I hope you all had successful, interesting seders. We were at home the first night with a good group of friends, then the second night we were invited out...and that was the first time in the twenty-six years I've been married that I attended a seder I didn't lead. It was great! The conversation was very interesting, the food was excellent, the wine was flowing--what's not to like? Even walking home afterwards, while less convenient than just going upstairs, was fine. I had the idea that all that cool air might settle my head before I attempted to sleep off all those many cups of wine, and even that seemed to work as planned! So, all in all, it was a very successful yontif. And more is coming next week!

When I was listening to the Haggadah, something struck me that I hadn't really paid much attention to previously. Have you ever noticed how, for all the whole point of the operation is to tell the story of the Exodus (and "the more you tell of it, the more you are to be praised"), we never actually do get around to telling the story in any really cogent, organized fashion? I mean, there are references all over the place to this or that event, to there having been ten plagues, to the parting of the sea, to there having been a pesach offering, etc., but nowhere is there anything like an ongoing, easy-to-follow version of the story of the exodus from Egypt. No Moses. No Aaron. Hardly any references to Pharoah doing anything at all other than dying in the sea, and no indication that the Pharaoh who died in the sea was not the Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites in the first place. No real description of any of the plagues. No staffs turning into serpents. No burning bushes. No babies in baskets. Only the barest outline of the tale, and that told in a way only intelligible to the priorly initiated. I wonder what any of us would imagine the real story to be if we only had the Haggadah as our source of information! Surely, it would not be the simple, inspiring story we read in the Torah, and that all of us learned as children.

Why might that be? If the point is telling the story, why don't we just tell the story? And if the point is merely to refer to it obliquely, then why do we insist over and over that it's such a huge mitzvah to tell the story over and over in the first place? I think there's something profound in this apparent editorial oversight, and it is intended to pique the attention of watchful adults, somewhat in the way the dipping thing, or the reclining thing, is meant to pique the interest of watchful children unaccustomed to such behavior at the dinner table. The story is about the ancients, but also not about them. It's about the exodus, but also not at all about it. It's about Pharoah freeing the Israelites, but it's also about us ourselves...and our willingness to embrace faith in God not as Judge or as Creator, but as the Freedom of the world, as the source of personal freedom in the world of men and women all to rarely able to live life as they see fit, as can truly free people do easily. It is about noticing that it is only sometimes Pharaoh that denies us our freedom--and our sorry world has, regretfully, no lack of pharaohs--but, far more often, it is we ourselves who ruin our chances to live free simply by refusing to loose the chains that hold us down and keep us back through the force of our will to live truly as we wish. So the fact that the story is about our ancestors and also not fully about them is signaled by the Haggadah telling us their story and also not telling it. What a subtle book our Haggadah is! I think that all the time, actually...but, just lately, more than ever.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Martin S. Cohen