Tonight, Jewish families and communities around the globe will gather together for seder. In the collection of songs that closes out the haggadah, Chad Gadya – One Little Kid – is often a beloved favourite for its animal noises and general silliness at the end of the night. But this addition to the haggadah describes a strange and violent story: a goat is eaten, a cat is beaten, a dog is struck, in a seemingly never-ending cycle of violence. It seems like an inevitable pattern, and an unusual take-home message for the seder. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, however, looks at the final stanza, in which God is the victor over all, even death, as a note of hope: “I find it almost unbearably moving that a people that has known so much suffering can summon the moral courage to end this evening of Jewish history on a supreme note of hope and write it into the hearts of its children in the form of a nursery rhyme, a song…We end the night with a prayer and a conviction. The prayer: ‘God of life, help us win a victory over the forces of death.’ And the conviction? That by refusing to accept the world that is, together we can start to make the world that ought to be.”
This does not have to be the take-away message of the seder. Rabbi Shai Held teaches that the seder is not only about memory, but about redemptive memory. We can interpret our people’s Egypt experience in different ways. An entirely reasonable reaction would be, “No one helped me when I was in Egypt, so why should I help the stranger in our midst now?” But Torah teaches something different: “You must not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The purpose of the seder is to teach us how to use our memory and our collective story to orient ourselves away from violence, and towards empathy, towards hope.
This week, the Knesset passed a law mandating the death penalty for West Bank Palestinians convicted of carrying out deadly terror attacks. There is no right of appeal. This law contravenes everything Jewish ethics and Jewish history teaches about the sanctity of human life, our Jewish orientation towards empathy and away from violence. It is yet another chapter in the never-ending cycle of violence of Chad Gadya.
I pray that our people will win a victory over the forces of death – both those forces within the Jewish people and within Israel, and those external forces that wish to see us eradicated from the earth.
Wishing you and your families a joyful Pesach of hope.
