Usually, around this time, I am pretty focused on Passover cleaning, kashering, and shopping. I am sure that next week is going to be full of that.  This year, though, the question that is filling my thoughts is about how to mark this difficult time in which we find ourselves during the Passover Seder. 

How will this seder be different from all other seders?

I imagine we are all wondering the same thing.

Let’s keep in mind that Jews have been observing Passover for thousands of years, often in times of suffering and distress. Our ancestors found way to hold Seders in concentration camps, as crypto-Jews, and under the threat of blood libels.

The Seder is well-designed to respond to the moment in which we find ourselves. By its nature, it invites us to relate the ancient story of Exodus, of moving from slavery to freedom, in the context of our own lives and experiences. 

B’khol dor vador. In each and every generation, we are obligated to see ourselves as if we personally went out of Egypt.

The Seder is not just a bunch of ancient texts.  It involves actions, movement, performance, song, taste, and observation. Each of the traditional elements holds the promise of evoking something deeply personal and relevant in us.

That is what the questions are all about, after all. Something is happening tonight that is not usual. We notice and ask why.

I would invite those of us who are leading a seder this year to invite our guests to respond authentically and honestly to what strikes them. For those who are guests, bring it with you to the seder you are attending, even if the host does not explicitly invite it.

There are many resources available. The Hartman Institute published a Seder supplement called In Every Generation which you might find helpful. It offers a number of suggestions that could be meaningful to incorporate.  I’ll just share a couple.

When setting the table, set an extra seat dedicated to those who are still held hostage, unable to celebrate Pesach with their lived ones. They are, quite literally, in degradation.

The four cups of wine symbolize four acts of redemption performed by God on behalf of the Israelites. Dedicate the fourth cup in memory of those who were killed and kidnapped on October 7.

Kibbutzim have a long history of writing their own haggadot, which often reflect the backgrounds and experiences of the members themselves. The supplement includes writings out of Haggadot published by kibbutzim that were attacked.

Or, find something in the Seder that speaks to you, and introduce your own ritual or discussion. 

I am thinking about the two times during the Seder in which we open the door.  Once is early, and once is late. These two moments feel especially poignant this year. 

The first door opening comes at the beginning of maggid, before we have even begun to tell the story of the Exodus. We open the door and recite a poem in (mostly) Aramaic.

Ha lachma anya
This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.
Let all who are hungry come and eat.
Let all who are in need come and celebrate Pesach.
This year, here, next year in the land of Israel.
This year, slaves, next year, free people.

Ha Lachma anya – is an invokation of peoplehood – we open the door to let anyone in who needs it. Nobody is allowed to go hungry. Nobody can be left out of celebrating Pesach.

The earliest record we have of this tradition is from the ninth century in Babylonia. But we can imagine an earlier scene. In Temple times and before, households gathered to slaughter a lamb, roast it, and eat it at night, hurriedly. One of the Torah’s requirements is that it must be entirely consumed by morning. Households that were too small to eat an entire lamb would have to join forces. That is to say, invite guests to join them.

Anachronistically, we picture people living in tents, roasting their meat, and actively welcoming their neighbors to join them.

When we open our doors now, who is it, exactly, that we are inviting? The invitations need to have already been offered. So this is more of a symbolic invitation.

I would suggest that it is a powerful statement of unity. We start by connecting our actions with those of our ancestors in Egypt. We eat the same bread of affliction that they ate. We invite anyone who needs it to join us. We proclaim that we will not leave anyone out. We declare that we are, this year, all of us, enslaved.  We share the hope, all of us, that next year we will become free.

What an incredibly powerful expression of unity!

And we need it. In many ways, Jews have become more united over these past six months.Yet our differences have also become grossly apparent. Ha lachma anya, and so many other sections of the Seder, emphasize our need to include everyone. Our table is incomplete if we do not have all four children sitting around it, after all.

A question that may challenge us is the extent to which we allow our empathy to spread. Is “let all who are hungry come and eat” limited to the Jewish people, or is it a universal invitation? As Leah Solomon writes, 

In years past, this was easier. Before October 7, although we knew that Jewish history has seen many tragedies, few of us alive today had experienced such a cataclysm. Never, until now, were we confronted with the excruciating task of holding another people’s suffering even as our own is so vast and raw, let alone doing so when the perpetrators of the atrocities against us are members of that very people, and when the suffering of that people is being inflicted in large part by our own.

In other words, can our empathy for human suffering extend to Palestinians in Gaza?

The second time we open the door at the Seder, of course, is near the end, after we have already completed three of the four cups of wine. We open the door, pour a cup for Elijah, and recite four biblical verses.

Shfokh Ḥamatkha. Pour out your fury on the nations that do not know you
upon the kingdoms that do not invoke Your name.
For they have devoured Jacob and desolated his home.

Pour out your wrath on them;
may your blazing anger overtake them.

Pursue them in wrath and destroy them
from under the heavens of Adonai.

This part of the Seder is actually two separate traditions that merged. Elijah had long been known as the herald of the Messiah. He is the prophet who did not die, destined to wander the earth in disguise, standing vigil for the time when the Messiah will come. Pesach, which is described as leil shimurim, the night of vigil, became a natural place to welcome Elijah’s presence, alongside the brit milah ceremony and the end of Shabbat. It is a night of transition from slavery to freedom, from suffering to redemption. Welcoming Elijah with a cup of wine is an expression of Messianic hope.

The first records of reciting shfokh ḥamat’kha appear in the eleventh century. In response to massacres of Jewish community in the lower Rhineland during the first crusades, these verses were introduced as a call to bring down vengeance. One of several medieval commentaries explains that the four verses represent four “cups of punishment” that God will one day give to the nations that once persecuted the Jewish people.

By the fifteenth century, the traditions of welcoming Elijah and reciting “Pour out your wrath” had merged, which makes sense, as both are messianic traditions, acknowledging that the world we live in now is filled with persecution and suffering. It is part of the narrative of “from slavery to freedom,” and “from degradation to praise.”

But it is dark, is it not? To me, Shfokh ḥamat’kha evokes feelings in opposition to Ha laḥma anya. The open door of welcome, unity, and compassion gives way to anger, rage, and vengeance. In the modern era, there are those of us who are uncomfortable calling down divine retribution on our enemies. 

In 1943, the Israeli poet Avraham Shlonsky composed a poem for Passover. He had recently read early reports about what the atrocities that the Nazis were commiting against the Jews of Europe. The poem was called Neder, meaning “Vow.” It is the same word as Kol Nidrei, that we recite at the beginnnig of Yom Kippur. In Kol Nidrei is an anullment of vows. We are proclaiming that if we make any vows in the coming year that we are unable to fulfill, we hereby declare them null and void. Shlonsky says the opposite. His poem is a neder which he refuses to ever abandon.

By my eyes that witnessed the slaughter
By my heart that was weighed down by cries for justice
By my compassion that taught me to pardon
Until the days came that were too terrible to forgive,
I have sworn: To remember it all,
To remember—to forget nothing!
Forget not one thing to the last generation
Until my indignation shall be extinguished
When the staff of my moral rebuke has struck until exhausted
A vow: Lest for nothing shall the night of terror have passed.
A vow: Lest for nothing shall I return to my wont
Without having learned anything, even this time.

This poem was printed in the 1956 Haggadah of Kibbutz Nahal Oz next to the text of “Pour out your wrath.” It was accompanied by a drawing of an olive branch and a sword. On October 7, more than sixty soldiers stationed at a base in Nahal Oz and more than a dozen members of the kibbutz were murdered, and many taken hostage.

“Pour out your wrath,” perhaps accompanied by Shlonsky’s poem, Neder, may have special resonance at the Seder this year.

These two open doors reflect the conflicting feelings and experiences that I am carrying in to Passover this year. I invite you to join me in finding traditions, both ancient and new, to fulfill our central task of rising from degradation into freedom.

And may all those who currently find themselves in actual places of narrowness find comfort and peace soon.