Looking Back Commands Us to Act Forward: Thoughts for Parashat Tzav, Shabbat HaGadol - Rabbi Dan Prath (Translated by Rabbi Rachel Druck)

Passover is coming, along with the Seder night and the reading of the Haggadah. In many families, the question arises: should we read the whole thing? Is it permissible to skip? Can we change it? I am not going to address these questions from the perspective of “When do we finally eat?” That is a valid question, rooted in the fact that a once-relevant text has become closed off and inaccessible, turning its reading into a burdensome task.

I do want to approach the issue of skipping or changing parts of the text from the question: what does the Haggadah actually ask of us?

I would like to argue that the inner message of the Haggadah not only allows for changes, but that its innovative format, created by the sages, is built on a literary structure where change is both its foundation and its essence. You cannot understand the Haggadah without understanding its demand for transformation.

Some people treat the Haggadah like a sourcebook, an anthology compiled by the sages, and from there, it can be edited, sources added or removed. I do not see it that way. I believe that it is a tightly crafted text with its own internal, dynamic logic that allows for intellectual and conceptual movement, and as a result, structural and textual movement too. If I had to define the Haggadah, I would call it an experiential educational activity plan.

To tell the story of the Exodus, you do not need the Haggadah. The early chapters of the book of Exodus do a great job. It is an organized story with a beginning, middle, and end, told in clear, beautiful Hebrew that has remained accessible and understandable even after three thousand years, led by a charismatic hero whose journey we follow from birth to leadership.

Instead of that story, we get a messy collection of excerpts in two different languages, with hardly any plot while we are eating various foods, drinking wine, asking questions, spilling wine, lifting and lowering plates, dipping greens… It is a chaotic scene (and not entirely clear).

Let us take a step back to understand the logic behind this chaos. The period of the Haggadah’s creation after the destruction of the Temple was also the period in which the holiday of Passover itself was in crisis. The sages were facing a reality in which the central act of the holiday–a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and eating the Passover sacrifice–was no longer possible. The sages were not acting from an ideology of change: change was a necessity forced upon them. No Temple, no sacrifice, so what now? They had to reinvent the holiday (just as they had no choice but to reinvent Judaism itself). From this crisis they developed a radical new approach in which change, initially imposed on them, became a driving force of evolution.

With only the book of Exodus left to work with, the sages had two options: send the story to the study hall for learning or to the synagogue for prayer. They chose neither. They put it on the family dinner table for everyone: men, women, and children; scholars and common folk; those in the Land and those in exile. In this format, reading chapters one and two of Exodus did not seem to serve the purpose. The story was no longer just the historical narrative of the Exodus. New questions drew their attention, such as how they felt about the story here and now and the relevance of the story in the aftermath of destruction, not just nostalgic remembering.

"In every generation, a person must see themselves as if they went out of Egypt" is a statement that speaks not to the past, but to the present. The challenge is not merely a mental act of remembering, but a physical one: eating. Eating that can be symbolic (bitter herbs), empathetic (matzah), or a radical integration in the form of a full family meal (the prepared table), all within the framework of drinking enough wine to make serious study or prayer impossible. This structure, we must remember, is the setting, not the essence. A new ritual had to be presented to convey the new worldview.

Let us set aside the deliberate exclusion of Moses from the Haggadah, which can be seen as a bold (even audacious) move, suggesting that the people of Israel do not need intermediaries between themselves and God.

All those self-appointed messiahs of the sages’ time were obstacles to a direct and authentic relationship between God and God’s people. While excluding Moses explains the need to dismantle and reframe the biblical text, the sages' "cut and paste" version offers only a technical solution to a political problem of their time. I think the new structure they created comes from a much deeper need.

The sages build a text that is almost ars poetica, a reflection of the art of writing itself in which they, as authors, insert themselves as literary characters. They ask and debate among themselves within the text how they should tell the story of the Exodus. Their starting point is both personal and current.

They insert one of the most important innovations they placed at the heart of their system: a culture of argument. Debate, disagreement, majority rule, minority voices are all present.

They do not only use existing sources but compose new ones. Texts like Ma Nishtana (The Four Questions or "Why is this night different from all other nights?") boldly declare that this is not a night of memory, but a night of change. They present four different educational approaches toward four types of children, thus challenging the orthodox idea of a single “correct” path. They show that the same content not only can be conveyed in multiple ways, it must.

The emphasis is on "You shall tell your child,” transferring religious authority to the parents. Thus, the canonical religious text is presented as a flexible educational aid for teachers/parents, allowing space for personal interpretation in fulfilling the duty of transmission- and in fact, making the historical story relevant again. It is worth noting that the Haggadah did not “close” when the sages finished their work. It continued to grow and evolve for many generations after the line “Hassal Seder Pesach K’Hilchato” (“The Passover Seder is complete according to its law”).

We now understand that we are dealing with a group of people who created a text that, at its core, is about change and development. So how does this relate to us? A reading of the Haggadah makes it clear - despite the sages’ focus on themselves, their intended audience is us. That is, the readers of the Haggadah in every generation.

What should we do? The answer is exactly what the sages did: continue developing the format, take the traditional story and update it to reflect our current reality. What is our “In every generation”? What is our current Ma Nishtana?

Jews have done this throughout history: the Anusim (forced converts) in Spain, the Prisoners of Zion in Soviet Russia, Jews in concentration camps and ghettos during the Holocaust, all understood the Haggadah as a ritual that speaks to their current state of oppression, using the historical Exodus story as a framework.

Unfortunately, even today, it does not take much imagination to adapt the Haggadah to our reality. On Seder night, our thoughts do not just wander to the ancient Hebrews groaning under Egyptian slavery three thousand years ago but to our own brothers and sisters held hostage in Gaza, in horrific bondage.

When Rabbis for Human Rights raises the voices of defenseless, innocent Palestinians who suffer at the hands of settlers as part of religious ritual, that is not a modern “pasting” of politics onto the text. The call to go “from darkness to light” is the authentic voice of the Haggadah, seeking out the oppressed of this time, in this place.

The aspiration for freedom is not a historical memory. Slavery is not just an intellectual topic. The Seder is a vibrant, essential family educational event that must respond to its surroundings. Keeping tradition means the constant integration of change. Looking back commands us to look forward.

The Seder night is a joyful family time with participants of all ages, beliefs, levels of knowledge, and involvement. This is the challenge the sages set when they placed the ritual of memory of a people’s birth and its struggle for freedom- within the context of everyday life, not in a detached seminar.

That is our challenge too: to make the Haggadah reading relevant and meaningful within the family chaos. To follow the path of the Haggadah and understand that activism and the pursuit of justice must not be reserved for a passionate few–they should be accessible to all.

Recently, I published a youth novel called The Guardians of the Haggadah and the Invaders from Tomorrow, an adventure set in a world of AI and virtual reality that is also the world of the Passover Haggadah. In the podcast Kanfei Ruach (Wings of Spirit), Prof. Rabbi Dalia Marx and I debate (and disagree!) in the last two episodes about the meaning of the Haggadah for us. What I try to do is not just interpret it, but continue to follow the command that emerges from the Haggadah: to keep writing it.

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