One important lesson my heart attack brought home was the crucial difference between intellectual knowledge of factual information, on the one hand, and experiential knowledge, or internalizing something emotionally on the other. Recognizing the signs –pressure in the chest, profuse perspiration, nausea– did not mean I was able to accept this was actually happening to me and fully grasp the consequences. Denial is a powerful defence mechanism. Coming as it did a few weeks prior to Passover, it occurred to me that the Passover haggadah is dealing with a similar issue.
As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi wrote in his classic little treatise, Zakhor, there is a significant distinction between the modern discipline of history and the traditional Jewish concept of memory. The Greeks, beginning with Herodotus, invented history; the focus was on greatness and conveyed factual information. The Jews, beginning with the Bible, invented historiography, the focus of which was not factual information but rather the meaning the events had in the lives of people. In particular, Jews want to know was it good or bad and how do we explain negative events in moral terms. In the Passover Haggadah, the goal is not to convey our greatness or “historical facts” but rather how do we internalize the narrative we are telling about ourselves.
The essential passage of the Haggadah –“in every generation we must see ourselves as having gone forth from Egypt”—tells us not only that we need to identify with the story so as to neither take it for granted nor ever lose hope that we can overcome any future form of oppression. It also invites us to identify ourselves with the collective narrative of the Jewish people.
The Hagggdah does this throughout, from Samuel’s version of the story–“we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt,” to Rav’s version—“we were idol worshippers,” internally enslaved, to Rabban Gamliel’s requirement to explain (and eat) the three essentials of the story—“Pesah, matzah, maror,” thereby literally internalizing the message.
The most memorable of the four children, the Rasha, gives us the essential Jewish definition of heresy. The only Jewish heresy is not disbelief in God but rather, the heretic is the one who stands apart and does not identify with the collective story of his or her people.
The reality today is that, as Yerushalmi has noted, the traditional transmission of collective memory has weakened and almost disappeared as people put their trust in historians “to get the facts straight.” What is at risk of disappearing, along with our collective memory, is the sense of Peoplehood that has defined Judaism for millennia. For many Jews today, especially (but not only) among the Millennials, Peoplehood seems too tribalistic, too particularistic in a world that champions universalism.
Recent Haggadah supplements by AJSW and HIAS connect our Passover story with the universal concerns for Tikkun olam and protecting the stranger. This to be applauded as a very Jewish response, in keeping with the traditional Torah message that the meaning of our enslavement was to become sensitive to and protect the stranger “because you were strangers in the land of Egypt and you know the feelings of the stranger.” But at the same time, I wondered why along with the many stories of refugees from around the world there were no stories of Ethiopian Jewish refugees? At what point does our universalism become a betrayal of our own particularism?
In addition to our own internal waning commitment to Peoplehood, there is the external assault on Peoplehood. This past week, UNESCO passed a resolution on Jerusalem that denied any Jewish attachment to the Temple Mount, or the Western Wall. Not only was the archeological evidence denied but also the Jewish narrative of Solomon’s Temple and the central story of Jewish faith, Binding of Isaac that took place on Mount Moriah—the Temple Mount.
As Yossi Klein Halevi wrote in the Times of Israel, “Passover suggests this definition of the Jews: We are a story that we tell ourselves about who we think we are. The current assault on the Jewish story is so dangerous precisely because it strikes at the core of Passover. If we lose the story, our sense of the basic justness of our narrative, we will lose the essence of our being.”
This is why it maters how we tell our Passover story. Will it be simply an intellectual recounting of “the facts” that occurred (or didn’t) to some ancient people, or will we internalize this story as the very core of our being? The distinction really might be a matter of life and death.
RABBI RON AIGEN 