Judge Dennis Davis
The Message of Pesach for 2024: A Tour Through Seder Text and Song

Judge Dennis Davis | The Message of Pesach for 2024: A Tour Through Seder Text and Song | 04.21.24

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- Well, good afternoon, good evening, morning, whatever it is, to everybody. What I want to do in the period, roughly an hour, that we have together is to have a look at the Seder in particular. It does seem to me that, bearing in mind that Pesach, particularly in 2024, given the fact that it is Zman Cheruteinu, the time of our freedom, for all sorts of reasons that I want to argue, is obviously relevant to today, but it’s relevant in the sense where it seems to me we can make of the Seder, to a large degree, what we want to, in order to shape our responses to the present context in which we’re in. In other words, what I’m really arguing is you can run the Seder as you wish. You can discuss all sorts of trajectories of discussion around the concept of freedom and Jewish history as you want to. There’s no fixed basis for it. There’s no fixed sense in which you have to do it in a particular way. And certainly, the worst way, I suppose, is just to monotonously read through the “Haggadah” without more.

I’m going to suggest some ways in which I look at it, and I do not expect everybody who’s listening to me to agree with me, but that’s fine. That’s part of the great tradition that we actually argue, for the sake of God, we argue in terms of our tradition, that we have different interpretations of our tradition, and that’s the basis upon which I seek to approach this particular lecture. Let me start with the simple proposition that the Seder, actually, what it means is it’s an order, it’s an order of things, and it reveals, and I’m going to argue, that the ritual of the Seder actually has a really radical set of implications, because each of them calls out, each of these steps, calls out to us a whole range of what could be different interpretations, interpretations which, to a large degree, speak to us today.

And given the nature of the Jewish world today, it seems to me that if our tradition can help us through what is this most awfully difficult time, so much the better. Now, we start the Seder with the fact that we… There’s a 15-word summary, and I’m going to play you a beautiful rendition of that in a moment, but the order of the 15 stages is firstly Kadesh, the recitation of the kiddush, Urchatz, the washing before the Karpas, the Karpas, the eating of a vegetable dipped in salt water, Yachatz, the breaking of that middle matzah early on, Maggid, the narrative of the Exodus, Rachtzah, washing the hands before the meal, Motzi, the blessing of food, Matzah, the special blessing of matzah, Maror, eating the bitter herbs, Korech, the sandwich of matzah and maror, Shulchan Orech, the preparing table that is the meal, Tzafun, the hidden matzah, the afikomen, Beirach, grace after the meal, Hallel, the hallel prayer, which we sing in praise of God and Nirtzah, those final prayers which talk about a prelude to redemption. And if you really want to know what the Seder is about, it’s the concept of hope.

Because if you look at these 15 steps, they reflect something particularly profound: They tell us, particularly the Talmud, in Pesachim 116b, tells us something which is central to the narrative of all Jewish stories, and which we should always bear in mind: You commence with the shame and you conclude with the praise. In other words, you commence with the real difficulties we have, but you conclude in hope, you conclude with a story of hope. It is not for nothing that our national anthem is called “Hatikvah,” and at this particular point in time, we need all the hope we can muster. But that’s central to the Seder. And you’ll see, what I mean by that, is there is a great debate within the Talmud itself as to what the shame is. So there are two rabbis who really debate this issue at great length, two of the most distinguished rabbis, Rav and Shmuel, and Rav says, “What is the shame? The shame was originally we were idolatrous.” And what does Shmuel say? Shmuel says, “No, no, no, the original shame was that we were slaves in Egypt.”

And I want to show you, through the prism of Maimonides, Rambam, that effectively, remarkably, in typical Jewish style, if you really want to know the structure of the Seder, you have to know that we incorporate both the notion that the shame we start with is we were slaves in Egypt, , that we were slaves of the Pharaoh in Egypt, and we then go on to talk about the fact that our forefathers from Terah, the father of Abraham, were idolaters, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But let me start, if I may, with just some of the music which starts off the Seder from that issue of Kadesh Urchatz. We’ll also listen to which sets the tone for the first part, that is, the dealing with the shame of that we were slaves in Egypt, our answer to that, and two other components which we sing, but which really what we are doing is we are saying that God intervened in our history and took us out of Egypt. So let us hear Cantor Ari Schwarz and children sing some of this magnificent stuff, which of course, we all sing at the Seder, perhaps not with the same musical beauty as you’re about to hear. So can we have clip two?

[Clip plays]

• So what I love about that, apart from the fact that he’s got such a beautiful voice, is that me sitting in South Africa, those are the exact tunes I learnt at Herzlia School in Cape Town, from where I graduated Matric, and there they are, in Park Avenue Synagogue and all over the world, singing the same tunes. It’s a majestic sense that we are all part of this family, as we debate, as I say, the structure of the Seder. Now, let me just talk a little bit about Rav and Shmuel a little bit more. So as I said, Rav’s argument is that we… Actually, the original sin and that which we start off with should be that we were idolaters, and that was this long and precarious and agonising journey from the notion of idolatry to the belief in ethical monotheism, whereas on the other hand, Shmuel says the original sin is that there we were in Egypt and we were slaves.

Now, remarkably, we do both. So we start with the issue that we were , we’ve just listened to that. We respond to our children with their four questions, four, of course, being that magical number which is of course replicating the four Promises of Exodus from Egypt that you’ll find in the Torah, and we then respond in this particular way, . So the first part of the Seder, including the songs that we’ve just heard, very much are replication of the injunction in the Talmud that the structure of the Seder is to start with the notion of slavery. And then we move on a little later, when we start the narrative, that very long part of the “Haggadah” where we start talking about miggelah, from the beginning, where, in fact, Terah, who is, of course, the father of Abraham, was effectively an idolater, and how Abraham broke the various elements of idolatry and began the long path of the Jewish people towards the acceptance of ethical monotheism, a long and painful journey.

And so Rav’s argument is that, effectively, that is what the Seders is about. And when we start reading the narrative, that’s precisely what we do. And what does Maimonides say in his text dealing with Pesach? His text was that we do both, because ultimately, the entire narrative with which we are engaged is one of both physical freedom and spiritual freedom, that you can’t have the one without the other. But he goes further, and I think this is perhaps if I can quote Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, , in blessed memory, the Chief Rabbi, he says that what we are dealing with here by which we amalgamate the two versions of Rav and Shmuel, so that the “Haggadah” represents both of these structures, is that we have both an act of commemoration and an act of education, that there is both an education and a commemoration inherent in what we are doing tomorrow night. And if we press a little further, we start with the act of education, to some extent, and we move to commemoration, effectively inextricably linked.

For the children, essentially, the text is the miracles that God performed to allow us to escape the shackles of slavery. And so for the children, we do it almost like in a Disney World, kind of pyrotechnical splitting of the sea and the miracles which were performed by God in order to allow us to move out of Egypt. And that’s why, for example, we have the , which we heard sung so beautifully by Cantor Schwartz just a moment or two ago. But then we move, right, to something beyond, where we actually then look at the way in which for adults, the Seder is about this long journey of choice, the choice that the Jewish people made, all those vicissitudes ago, to move from the notion of idolatry to that of monotheism. And it’s that long journey of choice that they took which is so central to the meaning of the Seder, that the essence of the Seder is really to reflect, for adults, on the choices we make in our lives, by which we essentially utilise the physical freedoms that we have to attain greater levels of spirituality, spiritual freedom, and I might add, ethical conduct in the world.

And so Rambam remarkably, when he engaged with the text from Pesachim from the Talmud, he took both sides and said, “We do both. We commemorate the actual exodus from Egypt and we also educate ourselves and our children into the broader ethical consequences and implications of the entire Jewish tradition. And we do so right from the beginning. Just think, if I can… I’m not going to go through every one of these, because it’ll take me hours, but just to give you a taste of a couple of illustrations of how ritual essentially serves the purpose of doing precisely what I’ve been talking about in the structure: Very early on, we take the celery, or a similar visual, I suppose, and we dip it into salt water, and we say, ” , blessed are you, God, Creator of the fruit of the Earth.“ And one of the reasons we do that is because by dipping the celery into the water, we reflect on the facts of the way in which the entire saga of the Exodus is circumscribed.

It starts with a dipping, the dipping when Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery and dipped his coat into the blood of a slaughtered goat to illustrate his father that he was dead. And then, we move to the end, where there is a dipping where the celery is dipped again, and that is because of the blood of the Paschal offering, which, essentially, was plastered over the doorframes of the houses of Jews, and God then passed over, pesach, over the houses during the final plague. And so we essentially used the ritual of the Karpas to show you the entire narrative from the origins of slavery to the Exodus. We do the same when we start the Seder, and we say, ” , this is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the land of Egypt.“ And we then break a middle matzah, right? The middle of the three matzahs. And we do that part for a number of reasons, but we do it because, to some extent, the breaking of that middle matzah is a reflection of the two sides of the entire Seder, the fact that the matzah was in fact the bread of affliction as we left, but yet, by virtue towards the end of the Seder, we acknowledge that as we became free, we ate that matzah because that was all we could take out, and so it also becomes a symbol of freedom, both sides of the coin.

And we say that all who are hungry should come and eat. Let me quote you what Primo Levi said in his book, "If This Is a Man,” which I think is relevant to this. He said the following: “The worst of times of all was when the Nazis left in January 1945, fearing the Russian advance. All prisoners who could walk were taken on the brutal death marches. The only people left in the camp were those who were 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 whom were dying. He then says, “When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone. and at that time, Torokowski, a Franco-Pole of 23 who had typhus, proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three, who had been working, and it was agreed.” And this is what Levi then writes, “Only a day before, a similar event would’ve been inconceivable. The law of the laager 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 laager was dead. It was the first human gestures that occurred amongst us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed to men again.” And so we start the Seder, in a sense, in that reflection, that we were slaves and we were hungry, but we are in the human condition and we want everyone to share with us, because by doing so we become human. And I illustrate those two, just two, early on in the “Haggadah” to illustrate to you that time and time again, in the actual Seder itself, there is a sense of that each of these points, which seem to be so irrelevant, are vital to the broader line that we see the Seder, or we should see the Seder as an existential reflection of our tradition and what it means to us, to me, what it means to us to embrace the concept of ethical monotheism, which took us so long to accept and which, of course, is linked, as Pesach is, to from physical freedom to the acceptance of the Torah at Mount Sinai those seven weeks later.

So that’s the second illustration I’d want to make in relation to trying to reconcile the Shmuel and Rav injunctions. But you can take it further if you want to. Take, for example, the four children, and one can have a tremendous debate and I can give you about six or seven different interpretations that I use at my Seder in relation to this. But I found one which is really interesting, again, which goes to show how you can reflect on this, where the writer says, “Some scholars believe there are four kinds of parents as well, not just four children. The wise parent is an utter ball. ‘Listen closely because you are younger than I am,’ says the wise parent.” And I’ll go on and on about Jewish history, based on some foggy memories of my own religious upbringing, as well an article in the Jewish Journal I recently skimmed: “The wise parent must be faced with a small smile of dim interest.

The wicked parent tries to cram the story of our liberation into a set of narrow opinions about the world. ‘The Lord let us out of Egypt,’ the wicked parent says, ‘which is I support bloodthirsty foreign policies and am tired of certain types of people causing any problems.’ The wicked parent should be told in a firm voice, ‘With a strong hand, God rescued the Jews from bondage, but it was my own clumsy hand that spilled hot soup in your lap!’ The simple parent does not grasp the concept of freedom. ‘There’ll be no macaroons until you eat all your brisket,’ says the simple parent, at a dinner honouring the liberation from Egypt. ‘Also, stop slouching at the table.’ In answer to such questions, the wise child will roll his eyes in the direction of the sea and declare, ‘Let my people go.’ The parent isn’t able to inquire, has had too much wine and should be excused from the table.”

It is, in other words, you may say that slightly superfluous, but what it’s about is that each of these texts invites us to interrogate precisely what in fact the text means for us. Not just children but parents. And of course, it’s very interesting to me when you get, for example, to the wicked child, because we’re told that the wicked child sort of says, “What does this freedom mean to you?” And the natural interpretation is that the wicked child is some self-hating Jew who really wants to deny his Jewish identity or her Jewish identity. I mean, think about it: The wicked child is actually at the Seder. The wicked child is there. Is the wicked child that wicked? And is the simple child that simple after all. Now, Yaakov Avinu, Jacob our father, was called Ishtam, which literally means simple, but it wasn’t simple. Maybe it means more critical. In other words, what I’m trying to illustrate just to give you is a whole sense that we can discuss all sorts of text of the “Haggadah” and think it through.

But fundamental to this text, fundamental, is what I believe is that the text reflects what is best in our tradition, which is for us to actually think for ourselves what does this mean for us now? Is it just simply an act of commemoration of that which occurred, or is it also an act of education, educating both our children and us about what the glories of the Jewish tradition mean for us living now? And I want to suggest to you that the Seder is a majestic affirmation of the latter. Let me give you a clip… Sorry, a text which I took from Martin Buber, which summarises for me so much of what is right and wrong with the present world of what I would call uncritical orthodoxy, which tends towards fundamentalism and not critique. Can we get the first of the texts please? Okay, so here is the first text, if I can just get this down… Ah, yeah. “A rabbi was asked by one of his students, ‘Why did God create atheists?’ After a long pause, the rabbi finally responded with a soft but sincere voice, ‘God created atheists,’ he said, ‘to teach us the most important lesson of them all, the lesson of true compassion.

You see, when an atheist performs an act of charity, visits someone who is sick, help someone in need and cares for the world, he’s not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that God commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his actions are based on his sense of morality. Look at the kindness he bestows on others simply because he feels it to be right. When someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say, "I’ll pray that God will help you.” Instead, for that moment, you should become an atheist. Imagine there’s no God who could help, and say, “I will help you.”’“ We have moral choice, that’s what I think Buber’s suggesting. We have moral choice. This notion of , that everything is pre-ordained, that somehow we kind of, you know, look to God and say, "Well, God made that I must do it or not do it or controlled us in this particular way.” That’s the children’s version of the Seder.

That’s in fact, what Rambam was telling us, that that’s what we tell our children, ‘cause we want to attract them into the tradition. We want them to hold onto the tradition, so that when they get older, their visions will broaden and they will realise that the Seder’s also about that long journey towards monotheism whereby choice got us to that position, whereby our physical freedom, actually, is there for us to utilise, for good or bad. It’s funny, you know, that this comes from thousands of years of tradition, because some of you may have seen an article, there are a couple of articles now, one in the “Financial Times” that I read and one in “The New York Times” this morning about the 200th century of Immanuel Kant, and a lot of people are now celebrating the great German philosopher, Kant. And of course, central to Kent’s philosophy was the notion of freedom, the notion that we have a choice in this world.

And what I think this says to me, which is so profound, is that when we look at the Seder, we don’t look at it as simply as God did this and we did nothing. In fact, what we say is what the Seder is about is a reflection of what it is that we can do to tomorrow to be more moral, how we can bring the Kingdom of Heaven down onto Earth. And I if you don’t accept that particular proposition, well, let me then give you a another little text that I want to go through with you, if I may? If I can get the next text? I think it’s the second part of this. Yes, thank you. Now, this comes… And you very welcome… Ooh, I’ve just, hang on, I don’t know why… Oh, dear! Somehow I’ve lost my… Let me see if I can get it bigger. I somehow seem to have lost everything. I don’t know what I was doing wrong, but as long as you can hear me… This is a text which comes from the Hartman Foundation, the Shalom Hartman Foundation, and essentially, what the text is about… They have compiled… Sorry, let me tell you a bit about Hartman.

The Shalom Hartman Institute, of course, was founded by David Hartman, Rabbi David Hartman, who is really one of my kind of rabbis. He was a Soloveitchik-trained rabbi who was eventually, I think, the Chief Rabbi in Montreal, before going , a man whose books, to me, speak to the modern condition and who to a considerable extent speaks to my idea of the way in which modern orthodoxy, in a sense, can be used to make sense of our world. And they, the Hartman Foundation, in his honour, or Institute in his honour, have of course produced in this particular clip that you’ve got, you can find the reference to it, a companion to the “Haggadah.” It’s obviously particularly in their particular orientation, and I appreciate that not everybody will agree with me or agree with them as to how they make sense of the “Haggadah.”

But what they try to do in this “Haggadah” is something which is very, very important, and it’s this: They say that the central portion of the “Haggadah,” something we often gloss over, is the following: “In every generation, must one must look upon oneself as if he or she had personally left Egypt. It is written you shall tell your child on that day, 'Because of this, God did things for me when I left Egypt, for not only did God save our fathers from Egypt, but he also saved us with them.’ Thus, it is written at the onset that we give our children a passover that it was our souls that He brought out of there, so that He might lead us and give us the land that He swore to our fathers.” There is a sense in which I think that this particular passage, if you don’t mind me saying so, is the most central passage of all of the “Haggadah.” And the reason I say that is because what it’s saying to us is don’t look at this as an historical text, which somehow happened thousands of years ago.

Ask yourself the question that this is about you, it’s about us, it’s about our context. It’s about how we, at this particular point, as we say the various prayers in the Seder, as we go through this ritual, what does it talk to for us? And of course, in the Hartman little text that you’ve got there, which you can read, it essentially is suggesting that this is a Seder in 2024 which is extraordinarily difficult to actually negotiate, because on the one hand, whilst we have physical freedom, our brothers and sisters and children and family in Israel are under terrible threat. We commemorate the Seder tomorrow with a more than a hundred people, and we don’t know how many are still alive, who are hostages, and who so much of the world has shamefully forgotten. We also commemorate the Seder, as they say, with really significant portions of Palestinians in Gaza starving. And it doesn’t matter, you may not want to say something about that, that’s fine with me, but for others, the answer would be that freedom is indivisible, and that we look at it, we ask ourselves questions, “What does this mean for me now?”

Now, it may mean for you that what is absolutely central are certain consequences of what occurred on October 7th, and I respect that greatly, for others in the Hartman tradition, there’s a broader sense. The point I’m making by giving you this text and referring you to the commentary that they prepared, which you can find on Internet, is this: It’s this, it’s that fundamentally, the Seder should not just be reading this thing in a rote way. It should be examining the text through the prism of that in every generation, we personally left, in every generation, we gained our freedom and what are we going to do with it and how are we going to continue that journey of ethical monotheism which began? That’s central to this entire text which we read tomorrow. Let me move on to an interesting portion of the “Haggadah.” We come after the meal, we’ve had a good , we’ve said , we say grace after meals and we then move onto Hallel, we move to the praise of God. What is interesting about the Hallel service is that in the rules on Pesach, when we read the Hallel, we only do half of it.

And the reason for that is because, to a considerable extent, we are sourced in the midrash, the idea that when we essentially crossed over the Red Sea and the sea divided and we were safe, and therefore the people of Israel thought to sing praises to God. And God said, “Why are you singing praises to me? My creatures are drowning in the water.” They were Egyptians, but they were drowning in the water. God said, “You don’t rejoice when people die.” That’s why we don’t say the full Hallel. And when we do say Hallel on the “Haggadah” night, we should reflect upon that fundamental midrash which is so central to the basic values of Judaism, of life. And it seems to me that that is precisely correct, that again, we ask ourselves questions about within the context in which we live, how does this speak to us?

I remember, if I can interpose for a moment, having all those Seders during the Apartheid era, and reading to a large extent, you know, the way in which Pharaoh treated the Jews in the most abominable, oppressive, brutal fashion, and thinking to myself, so much of that is being replicated in my country with regard to the majority of the population. How does that speak to me and what does this mean to me as a Jew who regards the tradition as one that speaks to all of humankind at the same time? And all I ask is, I don’t mind how you respond to this, I respect everybody’s interpretation, I’m just giving one, but what the thrust of my talk this evening is that this is not some antiquated ritual that we perform that has no ethical significance for the 21st century. And it does. And so as we come to the end of the Seder, of course we have some extraordinary singing, but again, the singing is not entirely without theological and philosophical implications.

So I’m going to play to you a a little bit of two of the songs that we sing towards the end, and then I want to say a little bit about the last one, “Had Gadya,” as we wrap up. So if we can have the second of the musical parts, that will be great.

[Clip plays]

• I’m not sure that any of us could do quite that kind of rendition of “Had Gadya,” but I hope you enjoyed that. Let me end by making two observations, and it’s about “Had Gadya,” which of course, is the last that we say on our Seders. And I’m going to read you something that Jonathan Sacks wrote in relation to the “Had Gadya.” He says this: “The theme is a destructive cycle of vengeance and retaliation. One interpretation, the kid is Israel. The father bought it for two small coins, as God redeemed Israel from Egypt through his two representatives, Moses and Aaron. The cat is Assyria, who conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. The dog is Babylon, who defeated the southern kingdom of Judah. The stick is Persia, who replaced Babylon as the imperial power in the sixth century BCE, the fire, the Greeks, who defeated the Persians in the days of Alexander the Great, the waters, Rome, who superseded Ancient Greece, the ox is Islam, who defeated the Romans in Palestine in the seventh century, the slaughterer is Christianity, specifically, the Crusaders that fought Islam and Palestine elsewhere, murdering Jews on the way.

The Angel of Death is the Ottoman Empire-controlled Palestine until the First World War. The song concludes with an expression of faith that this two will pass and the Jewish people return to its land. So it has been in our days.” I think that’s not an unuseful way to think about it, but perhaps it’s more than that. I started by saying to you that the Jewish narrative starts with the shame and ends with the hope, and the “Had Gadya” is effectively about hope. It expresses the Jewish refusal to give up hope throughout history that man’s humanity to all forms of other human beings, dogs biting cats and sticks hitting dogs, not the final verse. The “Haggadah” ends with the death of death in eternal life, a fitting end to the story of the people dedicated to Moses’ command to choose life. And when I think about it, just in relation to freedom, let me share with you one final thought: When the Rambam, Maimonides, talks about this, he asks a fascinating question.

The question he asks is, “When God created the human being, why did He not just make us in such a way that we would be decent?” That hostages would not be taken, that women would not be raped, that children would not be murdered, that we would not commit all sorts of atrocities all over the world, that we would not live in the kind of gloomy world that we are living in at the moment. Why did God not do that? He could have. And the Rambam’s answer is fascinating: If God had made us that way, he would’ve made us into automatons, my word, not Rambam’s, but that’s what he means, and the gift of freedom, of free will, would’ve been taken away. And in a sense that’s about the Seder. It’s about our freedom to exercise free will and how we use it to best advantage. And I think that really profoundly for me, the Seder is about…

And you know, I see somebody saying it’s a bit preachy, but frankly, this is about religious texts, so in a sense, you’re forced to sort of make some messages of this kind, and for me, the best reading of this is one of that this is the exercise of free will in which ultimately, like “Had Gadya,” we will move from shame to hope, and this awful period in Jewish history will pass and hope will prevail into reality. And on that particular basis, I hope that we all have a , and we have a kosher and joyous Passover, and that some of what I’ve just been talking about this evening, maybe you want to use in your own way in the Seder, but at least to have a conversation amongst family and friends which would ultimately, as it were, enrich the very experience itself, this majestic day in which we really are able to reflect on profound things through the structure of ritual.

Q&A and Comments

I just want to see whether there’s any questions here. I see one question, which was,

Q: “Can you invite people who are not Jewish?” A: Of course you can. And I would want to think that’d be wonderful. I have no hesitation, even today under difficult circumstances, to express the cosmopolitan nature of the Jewish tradition proudly and expressly, because not only do I not fear it, I embrace it, and for me, it guides the way I think of the world.

And thank you very much. It is a state of mind, Marilyn, freedom, and I think it’s something that we need to reflect upon. Anyway, , everybody else, and may you have a wonderful Seder.