Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, The Kavana Cooperative
The sun is shining, matzoh is out on the grocery store display shelves, and it’s clear that Pesach is on the way. Time to prepare!
For the past two years, I’ve been enjoying a haggadah that’s new to the scene: “The New American Haggadah,” edited by Jonathan Safran Foer with a new translation by Nathan Englander (Little, Brown & Co., 2012). While the book features some beautiful design elements, its large hardcover format makes it bit clunky for seder use.
That said, I think it has incredible potential as a resource for seder planning. On top of four cups of wine, four children, and four questions, this haggadah now brings us four commentaries! To give you a sense of this haggadah (and hopefully to enrich your Passover experience as well), I’d like to use it as a lens to dig into one of the core lines of the seder.
Toward the end of the maggid section — after the four questions, the ten plagues, Dayenu and Rabban Gamliel’s three symbols, but just before our taste of Hallel before the meal — we recite a line that is arguably the key to unlocking the essence of the Passover seder: “B’chol dor va-dor chayav adam lir’ot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza mi-mitzrayim.” “In every generation, a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out from Egypt.”
This line, lifted from Mishna Pesachim, chapter 10, is a bit challenging to interpret. After all, when Jews use the language of obligation (“chiyuv”), we’re generally talking about behaviors, and not about self-image. This is a great example, then, of a case where interpretations from multiple sources and perspectives have the potential to really illuminate our understanding of a short text. And indeed, “The New American Haggadah” offers a two-page spread featuring short essays about the “b’chol dor va-dor” line. Here is the essence of each of the four commentaries:
1) In the “House of Study” commentary, Nathaniel Deutsch draws our attention to Exodus 12:15, where God commands Moses and Aaron to instruct the Israelites about observing a seven-day period of unleavened bread, and to Exodus 13:6, where Moses relays God’s command. “But,” Deutsch writes, “there is a crucial difference. Where God uses the plural form of ‘you’ in the Hebrew original, Moses substitutes the singular form; where God directs his command to the entire nation, Moses redirects it to the individual Israelite…”
Is the “real challenge,” he asks, to be reminded that we are individuals, or to imagine that we belong to something bigger than ourselves?
2) Lemony Snicket’s (Daniel Handler’s) voice is fresh and snarky in the “Playground” commentary, which generally lives up to its fun title. He urges us to see ourselves in the story and to use the story as a lens for understanding our own lives. To give you a taste: “The story of Passover may seem very remote to you, as it happened thousands of years ago, when the oldest people at your seder table were very, very young…. We must look upon ourselves as though we, too, were among those fleeing a life of bondage in Egypt and wandering the desert for years and years, which is why we are often so tired in the evenings and cannot always explain how we got to be exactly where we are.”
3) Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, in her “Library” commentary, writes eloquently about the power of embracing a child-like sense of imagination as we approach the telling of the Passover tale. “It is the imagination alone that can extend the sense of the self, broaden our sense of who we really are,” she writes. “Tonight is the night that we sanctify storytelling.”
4) In “Nation,” Jeffrey Goldberg challenges us to consider our contemporary world from the perspective of our experience of having gone out from Egypt. He asks, “Do you live in a place where some people work two and three jobs to feed their children, and others don’t have even a single, poorly paid job?” From infant mortality, immigration, incarceration, and spiritual impoverishment in America, to the gap between household income of Jews and Arab citizens of Israel, the issues Goldberg raises are both poignant and painful to confront. He challenges us to interpret the “b’chol dor va-dor” line as a charge to help fulfill the promise of both American and Israeli societies.
Any one of these comments alone could be a powerful starting point for a rich seder discussion; together, they bring the “b’chol dor va-dor” line to life! Now, through this deceptively simple line of text, we can see the centrality of both individual and communal experience, the power of employing a collective narrative to better understand ourselves, the potential unlocked through imagination and storytelling, and the relevance of using the Exodus narrative to cultivate our own sense of empathy and justice.
Over the coming weeks, I hope that you will continue to let these ideas percolate as you prepare for the holiday to come. Wishing us all a meaningful journey, as each one of us begins the process of going forth from Egypt!
P.S. In case you’re interested in learning a new melody to the “b’chol dor va-dor” line, I’ve recorded it as an mp3 file, and it’s downloadable at the top of this page.