a people, spanning almost every country on the face of the earth, and four thousand years of time. If we had been able, then and there, to trace back the history of our parents and theirs across the generations, we would have been awestruck at its drama and scope. Was there anything that could remotely compare to the long Jewish journey to Jerusalem? Was this, I thought, not the most vivid testimony imaginable to the power and endurance of faith?

As the singing ended, and Shabbat drew to a close, I understood that to be a Jew is to join the journey of our people, the story of Pesach and the long walk across centuries and continents from exile to homecoming. There is no story like it, and the journey is not yet complete.

An Afternoon in Jerusalem,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggada

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חַד גַּדְיָא

CHAD GADYA

IN A NUTSHELL

This strange and haunting song seems simple on the surface but has hidden depths. Concluding one of Judaism’s most important evenings of the year with a children’s song tells us a lot about how important children are, especially on this night. The Jewish love of, and focus on, children means that we look forward to the future even more than we look back to the past. Just as we began the Seder with the questions of a child, so we end it with a nursery rhyme, reminding ourselves that what sustains a faith is not strength or power, but its ability to inspire successive generations of children to add their voices to their people’s song.

DEEP DIVE

The theme of Chad Gadya is the destructive cycle of vengeance and retaliation. In one interpretation, the young goat represents Israel. The “father” who bought it for two coins is God, who redeemed Israel from Egypt through His two representatives, Moshe and Aharon. The cat is Assyria, which conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. The dog is Babylonia, which defeated the southern kingdom of Judah. The stick is Persia, which replaced Babylonia as the imperial power in the sixth century BCE. The fire is the Greeks, who defeated the Persians in the days of Alexander the Great. The water is Rome, which superseded ancient Greece. The ox is Islam, which defeated the Romans in Palestine in the seventh century. The slaughterer is Christianity – specifically the Crusaders, who fought Islam in Palestine and elsewhere, murdering Jews on the way. The Angel of Death is the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Palestine until the First World War. The song concludes with an expression of faith that “this too shall pass” and the Jewish people will return to their land. So it has been in our days.

One Little Goat,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

This song, disarming in its simplicity, teaches the great truth of Jewish hope: that though many nations (symbolised by the cat, the dog, and so on) attacked Israel (the goat), each in turn has vanished into oblivion. At the end of days God will vanquish the Angel of Death and inaugurate a world of life and peace, the two great Jewish loves. Chad Gadya expresses the Jewish refusal to give up hope. Though history is full of man’s inhumanity to man – dog bites cat, stick hits dog – that is not the final verse. The Haggadah ends with the death of death in eternal life, a fitting end for the story of a people dedicated to Moshe’s great command, “Choose life” (Devarim 30:19).

Commentary on Chad Gadya,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah

FURTHER THOUGHTS

So, having earlier expressed the Jewish hope, “Next year in Jerusalem,” we end our Seder night with the universal hope that the Angel of Death will one day be defeated by the long-overdue realisation that God is life; that worshipping God means sanctifying life; that God’s greatest command is “Choose life” (Devarim 30:19); that we bring God into the world by reciting a blessing over life.

I find it almost unbearably moving that a people that has known so much suffering can summon the moral courage to end this evening of Jewish history on a supreme note of hope, and write it into the hearts of its children in the form of a nursery rhyme, a song. For what we give our children on this night of nights is something more and greater than the bread of oppression and the taste of Jewish tears. It is a faith that in this world, with all its violence and cruelty, we can create moments of redemption, signals of transcendence, acts of transfiguring grace. No people has risked and suffered more for a more slender hope, but no hope has lifted a people higher and led it, time and again, to greatness. So we end the night with a prayer and a conviction. The prayer: “God of life, help us win a victory over the forces of death.” And the conviction? That by refusing to accept the world that is, together we can start to make the world that ought to be.”

One Little Goat,
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah