HDTB Haggadah 2010

7/29/2019 HDTB Haggadah 2010

1/17

2010


2/17

We Are Gathered Here Today

What brings us together today? Who are we anyway?

Traditionally, we would begin the Seder by speaking about the Seder itself,

reciting the order of things to come. A simple functional answer to a deep andpenetrating question. Here is a more thorough look at what brings this group

together on this holy night:

Firstly, we are all Jews. We are fulfilling the commandment of remembering our

past together in order to more completely understand our present.

Secondly, we are all Zionist. We are creating a new Jewish destiny that is based

on freedom and justice, creation and love. We have placed ourselves in the

center of our People and taken on the task of spiritual and moral redemption.

For this we come together to create our Jewish culture together.

Thirdly, we are all in Habonim Dror. This means

What does this mean?

Hopefully we will both explore and create the answer to this question in some

way tonight. Let us guide ourselves in the way of the youth movement. Let us all

be madrichim tonight and use the occasion of the seder to work towards a

deeper understanding of ourselves, our movement, our people and our world.

And appropriately, let us read from Pesach Housepetter:

Creating hope, the madrichah knows, depends on their capability to overcome

external hardships, but mainly internal struggles. Growing the yearning, the

madrichah understands, in its essence depends on their readiness to challenge

the world around them, the social desert that lurks in the heart, souls of the

people.

With the economical wilderness that casts human beings into the depth of the

abyss, sorrow, agony, shreds, poverty, dismalness; with the falsehood that

crowned itself king, the madrichah knows that all of those manmade they are

and she works diligently on the heart of her chanichim.

Not to turn away from reality, not to give up on it, not to let go, not to deny the

chance, not to reject hope, not to accept, not to give in to the surrounding world

that is all manmade.

To challenge it, struggle with it, to create, to sprout in the midst of their souls a

new world, good and more just.


3/17

Kadesh(contributed by Daniel Samowitz)

Kadesh the first step of the story.

Kadesh is the first word of the seder. It is how we as Jews come together, to begin

the seder with a blessing over the first of four cups of wine.

Kadesh is a way for us to bless things and make them holy. But what is holiness?

Traditionally the Shabbat is holy unto itself; it is connected to nature and laws

that precede man. If there was no man Shabbat would still be holy, but not so for

the story of Pesach. The story of Pesach is made holy because we choose for it to

be holy. We choose to come together and share the story of the Jewish people

and sanctify it by performing kadesh as the first step of retelling the Pesach

story.

But why is wine used as a symbol of sanctification when it is so readily brings to

mind revelry and intoxication? How can it be a symbol of liberation when so

many have become enslaved to it? The point is that, in Jewish tradition, no object

is intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Its nature is determined by the way we

use or misuse it.

We are here to choose to make holy the story of our peoples journey from

bondage and slavery and our redemption from the hands of others to a freedom

of self-determination and choice. Once we were slaves unto Pharoah in Egypt.

Let us not only remember that tonight at our Seder but rather in all our days and

in our actions towards ourselves and others.

First Cup of Wine

Tonight, as we celebrate freedom as a movement, we will drink four cups of

wine. An integral part of the freedom of humankind is in ones learning how to

love the other. Each cup of wine tonight will be commemorated through an

exploration of the elements of love, as shown to us by Erich Fromm.

For the first cup of wine, we look at the first element of love: care.

That love implies care is most evident in a mothers love for her child. Noassurance of love would strike us as a sincere if we saw her lacking in care for

the infant, if she neglects to feed it, bathe it, to give it physical comfort; and we

are impressed by her love if we see her caring for the child. It is not different

even with the love for animals or flowers. If a woman told us the she loved

flowers, and we saw that she forgot to water them, we would not believe in her

love for flowers. Love is the active concern for the life and growth of the whichwe love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love.

May we all find the strength to care for one another actively in our pursuit of

solidarity and freedom!


4/17

Karpas(contributed by Ari Brian Schwartz)

The karpas ritual is not something that is relevant just for Jewish or Tnua idealists, but

rather for any person wishing to live a more intentional life the world over. When thinking

about the Karpas, think about the balance and the perspective with which we look at everyintentional aspect of our lives and the engagement with the greater society. As members of a

Zionist tnua building towards a better future its easy to say that we build ourselves and ourlives according to our ideals, or at least make the attempt. However, its another thing

entirely that allows us to actually be conscious regularly of the oppressive pieces of society

in our lives that we still take part in. Easy examples for many include sweatshop-made

clothing or food produced through unsustainable or downright horrific industry practices

(and I don't just mean the meat industry). But there are certainly more examples than that.

And while its an easy and obvious thing to say, well.... its not actually. It could be very easy

for us to assume that in trying to make our lives intentional and closer to our values that we

just 'do it' and are living a better life, or worse that one thing somehow absolves us ofresponsibility for the other. We need to have that balance of reminding ourselves about the

oppressive parts of life and our society that we still take part in. The karpas reminds us of

this balance and perspective. Hope and Intentionality in life plus a reality of constant

criticism and evaluation is a good goal. The ritual of karpas going together reminds that

growth and often crappy actions is the reality of our lives. .

What are the oppressive parts of society that we still perpetuate (towards ourselves or

others)? Will there ever be a point where their will be no need for a bitter reminder? Is this

even a helpful way to think about karpas?

Urchatz(contributed by Sarah Michaels Levy)

We will shortly be dipping parsley in salt water and eating it for symbolic purposes.

During Temple times, people always washed their hands before eating fruits and

vegetables that came into contact with water, as a way to ritually purify themselves

before eating. Since there is no longer any Temple, washing our hands before eating a

dipped vegetable is considered a voluntary act of symbolic purification, and not a

rabbinic requirement (which is why saying a bracha is unnecessary).

In our lives, we do all kinds of things that are required of us (even if we have chosen to

do them, they can still be considered requirements). There are also voluntary acts we

take part in that bring spiritual purification, and which serve to bring us closer to the

person we want to be.

In this season of renewal, please take a moment to think of one thing you want to do in

this Urchatz-style voluntary manner during the upcoming year, as a way to bring

spiritual cleansing into daily activities. You may talk about it with a few people sittingnear you.


5/17

Yachatz

At this point in the Seder we break the middle matza of the Seder plate in half

and hide it away as the afikomen. Traditionally, this broken matza is used as a

reminder of our hardship in slavery. Tonight, as a movement of Olim, we

remember our own exodus.

Although Aliyah, like the exodus story, is meant to be one of redemption and of

freedom, the story is seldom so simple.

PINE

Here I will not hear the voice of the cuckoo.

Here the tree will not wear a cape of snow.

But it is here in the shade of these pinesmy whole childhood reawakens.

The chime of the needles: Once upon a time I called the snow-space homeland,

and the green ice at the river's edge -

was the poem's grammar in a foreign place.

Perhaps only migrating birds know -

suspended between earth and sky -

the heartache of two homelands.

With you I was transplanted twice,

with you, pine trees, I grew -

roots in two disparate landscapes.

Do we experience the difficulty that Lea Goldberg describes? Are we torn

between our past and our present?

How should a modern Zionist movement deal with this internal divide? Should it

be negated? Should it be addressed?


6/17


7/17

Each of these options spins a different narrative. Each one tells a different tale of who

we are, and perhaps more importantly, why we are.

Tonight we will recount the story collectively. Our narrative is one of community,

intimacy, cooperation and unity. Each table will recount in whatever way they see fit

one section of the Exodus story

Ten Plagues

Dayenu

Betzet Yisrael

The Second Cup

For the second cup of wine, we look at the second element of love: responsibility.

Today responsibility is often meant to denote duty, something imposed upon

one from the outside. But responsibility, in its true sense, is an entirely voluntary

act; it is my response to the needs, expressed or unexpressed, of another human

being. To be responsible means to be able and ready to respond. Cain could

ask: Am I my brothers keeper? but this is not love. The loving person

responds. The life of his brother is not his brothers business alone, but his own,

too. He feels responsible for his fellow men, as he feels responsible for himself.

This responsibility, in the case of the mother and her infant, refers mainly to the

care for physical needs. In the love between adults it refers mainly to the

physical needs of the other person.

May our connections to one another not be a burden, but the voluntary act of a

free human loving another!


8/17

Rachtza(contributed by Elon Heymans)

Rachtza, the washing of the hands, is one of the few rituals that, strangelyenough, we perform twice during the seder. Both words and (its earlier

brother) of course derive from the word , to wash. Quite simple. That we

wash our hands before starting a meal isn't surprising either. But what is the

difference between both washing of the hands, and why do we wash our hands

twice?

Suggestions?

Well first of all, we can observe that in the traditional seder, the first

handwashing is without bracha. The second washing, is with a bracha, and

everyone should of course participate. But what does that mean?

To continue, we should be aware of the fact that every system of beliefs, whether

it is pagan religion, Judaism or socialism, serves to some extent to create order

out of chaos. That is exactly why religions back in the ancient world were all

about making the distinction between cleanliness and uncleanliness, between

holy and unholy, between in and out. Are you in on the seder table (or basically

any dinnertable around which Jewish rituals are performed)? Then youd better

wash your hands.

So perhaps there are things happening around the seder table that demand us to

make sure that we are clean, once more. The first time, we wash our hands

before we have our appetizer, the karpas; the second time, we make sure that,

after all this story telling and wine drinking, we are truly clean before we eat all

that symbolizes, and all that there is left of the korban pesach. The korban pesach,

which the modest rabbi's of the mishna decided to replace with a simple piece of

dry matsa, the afikoman, is the lamb we once ate because we were confident that

we'd be led out of Egypt. It is no less than the taste of a better future.

Now, as tsafun, the eating of the afikoman, occurs only at the end of the meal, we

are reminded that also our real meal is in fact an integral part of the Pesach

celebration. We lean, we eat and drink in freedom, and we tell ourselves that we

have reached our ultimate goals already... but we haven't really. During ourdessert, the eating of the afikoman, we are brought back to the bitter reality. To

learn that lesson, to enter that cycle, we need to be clean and we use a bracha to

externalize that very act.

Everyday we wash our own hands; let us wash each others this one time.

Blessed is this celebration, from Rachtza to Tsafun, during which we taste of a

better world, for which we wash our hands. Amen.


9/17

Motzi Matza(contributed by Yaniv Cohen)

Matza and Zionism

The mitzvah of eating matzot at Pesach is predicated on the historical

inadvertent baking ofunleavened bread when the Jews hurried out of Egypt on

the morning of Pesach. They left so quickly that there was no time for thedough to leaven. The result was matzah, and the halachah institutionalized it as

one of the symbols of the Exodus, the defining event of the birth of the Jewish

People.

While there are a limited number of mitzvot that are meant to be performed by a

small group of people as formal representation of the nation most notably the

Temple service - surely one of the most important aspects of Jewish monotheism

is the democratization of the service of God. The Torah, the book of laws, waspresented, not to the priests or the kings, but to all the people. The Talmud

stresses the elaborateness of the process by which each mitzvah of the Torah

was taught carefully and systematically by Moshe to every stratum of Jewish

society, from the High Priest to the leadership, to each and every individual Jew.

While the matzot of the Exodus were products of the urgency of the moment, the

matzot of every Pesach since (Pesach dorot) were a mitzvah of the people: to

make it, to bring it to the table, to share it with family and community. They

were more than folkways, certainly. There were laws of preparation and

production, laws which became more structured and codified through thirty-five

hundred years of study, discussion and experience. But like all the laws of theTorah, they were laws for the people to learn and apply. They were not the few

rarefied mitzvot of the Temple. The people baked their matzah for Pesach; they

picked the four fruits and built their sukkot for Sukkot. The chickens and the

animals were slaughtered in accordance with the law; the tithes were taken and

paid. There was a normalcy of life lived within the communal theocracy which

the Torah had explained to the people.

It would be hard to overstate the national trauma that was the destruction of the

Second Temple. It was not simply that the Temple, with its sanctified service,

was gone. The monarchy was gone. The capital city was destroyed. The peoplewere exiled among the nations. There was no more communal theocracy. There

was no more normalcy. Even the one people's sacrifice, the paschal lamb,which each family or group had brought on the eve of Pesach, was now

forbidden, since it too had a Temple element, and could only be offered when the

Temple stood in Jerusalem.

What had been the normal practices of a Jewish life in a Jewish land now became

the alien practices of strangers in the lands of others. It was Rabbinic Judaism

which maintained the connection of this scattered nation to its heritage, often by

emphasizing the symbolic importance of the mitzvah, the special meaning to

which to cling to keep the practice offoreign law and ritual alive in often-


10/17

hostile environments. There is perhaps no better example of this

metamorphosis than the night of the Passover itself, in which the Rabbis of

the Mishnah design a celebration of symbols: the Pesach Haggadah, to glorify the

memory of the eating of the Paschal Lamb, which was now no longer available.

As the exile extended from years to centuries to millennia, as time took usfurther and further away from the reality of living a daily Jewish life, it was only

natural that the stress on symbols should grow stronger. The matzah became a

symbol of freedom. The holiday itself, while maintaining its identity as the

birth of our nation, also became a dream, no less compelling, ofthe coming ofredemption.

It is not surprising then that these symbolic mitzvot grew in their spiritual andeven mystic importance, so that, as representative of the Jewish Religion theycame to carry a tremendous weight of responsibility.

The settlement of the Land of Israel since the mid-1800s had significance in

every possible aspect of Jewish life and thought:

In terms of daily religious life, the birth of Modern Zionism offered no less than a

return to normalcy, a return to Jewish people living their lives Jewishly among

other Jews, an idea which sounds eminently ordinary but has been an

unattainable dream for two thousand years. The Zionist Ideal as expressed in

the daily lives of Israeli Zionists has led, and continues to lead, to a

demythologizing of halachah, to a return of daily religious ritual to the people as

an ordinary part of their ordinary lives.

The baking and eating of matzah, here, in the State of Israel, is centered, as its

practical example, on a group of men and women who have studied well the laws

of matzah and are baking and eating their own matzot for their own celebration

of the Pesach. It is not a folk festival; it is not a Jewish crafts project. It is simply

following the laws that God gave to the Jewish people. To be a free people in our

land

This practical, functional, accessible view of mitzvot is perhaps the greatest gift

that the rebirth of the State of Israel has offered to the religion of the Jews. They

symbolize a system which served so well to nurture our hopes and our dreams

for those long, hard centuries that we may now, at last, return to the daily life of

mitzvot within a Jewish land. And in this, as in many other ways, may the State

of Israel serve as an inspiration and a guide to Jews all over the world.


11/17

Maror(contributed by Hannah Rollo)

Blessed are you, Lord our G-d, king of the universe, who has sanctified us with

his commandments, and commanded us to eat bitter herbs.

We eat the Maror as a symbol for the bitterness of our slavery in Egypt. The

Pesach seder is a celebration of our freedom, yet at the same time we have

symbols representing slavery. We celebrate freedom with 4 (or 5) cups of wine, a

festive meal, and leaning when we eat. At the same time we eat bitter herbs and

dip in salt water. The whole seder you are required to place yourself 'as if you

were in Egypt'. There are many symbols in the seder that allow us to have some

sort of experience to connect to the time 'you' were in slavery.

If the Maror represents the bitterness of slavery, and the Seder is the time to

celebrate our freedom, why do we eat the bitter herbs at the heart of the Seder?Have you found in your life that bitterness (slavery) could be part of your

freedom (sweetness)?


12/17

Korech


13/17

Shulchan Orech

Lets Eat!


14/17

Tzafun

Music Quiz


15/17

Barech

The Third Cup

For the third cup of wine, we look at the third element of love: respect.

Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes in accordance with the root of the word(respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique

individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and

unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved

person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the

purpose of serving me. If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with

him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use. It is clear that respect is

possible only if I have achieved independence; if I can stand and walk without

needing crutches, without having to dominate and exploit anyone else. Respect exists

only on the basis of freedom: Lamour est lenfant de la liberte as an old French

song says; love is the child of freedom, never that of domination.

May we be vehicles of growth for one another, respecting each others ways andproviding a space for independence and freedom for one and all!

Elijahs cup


16/17

Hallel

4th Cup

For the fourth and final cup of wine, we look at the final element of love: knowledge.

There are many layers of knowledge; the knowledge which is an aspect of love doesnot stay in the periphery, but penetrates the core. It is possible only when I can

transcend the concern for myself and see the other person in his own terms. I may

know for instance, that a person is angry, even if he does not show it overtly; but I

may know him more deeply than that; then I know that he is anxious, and worried,

that he feels lonely, that he feels guilty. Then I know that his anger is only the

manifestation of something deeper, and I see him as anxious and embarrassed, that is

as the suffering person, rather that the angry one.

May we use our freedom to develop deep relationships with one another, may we

have the knowledge to love one another truly!


17/17

Nirtzah

Leshana Habaa Beyerushalayim Habnuya

Documents

HDTB Haggadah 2010