Muswell Hill Synagogue
Vayikra 22/23 March 6.02pm 7.06pm

The Pesach Hagada – Telling the story as yourself

The Pesach Seder is often a long evening, and to remain aware and connected to it is hard. But after the meal, I am often ‘awakened’ by the paragraph we say before we open the door for Elijah. We all stand up and say ‘Pour out your anger on the nations that do not know you’. Hard words indeed and words that many will feel uncomfortable to say. We probably mutter them in the Hebrew and not in their English – but we are meant to understand what we are saying.

I would argue that as with other sections of the Hagada that we read, these words have a context. In other words, the Hagada is an accumulation of different Jewish generations, engaging with our foundation story, the Exodus from Egypt. This story in a sense has it all. It has persecution, anti Semitism (if one can use that label for an ancient story), prayer, leadership, miraculous, providential, redemption and liberation. And different Jewish generations and contexts will clearly relate to varying elements of this story. It may even be possible that different generations will compare or contrast their plight with that of the Children of Israel, redeemed by the hand of God from Egypt.

The first reference to the section ‘Pour out Your Wrath’ is in a compendium of prayers known as the Machzor Vitri produced in the early 1100’s. According to David Arnow, a writer on the history of the Haggada, it is not clear whether this passage ‘came about as a direct response to the First Crusade or whether it developed somewhat after’. In his words, ‘if the Crusades did not inspire the passage, they likely created fertile ground for its rapid and universal acceptance’. In fact Arnow goes further and looks at religious reactions to the Crusades, which do contain motifs of anger and a desire for God to intervene and punish those who carried out the numerous massacres of the Jews of Europe. So in the Sefer Zechira of about 1174, we see written a desire for God to ‘reveal to us His vengeance against both Edom and Yishmael, as he did against Pharoah and of Egypt’. In other words, Jews who survived the Crusades would look at Pesach as a model of God’s intervention in history, and used the Seder to plead with God to yet again intervene and exact justice on those who persecuted us.

What of the 20th century Holocaust? There are many ‘Holocaust Hagadot’ that add in or annotate references to the Holocaust. But there is no official inclusion within the rubric of the Hagada itself. This may be because of a hesitancy to officially sanction any liturgy for the Holocaust outside of the 9th of Av which for many religious Jews is an official Holocaust Memorial Day. There have been attempts to include something to remember the Holocaust. Interestingly, Rabbi Menachem Kasher, an Israeli Rabbi introduced reference to the Holocaust at the point of ‘Pour out your Wrath’. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his Hagada produced when he was Chief Rabbi includes a number of references to the Holocaust. Interestingly, at the point when he comments on ‘Pour out your Wrath’, he includes two additional pieces of liturgy in his commentary. Firstly, he brings an annotation in a Hagada from Worms, Germany in 1521 which is titled ‘Pour out your love on the nations that have known you’. It is referred to by Rabbi Sacks as ‘a prayer of thanks for the righteous gentiles throughout history’. Incredibly, over 300 years earlier in 1096, in the same town of Worms, had taken place one of the most infamous pogroms of the Crusaders. A second addition was a prayer constructed after the Warsaw Ghetto revolt of 1943. It had begun on Pesach itself, the day that had been set aside for the liquidation of the ghetto. The Holocaust is clearly a context through which we will view the Hagada, as of course will be the gathering of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the Land of Israel to build the State of Israel, born in 1948.

There are of course other facets of the hagada that are emphasised according to contemporary context. For instance the organisation Rene Cassin looks for inspiration from the Pesach story and the end of the slavery of the Children of Israel, to highlight present day issues such as slavery and human trafficking. Here is a link to their Hagada companion produced in 2011: Rene Cassin Hagada

I think we have begun to see here that there is a relationship at the Seder through the Hagada between my personal, family or communal Jewish experience, my Jewish outlook; and the ancient story of Pesach. We are asked to come with our baggage, and join the experiences of our ancestors through the eating of matza and marror and the story of the Seder. In today’s world this is a wonderful opportunity. We live in a world which I often feel over celebrates the subjective feelings of the individual to the exclusion of considering the importance of communal traditions. At the same time, religions often react by dwelling on their ‘objective truths’ and rejecting the creative possibilities of individual engagement. The Pesach Hagada provides for us a middle ground, and we don’t often realise that it does this. We all come with our context, our outlook, our subjective world – but we allow our individual approach to mingle, coexist and learn from our many received traditions which are so important to us as a community. We create a dialogue between the two, finding our place within our world of tradition and halacha, while refining the perceptions that we have grown to believe in.

On Pesach, we can come out enriched and having intelectually and morally grown – and engage in a deeper way with our tradition.