Pesach 2022 (2)

One of the more unusual features of Passover is the way it prompts us carefully to consider the future by obliging us to remember the past. That aspect of the holiday comes out in many different ways, some intellectual (for example, reading haftarot so totally focused on the future as complements to the Torah portions we read in the course of the festival that are all about the past) and some intimate and sensory (for example, the strange sense I had at both seders of my grandparents’ presence as I contemplated my youngest granddaughter in her high chair playing with her the kiddush cup we bought her in Israel the summer after she was born and trying to figure out when, if ever, dinner was finally going to be served and what these grown-ups were so busy talking about in such detail).

It is even possible to sharpen our thinking about the future by focusing on the past, and specifically by reading the ancient prayers and lessons collected in the Haggadah. I had just such an experience at our first seder as I contemplated a text that I not only know by heart, but have—I think—known by heart for all of my adult life. It’s not an obscure passage either of the kind only a rabbi would know by heart, but rather one truly known to all. And its place is one of true prominence, so also not something at all hidden away. The setting is key. A child—usually the youngest present, although any will do—asks the four questions. All the questions have answers, of course (although, mysteriously, the Haggadah itself only addresses two of them), but the Haggadah doesn’t have us proceed, as would feel normal, to answer even the two questions that will formally be answered eventually. Instead, the individual leading the seder  lifts the plate of matzot aloft and says words that truly are known almost to all: “Behold, the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the Land of Egypt. Let all who are in need come and celebrate Pesach with us. Let all who are hungry come and eat. This year, we are here—but next year may we all be celebrating Passover in the Land of Israel. This year, we are still (in so many ways) enslaved—but next year may we all be free people.”

This proclamation is famous in its own right, encapsulating the key values promoted by the festival: charity, hospitality, generosity, and compassion. The only thing is that the second sentence is almost always mistranslated—and it was in the contemplation of that mistranslation, and the correct meaning of the words (and, even more so, the implication of that correct translation), that I found myself caught up as a door opened in my mind where I hadn’t ever noticed it before. (In intellectual and spiritual matters, just as in physical reality, doors have to be noticed before they can be opened and stepped through.) And so, having opened that door in my mind at our seder, I thought I would invite you all in my second Pesach letter of the year to step through it with me.

The text is in Aramaic, the lingua franca of Roman Palestine and the language of daily discourse for its Jewish citizens, not in Hebrew. And it’s shorter in the original too, complete in just four words: kol ditz’rikh yeitei v’yifsach. The first two words, the sentence’s subject, are easy to translate as “all who are in need.” The third word is simple Aramaic too and is the first of the sentences’ two verbs: yeitei is means “let come,” to yield a simple invitation to the needy and lonely to come inside and visit with our families on this festive evening. But it’s the last word that is mistranslated almost always: it doesn’t mean “[come inside] and celebrate Pesach with us,” but rather “[come inside] and partake of the paschal offering, the zevach pesach, with us, with our family.”

The background is clear enough. On the evening of the tenth plague, the Israelites slaughtered a kid or a lamb and painted its blood on the doorposts and lintel of their homes to remind God to pass over their homes on the way to smiting the firstborn sons of Egypt. And that was to become an ongoing ritual. Not the blood painting part, but the offering up of a lamb or kid on Passover Eve that was then eaten that evening in pre-organized groups called chavurot tailored to be the right size to consume all the meat of one lamb or kid, thereby leaving nothing over at meal’s end.

The chavurot part is part of the story and part of the law. The beginning of Exodus 12 discusses this in detail and, if anything, overexplains the concept: “In the tenth day of this month shall every individual select a lamb, one per household. Yet, if the members of any household be too few to consume a lamb, let neighbors come together to form larger groups; these groups shall take into account how much each individual can eat so that the lamb be totally consumed.” And that notion of pre-organizing the groups became law. Indeed, in Maimonides’ great law code, the point is made specifically that the animal can only be slaughtered in the first place for a specific, pre-signed-up group of individuals and that only they, and no one else, can then eat of the meat of that paschal lamb or kid.

So that’s the puzzle: the Haggadah bids those gathered to consume the flesh of the paschal offering to fling open the doors of their homes and invite all who are hungry to come and eat, and all who are in need (presumably because they didn’t register properly with any group to sponsor a paschal-lamb sacrifice) to come in and partake of our family’s zevach pesach. But the law forbids that specific thing: if the hungry person in the street whom the seder-leading is inviting inside isn’t already signed up to be part of a zevach pesach, then he specifically may not partake of the sacrificial meat. Inviting a hungry soul inside to eat is a lovely mitzvah. But inviting an unsigned-up individual to eat of some other family’s paschal lamb is not only awkward, but actually forbidden. So how can the Haggadah feature that line that appears to invite illegal behavior?

I suppose we could start by wondering why this mysterious person-in-the-street didn’t sign up to be part of a group paschal sacrifice. Did he have no family or friends? Was she so impoverished that she couldn’t afford to chip in even a token amount towards the purchase of the animal? Was he too ashamed of his own disconnectedness from religion and its requisite rituals to do what it would have taken to find a group to join in sponsoring a lamb or a kid? Perhaps we’re supposed to imagine a homeless person or an urban nomad of some sort who simply has no home in which to dine, or a street person who simply had no acquaintances to join with for a seder meal? Or are we talking about someone so disconnected from Jewish life that the idea of co-sponsoring a paschal sacrifice simply hadn’t occurred to that person as a viable idea, as something he or she could actually do?

And so the Haggadah turns away for a moment from the rulebook and, forgetting to remember that you have to sign up in advance and be part of a chavurah to sponsor a sacrifice, simply opens the door to being kind and welcoming to people who ought to have gotten themselves organized in advance but who just didn’t. For some reason. Maybe for multiple reasons. Maybe even for lame, silly reasons.

And that is what I learned from thinking this year about a line in the Haggadah everybody knows by heart. The law is sacred, its details inviolate and holy. The ideal is for all Jewish people to live within the four cubits of halakhah always. To know, or even really to know of, the God of Israel requires the Israelite to submit fully and absolutely to the yoke of God’s commandments. And yet there is still room to improvise, to step around the strict letter of the law to be kind or generous, or to be hospitable or caring. It is always reasonable to look at someone languishing outside the sanctuary and kindly to reach out to that person with compassion and humility even if it means stepping gingerly around a strict detail of the law. Okay, so you didn’t sign up in advance. Come in anyway and join my family, my children, my friends. You’ll sign up next year. But this year…be my guest and feel included, not excluded. And feel very welcome. Yes, I could justify excluding you with reference to your own failure to prepare properly for the holiday. But how could that possibly be the right thing to do?