An In or Out Moment Is Upon Us

There’s a line in the Haggadah that seems to me especially meaningful this year. And, although my letters to you all have been getting darker and darker as the year has progressed since last October, the line in question—when read in the correct light and with the correct background information—that line contains a message of hope that I think may be just the thing for all of us as we live through our annual festival of freedom and feel, it seems with each passing week, less certain where this will all lead.

The line opens the long Magid section in which seder-meal participants fulfill the mitzvah of telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The setting really could not be better known. The leader uncovers the matzot, lifts the plate, and recites words we’ve all heard a thousand times. “This is the bread of affliction. Let all who are hungry come and eat…and let us gather together next year in Jerusalem.” Most seder-regulars can easily recite the words from memory. At some tables, they are sung aloud, which only makes it easier to remember them from year to year. But hiding behind the words is a riddle that will feel particularly relevant to this nightmarish year through which we have all been living since last October.

The invitation to the hungry to come and join in the feast is suggestive of the natural sense of hospitality that Jewish people bring easily to the celebration of Jewish holidays. But there is a problem here, and it has to do with the second part of that invitation, the part represented above by the three dots that separate the invitation to the hungry and the prayer that we all have seder together next year in Jerusalem. The familiar words, kol di-tz’rikh yeitei v’yifsach, are often mistranslated as “Let all who are in need come and celebrate Passover with us.” That makes it sound like a mere restatement of the opening remark: “let those who are hungry come and eat / let those who have no seder to attend feel welcome at ours.”

So that’s a nice sentiment. But that’s not precisely what the words mean. The Torah enjoins upon the Israelites the eternal obligation to celebrate Passover by offering up the sacrifice called the paschal offering or, more commonly in Hebrew as the korban pesach or the zevach pesach and then by consuming its meat on Erev Pesach, on the Eve of Passover. That being the case, a more literal translation would be something like “Let all enter who need to share our korban pesach, our paschal offering.”

And that too, of course, is a noble thought. The Torah says unequivocally at Exodus 12:8 that “you shall eat the meat [of this sacrifice] on that night; broiled in fire and with matzah and bitter herbs shall you eat it.” So what could be more natural than helping others perform the very mitzvah your own family has already gathered to undertake?

But there’s a detail that needs to be considered: the Torah specifically requires that the Israelites consume the sacrifice in chavurot, which is to say: in pre-formed groups constituted of the specific sponsors of the specific offering they will then consume together. And, indeed, this is the law. Maimonides, for example, writes unequivocally that “the paschal offering may only be slaughtered as a specific offering for its specific sponsors,” who become the people thus entitled to consume it (Hilkhot Korban Pesah 2:1). So how can the seder leader blithely invite any in need to eat the korban with his or her own family? Such people specifically cannot accept the invitation without breaking the law.

So that’s the riddle. What the “real” answer is, who knows? But what the riddle means to me, and particularly in this year of pogrom and war and surging anti-Semitism, is that sometimes you need to step around your normal practice for the sake of a greater good. Yes, the invitee—the specific person the seder leader is addressing when inviting the hungry to come eat and the needy to share in his or her family’s paschal sacrifice—that person being invited in should have signed up for his own sacrifice, should have sponsored a korban pesach in the specific way required by law. But that’s not what happened! And who can say why not? Was the invitee too poor, too shy, or too unfamiliar with the law properly to have dealt with its requirements? Was the invitee held back by physical disabilities, or by mental or emotional ones? Was the specific person being invited in a traveler, a stranger, or perhaps an alienated local who up until that very moment was certain that the very last thing he or she wanted was to do the whole Pesach thing with someone else’s family? Whatever! This person has somehow appeared at the door. The time limit for slaughtering the pesach is long past. The kohanim, the Temple priests, are all off to attend to their own seder meals with their own families. The Temple itself is shut down for the night, its nighttime security detail in place but otherwise empty. The moment has clearly passed to do this the right way. And yet, as the burden shifts from obligation to generosity, from harshness to kindness, from halakhah to aggadah, the host, accepting the situation not as it ought to be or could be but as it actually is, turns to the person standing at the door and, preferencing the real over the ideal, invites that person in to join the family inside and to participate in celebrating Passover by consuming the flesh of the sacrificial offering with which the festival shares its name. The folk genius of the Jewish people allows for things like this, for people knowingly to step occasionally around the rules for the sake of a greater good.

And that is where we are today in the wake of the Simchat Torah pogrom. What is needed, more than anything really, is for the Jewish people to set aside the political or even religious debates that divide us and to face the future united as one people possessed of one Torah and devoted to the service of the one God. As everybody knows all too well, we are a fractious people. Arguing is what we do best. (The old joke about “two Jews, three opinions” is funny and not funny at the same time.) But the bottom line is that what we need to do now is to come together. We don’t all have to agree about everything. We certainly don’t all have to like Bibi or his politics, and neither do we all have to agree whether the IDF has done all it could to free the hostages held captive in Gaza. We certainly don’t have to agree with anything our own President or Vice President have said about Israel over the last half year, both speaking so regularly out of both sides of their own mouths that we barely even notice the disconnect between today’s comment and yesterday’s and the day before’s. But what the Haggadah is saying is that we have to open the door and invite all in who are somehow still on the outside wondering if they even would be welcome at a seder without having first signed up to sponsor a korban pesach in the Temple.

What that line in the Haggadah about the korban pesach and the unsigned-up stranger at the door is there to teach us is that the pursuit of the greater good will always be the wiser choice. That thought should be our watchword as we negotiate these stormy seas on which we are all afloat this year: the key is to draw into our ranks all who would seated at our table and then, united and with one voice, to face the world and demand justice—justice for the captives in Gaza, justice for the people whose own lives were ruined on October 7 or whose loved ones were murdered, justice for Israel in the international halls of justice that so frequently, almost routinely, treat Israel unfairly and unreasonably harshly. If we can’t speak as one now, then when exactly will we? And if not now, then when?

If we can manage that, we’ll have done a lot. Yes, there will be those who cannot bring themselves to stand with Israel or with the Jewish people. I regret that, but I also accept it—but I am thinking about swelling our ranks, not thinning them. And so, even with the seder meals behind us now, I invite you all to join me in opening up the doors—of our homes, of our synagogues, of our communities—to all those Jewish people (and they are legion) on the outside and inviting them in to stand with Israel and to stand with all of us who stand with Israel. And allies in the non-Jewish world whose hearts beat with Israel are welcome in my house too. There are moments in history when you have to stand up or back off, to be in or out, to declare yourself a part or apart. This, I think (and, yes, fear) is one of those moments.