Jewish Culture: Part 4

Recounting Jewish History: The Telling

March 18, 2016

Who are you? What does it mean to be you? How do you decide your social groups, your occupation, your associations, your friendships, your marital partner: the context of your life? It's a question you ask and answer nearly every moment of every day, but we are mostly unaware.

Today we define ourselves as individuals, and search in our cultures for a personal identity. But it was not always such; nor is there only a single way. If you go back far enough, humans defined themselves foremost by the groupings in which they lived: religion, nationality, free or slave, merchant or servant. Our ancestors knew themselves first and foremost as Jews.

What does it mean to be a Jew? That question Jews asked more than the modern question,"What does it mean to be a human being?" The seder explains to each Jew who s/he is, and how we got to be this way. What does it mean to be you? It means "You are a Jew." But what does that mean?

As we have seen, the seder takes place in holy time, time both ordained and then marked as holy by the kiddush. What's special about holy time?

Holy times possesses a special intensity. In the rituals of holy time we rehearse and establish for the future the meanings of our lives. Our rituals reflexively explain to us, and thereby establish, what it means to be a Jew, our basic self identification. When you look into the mirror, what do you see? Do you see a human being, or a Jew? Where does your story begin? Does it begin with the exodus from Egypt, in slavery? These questions establish the Foundation Stone at the inner core of each Jew, the personal definition that explains how we formulate and then relate to life's most critical question: who am I and how am I supposed to live? The seder explains, in this intensive and heightened reality, how we are to think of ourselves and therefore behave from this moment on.

Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman explains the difference in separate types of literature. Novels we read alone to ourselves. Poetry we may read alone, or better, aloud; but to ourselves most often. Plays are meant to be read aloud to an audience, and the reader puts on the persona of the character. But when the play concludes, the person returns to his/her previous personality. Liturgy we read aloud, to ourselves and our community, and when the play (re: worship) ends, out intention is to maintain the character we have assumed during the liturgy. Liturgy defines the best within us, urges us to become the person we espouse to be.

Consider how we use a ceremony to define our internal definition of ourselves. Around 187 c.e. Judah the Prince, the principle rabbi of the period, issued the basic set of Jewish laws, known to us as The Mishnah. He wrote, regarding answering the Four Questions in the seder, explaining the seder meal to a child, "And according to the son's intelligence his father instructs him. He commences with shame and concludes with praise; and expounds from 'A wandering Aramean was my father,' (Deuteronomy 26:5) until he completes the whole section."

Let's unpack this short section of a longer mishnah. The Torah commands, "You shall tell to your child on that day, saying ..." (Exodus 13:8) "The day" is the 15th day of Nisan, the first night of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. But what does the verb mean? What is The Telling, haggadah in Hebrew, about precisely? Jews fulfill this command by telling the story of the exodus each year on the first night of Passover. But how do we tell the story? What exactly do we say, and why?

Think about the objective of telling the story. Surely we must obey the divine command to commemorate the day, but what else? Experiencing the exodus shaped the Jewish people. We often refer to the exodus as "the root experience of the Jewish people." It's mentioned in prayer many times daily. How do we transmit this core, generative experience to the next generation, which is the only way to perpetuate the experience. We must explain it to the children in such a way that they imbibe not only the story but the experience itself, to make that story not an historical event but a personal account.

How the seder accomplishes this feat we will explore next week.