| April 2008
Sinai Update – April 20-26, 2008
At the end of most Haggadot, announcing the end of the Seder are the words “Next year in Jerusalem!” In a time when so many American Jews are feeling emotionally distant from Israel, when many Jews experience the State of Israel as a problematic political question, why is this phrase recited at our Passover Seders? What can it mean for us as the days of Passover continue this week?
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the Jewish community of Great Britian, writes that “nothing in the imaginative life of peoples throughout the world quite compares to the Jewish love for, and attachment to, Jerusalem... Jerusalem is a place, but it is more than a place. It became a metaphor for the collective destination of the Jewish people... a [metaphorical] home for the Divine presence.” Passover is not only our “festival of freedom,” but it is, like Yom Kippur (which focuses more on the individual), a holiday in which we regain our sense of collective purpose as a people, specifically, that our task as Jews is to strive to build a more just and free society, built on the principles of human dignity and redemption for each person. Jerusalem, I believe, symbolizes nothing short of that, the “perfection of the world, tikkun olam, under the sovereignty of the One God,” as the Aleinu prayer says. When we say, “Next year in Jerusalem,” we re-ignite the spark of hope within us that that perfect world can be achieved, and that the Jewish people can fulfill its destiny as a light to the nations, a model of holiness in the spiritual and ethical dimensions, in every act we do. As for the real, “earthly” Jerusalem, I see the State of Israel as one crucial arena in which our aspirations for a just society must be and can be realized, and continue to believe that Reform Jews must contribute to building up an Israel founded upon justice, goodness and hope for all, as complex as that task may be. Only if we are engaged in Israel’s present and future can we truly say, “Next year in Jerusalem!” May you and your dear ones enjoy the final days of Passover, our feast of freedom and redemption!
Sinai Update – April 13-19, 2008
This Saturday evening, Jews will sit down at our Seder tables to tell the essential story of our people: our liberation from Egyptian slavery. We retell it every year to teach the next generation – and remind ourselves – of both the suffering and exaltation that we experienced, and of both our despair while impoverished and our joy in becoming a free people with our God. We re-tell this sacred myth-story of our ancient people, but we also make it come alive as if we ourselves were there, and apply its universal message to our modern reality.
In this time of presidential races and debates, we remember that the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, has written that “Pesach is an intensely political festival. It is about the central Jewish project: constructing a society radically unlike any that had existed before and most that have come into being since. It poses a fundamental question: can we make, on earth, a social order based not on transactions of power but on respect for the human person – each person – as ‘the image of God’?” (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Haggadah, p. 5) This essential Jewish question – and dream – is with us as much this year as any other. At our own Pesach Seders this year, we might be inspired to ask, what is the image we have of our ideal society? How can we make it more of a reality?
May you and your dear ones experience joy and happiness, hope and liberation, on this Pesach holiday! My wife, Martha, and I wish you and your family a very happy Passover!
Sinai Update – April 6-12, 2008
Believe it or not, Passover is just a week and a half away, and the night of the Seder is just around the corner. The essential goal of the Seder is to help us re-live the experience of coming out of slavery, to realize the traditional Hagaddah teaching that “in every generation each Jew should regard him/herself as if s/he came out of Egypt.” In fact, we’re told that it is a mitzvah to teach your children about our liberation from Egyptian slavery (Exodus 13:8), and that the person who describes the Exodus in elaborate detail the “is praiseworthy” (harei zeh me’shubakh). The book of the Passover Hagaddah, literally, “the telling,” is meant to facilitate the experience. Yet, for many Jews today, just reading through the Hagaddah page after page doesn’t make the Exodus come alive. We need something more.
Augmenting the Passover Hagaddah with lively discussion, creative re-enactments, debates on current issues, and games can help us tell our great national Exodus story. This week, for my own family Seder, I will begin to prepare in advance to help shape a spirited and dramatic Pesach experience. This website,
Sinai Update – March 30, 2008 – April 5, 2008
In these weeks leading up to Passover, let’s take some time to prepare ourselves spiritually for the holiday (which begins Saturday evening, April 19).
What is it about Pesach that has captured the imaginations of generations of Jews? On one hand, the story that Passover is impossible; how could a small, impoverished enslaved people like the Israelites rise up against the mighty Egyptian superpower, free themselves, and drown Pharaoh? The Seder looks backwards to the miraculous Exodus story, and it also looks forwards, at its end, to faith in a Messianic end of time, which have both been scrutinized and doubted by modern Jews. It would seem that the unbelievable and miraculous aspects of Pesach would lead us to relegate it to the category of folk tales and superstitions, things that cannot be believed.
But “faith” as we get it in Pesach means something more than subscribing to the supernatural, and it is this, I think that makes Passover so inspiring. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of Great Britian, writes that emunah (“faith”) “does not mean certainty; it means, to the contrary, the courage to live with uncertainty, knowing that the future is radically unpredictable, but that it can be faced without fear, because we are not alone.” The picture of the faith which Passover gives us is hope and hopefulness, a courage emerging from a powerful story of our past and a strength for stepping closer to a better future. Back |
