On Seder night we will emerge from the hustle and bustle of the elections, the corona and the difficulties of earning a living to connect to our founding national story • Try to imagine our experiences without this memory, without "Next year in built Jerusalem" • We have a debt to the past - and we have a future destiny
Passover Seder: An opportunity to tell our story
Photo:
Oren Ben Hakon
On Seder night a story is told.
Our story.
The story of the Exodus from Egypt.
We will count it to mention and we will count it to remember.
We, like other peoples, have a common language and culture and history and territory, but only we have one story that we repeat in the same wording, in every home, in every community, at a fixed time, for thousands of years.
Only we, the Jews, have a story whose previous chapters were written by our forefathers and elders, and whose next chapters we write.
This unique and special night requires us once a year to leave the here and now;
From the joys and small and big troubles of a small day - from the hustle and bustle of the elections and the corona and the difficulties of earning a living - to connect with the "people of Israel for generations" and understand that we are part of the chain of generations.
While these concepts are a bit "big" on most of us, the Passover Haggadah simplifies them for us in ancient wisdom.
We are debtors of the past - our history is not random, and debtors of the future - we have a vocation.
This is how identity is formed.
Try for just one moment to imagine what our experiences would have looked like without this memory - year after year, generation after generation - in the same old-fashioned West Bank language that all innovations and updates could not.
Try to imagine where we would be today without this explicit challenge to the exile, without the plea and the cry and the faith: "Next year in the built Jerusalem", without the old praise and without more chapters from different periods in our history, which found their place in the Passover Haggadah.
What would we look like today - if at all - without the great liberation journey that began with the parting of the Red Sea, continued with a 40-year wandering journey in the desert and ended in the Promised Land?
We returned to our country inspired by the Exodus from Egypt
We returned to our country, not least inspired by the Exodus from Egypt.
This huge drama instilled spirits of revolution and hope in other societies and peoples, but only for us it was a genetic code.
Only we identify ourselves in this ancient and contemporary story.
Only we are commanded to feel it in every generation, to see ourselves and show ourselves, as if we are the ones coming out, now, from Egypt.
When David Ben-Gurion addressed the UN General Assembly in 1947 and tried to convince the nations of the world of the necessity of a Jewish state, he asked the British and Americans one question: who of them remembers exactly when the English immigrant ship Mayflower set out, 300 years earlier, off the coast of America Does anyone remember how many people were on it? Or what bread did the sailors eat when they set out on the voyage? However, the delicious Ben Gurion, 3,300 years before the Mayflower voyage, the Jews left Egypt, and every Jew in the world still knows exactly what day they left, what bread they ate, how they left From there and who took them out of there.
Our founding story, which began with Terah the father of Abraham and the covenant between the covenants, and reached its culmination in bondage and later in the exodus and redemption of Egypt, was told and remembered by the people of Israel every year, under all conditions and conditions.
Under the horrors of the Inquisition and the horrors of the Holocaust, in postcards and pogroms, in times of peace and war and epidemic, because he knew this was his founding religious and national story.
