Pesah (Archives)

The Seder: Discursive or Experiential?

“How is this night different from all other nights?” I’d like to suggest a fifth answer to this question (if you read carefully, the so-called “four questions” are more declarations of fact than they are questions; the mishnah at Pesahim 10.4, and the Talmudic sugya that follows, suggest that the son’s actual questions are meant to be rather more free-form): namely, that on this night we talk more than we engage in other, more ritualized activity—recitation, prayer, etc. The central mode of the evening is discursive rather than ritual or experiential; it seems to speak more to the mind than to the heart.

The other central celebrations of the Jewish year are characterized by mitzvot that function as symbolic acts, rituals that make their impact on the pre-verbal level: the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, the waving of the lulav or dwelling in the sukkah on Sukkot, the lighting of candles on Hanukkah, etc. Even these mitzvot which involve the recitation of texts—be it daily or Sabbath prayer, the singing of Hallel, the dramatic, moving piyyutim read on the High Holy Days or the Kinnot on Tisha b’Av—easily lend themselves to an emotive, expressive reading.

On Passover, by contrast, we talk an awful lot. The central experience of the holiday is not so much the reading of a text—the Haggadah—as it is the discursive experience. “You shall tell it to your sons.” The Seder, as experienced today, is mostly words. A good Seder is one in which there is much discussion, in which one hears new interpretations, gleaning new insights and understandings of the Exodus. The Haggadah itself is intended, not so much as a recitation, but as a telling, an explanation, a narrating of the formative event of our people’s history—if you like, a banquet/symposium, doubtless shaped by the forms of Roman culture that were so predominant in Rabbinic times. Or, to put it somewhat differently: if Judaism ordinarily seems to encompass both the rational, intellectual, discursive mode, and the emotive, symbolic, celebratory mode— if you like, the Lithuanian and the Hasidic—on Pesah the atmosphere of the Beit Midrash seems to predominate. The central act of the Seder, Sippur Yetzi’at Mitzrayim, the relating of the story of the Exodus through the midrashic mode, was once described by Rav Soloveitchik as “an evening of Talmud Torah devoted to the theme of Yetzi’at Mitzrayim."

Why so? The Seder is the Jewish educational tool par excellence. Its central purpose is to pass on to the next generation the central formative event of our history, one that determines much of our consciousness and our sense of who we are in the world—the Exodus. Thus, each generation of parents is charged with the task of passing on this knowledge to the next generation—which, more than factual knowledge, entails internalization of that knowledge, the formation of a specific consciousness, an attitude toward life, a sense of location in the world—what is today fashionably called ones “narrative.” And, when there are no longer small children in the home, one still has the obligation to rehearse this message, to discuss it with ones adult children and friends on a deeper level, with ones spouse, or even, if there is no one else at the table, to rehearse it to oneself. For all these reasons the discursive mood, rather than the pre-verbal symbolic one, seems essential.

What is the nature of that message? That the Jews are a strange hybrid of nation and religion: neither a religion alone, by virtue of doctrine and God-vision alone, nor a nation in the simple, uncomplicated sense of sharing a common language and soil and culture. A nation born in exile, in suffering, that celebrates its ancient liberation and painful birth in the desert so long ago. A nation by virtue of its beneficent God, and by virtue of its Torah; but also a religion that is defined through its peoplehood, its ethnicity, its peculiar history. A nation that has known many exiles and many periods of foreign domination, so that the Enslavement is as much an archetype as is the Liberation—and the Exodus, not only a past event to be celebrated, but also an archetype for that future event which we constantly hope and await. This paradoxical identity so thoroughly permeates our existence that even the newly-forged Israeli nation, despite all its protestations of normality, cannot really feel itself a nation among nations, defined by land-language-culture, in any uncomplicated sense. It is this message that makes the Passover Seder such a powerful experience, attracting even those Jews with precious few other vestiges of Jewishness.

But ultimately Pesah does in fact transcend the discursive mode. The Seder itself is clearly rich in symbolism, in eye-catching ritual and ceremony: the tableau of the Seder table itself, laid out with elaborate tableware and shining goblets, with the raised Seder plate as its centerpiece; the singing, with each community, if not each family, having its own special Seder melodies; the elaborate ritual, with the various dippings and hand-washings and covering and uncovering of the matzah, raising and lowering of the cup. In ancient times, the earliest Passover celebrations in the First Temple seem to have been marked more by celebration than by discourse: the eating of the Passover offering and the singing of songs of praise, the Hallel, were the two central moments. Virtually all historians say that the Haggadah as we know it took shape only gradually. Thus, in ancient days, the Torahitic mitzvah of telling the story may have been performed in a much simpler, briefer manner.

But even on the halakhic level, the Haggadah may be seen as constructed, not only to further discourse and discussion as an end in itself, but to ultimately bring each participant to the level of feeling, in his or her very bones, that he himself has gone out from Egypt that very night. Somewhere around the passage from Rabban Gamliel— “whoever does not say these three things on Pesah has not fulfilled his obligation”—there is a transition from the discursive mode to the experiential. We turn from recalling past events to the attempt to relive them, to identifying with them in our own innermost being. “In each and very generation a person must see himself as if he has gone out of Egypt.” Thus, we focus upon the symbolic meaning of the special foods we eat on this night—the most powerful, direct, visceral form of experience; and then we declare that it is our obligation to render thanks and praise to the Lord who did all these things for us, bursting into songs of praises and reciting the first two, perhaps most directly apt, psalms from the Hallel (the splitting of the Hallel in half, part before the meal and part afterward, is one of the peculiar features of the Seder).

Four Sons and Four Levels of Consciousness

But even the narration itself, the telling of the story, may be viewed in a more meditative, mystical light. Yaqub ibn Yusuf taught me a different reading of the famous passage in the Haggadah about the four sons, one that turns the usual reading on its head: very much in the manner of the Hasidic pshet’l—or of the Jewish-Sufi synthesis.

The wise son, usually seen as the ideal Jewish type, is here interpreted as being stuck on the lowest, most mundane level of consciousness—that of the rational, analytic, operational intellect. His questions, learned and clever as they may be, are confined to the concrete world of action visible to his corporeal eyes. “What are the laws and ordinances…” He is answered in the same coin, but given a hint, a pointer guiding him towards another level of apprehension: “… one does not add any afikomen, any additional thing, after the Pesah offering.” That is: you have to actually eat the Pesah (or matzah), you have to experience what it’s about, and not only engage in intellectual gymnastics—and stay with it as the last item of the night.

The next year, having learned this lesson, he returns to the Seder, only to ask the question of the “wicked son”: “What is this service to you?” By this point he is aware that the Seder is more than merely a formal legalistic structure, but that it deals with an experiential dimension; he has reached what Ken Wilber calls the existential crisis, the point at which he begins to question the adequacy of purely rational, cognitive tools for understanding the world. But he excludes himself from the celebrant community—and this point is the focus of the answer he is given. “If you would have been there, you would not have been redeemed.”

The third son (or perhaps the same son, having attained yet another level) is on the mythical or archetypal level, and intuitively apprehends the nature of symbolic language. He simply asks “What is this?” and is given a deceptively simple answer, “With a strong hand the Lord took us out…” (This deceptive naivete, concealing profound depths of religious consciousness, reminds me of the figure of the Bobover Rebbe ztz”l, at a Seventh Night of Pesah tisch that I visited perhaps thirty years ago. After the traditional reenactment of the Splitting of the Sea, he told his hasidim with a voice full of awe and reverence: “Milyon’n fun yidd’n tantzen in yam!”—“Millions of Jews dancing in the sea!”)

The fourth son, finally, has no need of words: he already approaches the Seder table with a mystical-unitive consciousness, that is at one with the One who redeems. He “does not know how to ask,” because he is on the level of total unity. To the outsider, there is something naive, child-like or even simple-minded in his bearing. His consciousness is so outside the ken of the work-a-day, pragmatic, ambitious people that populate our world that the latter cannot even comprehend that there is something special going on here. Or perhaps his knowledge is like that of which Maimonides says, “the end of knowledge is knowing that we do not know.”

Note: although I have described these four levels using a modern conceptual framework, they equally reflect the four worlds of the Kabbalistic paradigm.

On Eliminating Hametz: Some Halakhic and Aggadic Perspectives

The halakhah recognizes two basic methods of performing the obligation of Bi’ur Hametz, the elimination or removal of all hametz, all leavened or fermented grainstuff, from ones possession on the Eve of Pesah. The first is the physical removal or destruction of hametz: burning it by fire, casting it to the wind or into the sea. This method operates in close tandem with the search for Hametz on the night before Pesah, to assure that one in fact finds all the hametz in ones possession. The second method is that of bittul hametz, of “negating” hametz within ones heart: a purely mental act, expressed in a verbal declaration made on Erev Pesah morning, that all and any hametz in ones possession or located on ones property is null and void, “like the dust of the earth,” and of no interest or value to oneself. Bedikat hametz, in this light, is simply to assure that one doesn’t inadvertently leave behind something really valuable or desirable, which one may inadvertently discover during Pesah and “reacquire.”

Much ink has been spilled on the difference between these two approaches, providing grist for the mill of many a rosh yeshivah’s shiur kelali on Pesahim. I do not intend to compete here with my learned erstwhile mentors, but to make two points: one a practical one; the other, an application of this insight on a metaphorical level.

In practice, no one seriously advocates not cleaning ones house for Pesah and simply leaving all the hametz in one possession in situ. However, the principle that bittul hametz, a purely mental act, can be efficacious to “cancel” ones legal ownership of hametz may validly justify, for those strapped for time, a more perfunctory going-over of all of those rooms in ones home except for the kitchen. It is notorious that Orthodox women work themselves to the bone for weeks before Pesah, cleaning every inch of their homes, turning out drawers and closets and miscellaneous storage spaces where no food normally enters, in order to be certain that they have eliminated every microscopic crumb of hametz. And then they arrive at the Seder table exhausted, grumpy, surly, and neither they nor their family and guests enjoy the hag. Judicious use of bittul hametz might solve some of these problems (assuming, of course, that housewives might not feel the need to do thorough “spring cleaning” anyway).

Second, and more important: a well-known motif of Hasidic and Kabbalist Mussar literature holds that hametz is equated with the attribute of ga’avah, pride, or with the Evil Urge in general. Here bedikat hametz becomes an inner search, a stock-taking of ones life situation to eliminate negative character traits and behavior patterns. These, as anyone knows who has tried, are far more stubborn and difficult to remove than even truck-loads of foodstuffs.

I once gave a shiur, a short talk on this subject at Yakar, at which I suggested that the above two methods of bi’ur hametz might also be applied to this moral quest. Ba’alei ha-Mussar, Jewish ethicists, particularly of the school of Rabbi Israel Salanter, are wont to speak of two means of combating the Evil Urge: tikkun ha-middot and kibbush hayezer. The former, usually translated as “character correction,” refers to thorough-going attempts at reshaping ones character, involving stock-taking and hard self-discipline. The ultimate aim of this approach is to literally eliminate the bad traits, so that a person no longer feels, even inside himself, pride, jealousy, anger, or whatever, but is actually driven by kindness, generosity, humility, etc. In this sense, the process may be compared to physical destruction of hametz. This path is most appropriate to a person’s earlier years, when character is less fully formed and has not yet been fixed through the patterns of long decades of adult life. In youth, too, a person may be more emotionally free to work on oneself, being less burdened by the responsibilities of family life, career, etc. A classical example of such character work was the program of the Mussar yeshivot of the nineteenth century, in which a good part of the daily schedule was devoted to text study and spiritual exercises geared towards such character change.

By contrast, Kibbush ha-Yetzer, “suppression of the Urge,” may be described as a kind of holding action. The character is not fundamentally altered, but one learns to exert ones will power every time the option of wrong-doing presents itself. This approach may be compared to bittul hametz belibo, to mentally dismissing the hametz from ones ownership. As such, this approach is more suitable to the grown adult in his/her middle years, when the basic character is more rigid, but the person has learned over the years how to marshal will power and to resist or postpone gratification.

Finally, a brief word on the Hasidic approach to this question. The conventional image of Hasidism is of a movement based upon a simple joy, in the sense of a “happy-clappy,” naive type of effervescent bonhomie—lots of singing and dancing, perhaps with the help of drinking lehayyim. But, as Rivka Schatz has demonstrated in her book Hasidism as Mysticism, Hasidic joy was far more dialectical and sophisticated, addressing itself to a far deeper complex of issues. Essentially, Hasidic joy was a response to the nexus of guilt, contrition, and melancholy that might easily result ensue within a person who takes the moral and intellectual imperatives of Judaism seriously and, as is almost inevitable given the nature of human beings, finds himself wanting. At this juncture the call to joy says: leave behind your guilt and negative feelings, which are but one more device of the Yetzer Hara to distract you from your real task; worship God with joy, rather than mulling over your failings; be happy in the positive things you have done: if you are busy doing mitzvot, learning, singing, praising God, you won’t have time to sin.

Matzah Before Midnight and Matzah After Midnight

One of my favorite Pesah teachings is from Habad: a teaching from R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady’s Likkutei Torah: Parshat Tzav, the first of two Torahs with the heading s.v. sheshet yamim tokhal matzot (Brooklyn 1972 ed., p. 25ff.). Because it is long and complicated, I will depart from my usual custom and bring several salient ideas in a paraphrase summary.

The teaching begins by pondering the apparent contradiction between two verses in the same passage of the Torah, one stating “Six days you shall eat matzah” [Deut 16:8] and the other that “Seven days you shall eat matzah” [ibid., v. 3]. It resolves this by stating that the verses refer to two different obligations: one includes the matzah eaten in Egypt on the evening of Passover, which it calls “matzah before midnight”; the other refers to the matzah eaten the remaining six and a half days of Pesah, “matzah after midnight,” which was taken by the Israelites on their backs and eaten in the way, and which was unleavened “because their dough did not suffice to rise.”

(This difference is also reflected in the halakhah, in at least two ways. The matzah eaten at the Seder is called “matzat mitzvah”: eating it is an absolute obligation, accompanied by the blessing “who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to eat matzah.” The other matzah, eaten the rest of the week, from lunch on the first day of Yom Tov on, is called “matzat reshut”: its consumption is not a formal requirement. Moreover, there are two differing explanations given as to why we eat matzah altogether: that of the Mishnah and Rambam’s text, on the one hand (“because they were redeemed”—m. Pesahim 10.5; Yad, Hametz u-Matzah 7.5; but see 8.4!), and that of the Haggadah, in the section “R. Gamaliel said,” on the other.)

Likkutei Torah goes on to explain this difference in terms of the spiritual significance of the two kinds of matzah. The matzah before midnight is called nahama dimhemenuta— “bread of faith,” eaten as a demonstration of faith and trust in God. Indeed, it is said that on the Seder night we are eating at “the Divine table”; partaking of the matzah is a kind of “awakening from below,” a demonstration of human love for, longing for, and waiting upon God.

To explain the “matzah after midnight,” the Alter Rebbe describes two kinds of Divine presence in the world. The more usual one is that of cause and effect: a long chain of causality, through a series of intermediaries (both natural and sefirotic) by which the Divine fulness is brought down into our physical world. There is thus no immediate or obvious sense of Divine presence, unless one reflects deeply upon how all this has come about.

But occasionally there are moments of grace, in which God’s majesty makes a dramatic irruption into history. In particular, there were three great moments—the night of the Exodus; the splitting of the Sea; and the Revelation at Sinai—when the Almighty burst through this chain of causality to make Himself known in a direct, immediate way. This moment was so powerful, that even inanimate matter such as dough was, so to speak, overcome by awe of the Divine Glory and did not rise, but remained flat, unleavened bread—matzah. Thus, the matzah is a tangible expression of the miraculous aspect of Pesah. Indeed, R. Shneur Zalman continues, in a certain sense the matzah eaten during the week of Pesah is of even greater holiness than that eaten at the Seder, reflecting as it does the overwhelming manifestation of Gods’ kingship and majesty in the world.

To return to the contrast between Purim and Pesah, alluded to a few weeks ago: Purim symbolizes the hidden, immanent Divine presence, not overtly felt in history, but hidden within the labyrinth of causality, often involving mundane and even mean, petty events and motivations of their human facilitators. There is an almost cynical pessimism about life—were it not for God’s hidden but guiding hand, human life and history would be no more than “a bunch of stuff,” simply one thing after another. During Pesah, by contrast, the grandeur of the Divine direction of history is tangibly felt: raising up this one, lowering that one.

In the Spring of 1974, Rav JB Soloveitchik ztz”l spoke on two separate occasions of the meaning of Pesah and the counting of the Omer that follows it. He said that the sense of Divine Kingship, of grandeur and order, of all being right in the world and of history working out as it should, is fleeting. Already during the middle days of Pesah we begin Sefirat ha-Omer which, for reasons rooted both in Kabbalah, in Jewish historical memory, and in his view even in the peshat of the Torah itself, is seen as a somewhat melancholy period, based on a sense of the earthbound and mundane nature of human life.

This talk was delivered, significantly, in wake of the Yom Kippur War in Israel. The Rav seemed to be giving vent to the sense that the elation, the jubilation and ecstasy that followed the Six Day War of ’67, the almost-messianic euphoria that accompanied the reunification of Jerusalem and the opening of the entire Land of Israel to Jewish presence, was shattered by the reality of the ’73 War. Even though Israel did eventually come out on top, there was a sense of fiasco, of failure, that Israel was far from invincible, and that we had returned to the vagaries of history, with all its caprices and uncertainties.

And if things were thus back then, in ’74, what shall we to say today, after all that has happened since? There are no doubt those who see the renewed struggle between the Cross (in the form of American democracy) and the Crescent as a portent of the final conflict that will end in the vindication of the House of Israel. I prefer to say, with R. Haninah b. Dosa: May he come, but may I—and my children, and their as yet hypothetical children—not see him.

A Meditation on Matzah

Matzah is described by the Torah as lehem oni. The Talmud offers two interpretations for this term: one, the literal sense, “bread of poverty”; the other, based on word play, reads it as if it meant “answering bread” or “bread upon which many things are said.”

Lehem oni: Matzah is a poor man’s bread. It is the quintessence of simplicity: simple flour and water, baked quickly, before it can rise. Without yeast, so that it does not puff up and expand. Lowly, humble, like a poor person used to others lording it over him. It may not be kneaded with any rich additives: wine, oil, honey, eggs, milk or fruit juice. If it is, all agree that it may not be used for the “matzah of mitzvah” eaten at the Passover Seder; others (thus the Ashkenazim) add rule that may not be eaten at all during Passover.

The Maharal of Prague speaks of the simplicity of matzah as emblematic of the meaning of the holiday: of returning to the fundaments of our lives. Like the truth itself, it is unadorned and simple. Without the trappings of civilization, of elegance, of luxury brought about through the accident of success. There is something primal, immediate in its taste, something that brings us back to other times and places, to other levels of existence. That challenges the pursuit of material things, of possessions, of opulence, of money as the source of success and happiness in life.

Lehem oni. The Haggadah opens with words sometimes translated as “This is the bread of affliction.” The Jews are a peculiar people. What other nation traces it origins back to slavery, and still, three and a half thousand years later, celebrates its liberation from that miserable state as the basis of its existence? According to the Mishnah, each and every one of us is commanded to see himself and to show himself, as if he himself has just come out of Egypt. What does it mean to know that we were once slaves?! First of all, it means knowing how to empathize with the lowest of the low. To know that even the poorest, uneducated people, those who do the most menial and demeaning work, are in some sense ourselves. To literally see every other human being, no matter how great or small, at “eye-level.” Not merely to give him “charity” with noblesse oblige of the patrician, but to know that he is literally like ourselves.

Jews have a history of being “liberals,” of being in the forefront of movements for social justice; sociologists comment, at times with astonishment, that Jews are almost unique in not voting according to their economic interest. (Perhaps this is why many of us feel such a sense of betrayal that the so-called Left has joined the knee-jerk campaign against Israel.) Some explain this in relation to one or another aspect of recent Jewish history—the conditions of the Emancipation, the poverty of the shteitl, the marginality of the Jew in Western culture, the advantages to the Jews of a society based on merit and libertarian principles rather than one with an entrenched aristocracy. But I would like to think that there is in this also something of the collective memory of the enslavement long ago in Egypt. Matzah is also Lehem she-onim alav devarim harbeh. The bread upon which we recite/ answer many things. Matzah is the bread of conversation, of discourse. The Seder is a kind of banquet/symposium. During the Seder, we talk for hours: about the Exodus … but also about many related matters that it brings to mind, by association, by implication, by analogy, by other connections. And throughout the Seder, this thin, unadorned bread—perhaps round, hand-baked matzah, with its bumps and unevenness and rough edges and burnt, blackened spots, and the unique aroma that it brings with it from the hot fire—is visible on the middle of the table, enjoying honor of place.

What do we talk about at the Seder, anyway? What is our story? In a world in which culture is becoming increasingly superficial, transient, “international” and “globalized,” we persist in passing down our ancient, seemingly arcane memories.

We read and talk about the text of the Haggadah, of course. The slavery, and the Exodus. Of God and His miracles. Of the state of slavery, of how we got there, and what that bitter experience. We talk about the shock of liberation, the time spent in the desert, the difficulties of being responsible for ourselves—the rebellions, the murmurings, the Israelites desire to turn back. And God, working miracles, and feeding us like a nurturing mother. And how He drew us close to His service. And we speak of the ultimate goal—Eretz Yisrael, a land of our own.

And we speak of our own redemption. It is said that the Haggadah, as we know it today, was shaped in an age when there was no longer a korban pesah. The matzot and the words are a kind of substitute for the Temple ritual. Words, words: the words that Jews love so—words of wisdom, words of depth, words of vision.

The rabbis of those early days saw their own redemption as imminent. For them, the Future Redemption and the redemption from Egypt were one continuum, at times almost one and the same. Pesah mitzrayim, Pesah dorot. Geulat mitzrayim, geulah atidah—the Redemption from Egypt and the Future Redemption. Such words sprung naturally to their lips.

Even before Pesah starts, on Shabbat Hagadol, we read the words of Malachi, the last of the prophets, who says, “Behold l send you Elijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord.” Why Elijah? He is not a part of the Pesah story, but he is a central figure in the story of the future, faithfully following the Jews through every generation of their exile. At times he is the beggar sitting in rags in Rome, or the holy beggar, the mysterious stranger met in an odd, life-changing encounter. And he is, of course, the harbinger of the Messiah.

According to historian Israel Yuval, when we talk about the redemption, we also talk about that which differentiates us from the Christians.

Each historical period, and its redemption.

The halutzim, self-declared atheists who founded the first kibbutzim in Israel, created Haggadot and celebrated a form of Seder in which the story of the latter-day Return, the rebuilding of the Land, the story of the New Jew, are interwoven; songs of springtime, the lyrical eroticism of Song of Songs, and Alterman’s “the Silver Platter” all have a place in these new haggadot. Auschwitz as enslavement and Beit Alfa or Degania as redemption.

And then, in the 1960s in America, someone suddenly wrote a Freedom Seder—published in the radical Ramparts, no less!—which expanded the scope of the Exodus story to encompass all men, wherever they are, of whatever race or nation, who struggle to overthrow the yoke of oppression and be free. “Kevin Barry” and “We Shall Overcome” joined hands with “Dayyenu.”

And finally, there is the inner story. The Haggadah of inner growth. This is a story well-known to many Hasidic thinkers. The true Exodus is that of psychological redemption: liberation from that which holds you captive within your own soul. The hametz you must burn is within your heart; the meaningless habits, the false ideas, the hang-ups, that weigh you down, that you must let go. One of the new haggadot found in the bookstores this year is Michael Kagan’s Holistic Haggadah, that begins, Zen-like, with the question, “How shall you be different this Passover night?” The Seder as an opportunity for each individuals to start his life afresh, to break through to new insight and new life energy.

And so the story goes on, down through the generations. The Torah has seventy faces. From the one story of the Exodus of the slaves, many stories are born. Pesah is like a symphony, with the many stories and words that Jews tell over the matzah.