Rabbi David Wolpe suggests the first of the four questions might be read more literally, and meaningfully, as: “Why is this night any different?”
[W]e should wonder about slavery and freedom every night of our lives.
We should always sit down at the table with the question of redemption in our thoughts and our hearts, for we always live in an unredeemed world.
Suffering should never be invisible to us, or hunger, or grief. . . .
Passover rituals express the potency of faith in small acts. The grief of ages is in an herb, slavery in an unleavened bread, and redemption in an untouched cup of wine.
Paul Greenberg suggests in “The Search: We Leave Egypt Tonight” that this night marks the beginning of a different future:
Walker Percy called it the search. Or at least his alter ego in “The Moviegoer” did. . . .
“What is the nature of the search, you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. . . . To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.” . . .
It is not history that gives Passover its warrant. Quite the opposite: What makes tonight so full of promise and burden, like freedom itself, is that it breaks through history. It disrupts the everydayness.
Why is this night different from all other nights? Not because we are set free, but because we may realize we are set free.
Nor is it the celebration of freedom that fills this night with awe but what follows: the plunge into the Wilderness. That is, the search. And tonight it begins anew.
Michael Tolkin writes in “Faith and Proof” that the story comes from a book that is beyond history — “written over a thousand years by a thousand writers . . . proposing a model society of frail humans who need justice, sacrifice, joy, rest and atonement . . . . a collection of voices [that] is a hint of the sound of God.” It does not matter whether it is literally true:
If Abraham did not send Hagar and Ishmael into the desert, but we imagined it; if we had not been slaves but imagined it; if we had not been 600,000 strong at Sinai, but imagined it; if God did not let us cross into the land until a generation had died in the wilderness, but we imagined it; if David did not have Uriah killed so he could marry Bathsheba, but we imagined it; if we imagined the need for a land to create a light for the world . . . if all the contradiction and paradox were not dictated on Sinai in 40 days, but heard by us over those thousand years, and our errors written down and not denied or blamed on someone else — then the book is all the miracle anyone should ask for, and to read it as literal is idolatry.
Adria Popkin, former pastry chef, largely non-observant, writes about the seder she prepared the year her grandfather died:
Abraham Solomon Goldman who, as I used to laugh to myself, possessed the most Jewish name in America, was appropriately and devoutly religious. He prayed every morning and walked to temple every Saturday for the Sabbath. . . .
Through his guidance, I learned to see the importance of tradition, the significance of retelling and remembering the Passover lore . . . . So I decided that a year after his death, at our Passover dinner we would remember the story of my grandfather. . . .
As I kneaded the matzo meal into a sticky paste to make dumplings for our soup, I remembered ancestral slaves turning mortar into the bricks that made the Pyramids.
I served sweet potato gnocchi with roasted red pepper sauce — the color of fire and strength.
Grilled asparagus and radicchio represented spring, the season of freedom and renewal.
Dessert was a creme caramel, my own Manna Flan — because it tasted so sweet you could pretend it fell from heaven. I filled the food with my grandfather’s faith . . . .
We all took turns reading the Passover story. We sang some Hebrew songs and we raised our glasses of wine to my grandfather and toasted, "L’Chaim," to his life.
My own father, the agnostic scientist, winked and said, "Delicious."
We sanctified life and legend with my supper. That night religion revealed itself as a background setting to the story of my life and a place setting at my table. My family felt connected to something bigger, back to a time even before my grandfather, back to a very old history and powerful beliefs. . . .
That seder was the finest meal I have ever prepared: It was a eulogy and a commencement all in one dish — seasoned with nostalgia and savored like hope.
If you need a Haggadah, you might print out Rachel Barenblat’s: she’s created one that blends traditional and nontraditional, old and new, liberal and conservative, and some passages from the Women’s Seder Sourcebook, and she makes it available for free — her Passover gift to us. It’s right here in printable form (you can thank her with a comment here).
For those interested in some thoughts about the larger political meaning of Passover, here are some diverse links: George W. Bush’s Passover message is here. Richard John Neuhaus’s thoughts on "America as a Religion" explores David Gelernter’s asserted connection between Passover and America. Michael Walzer, in "Exodus and Revolution," ended his book with this paragraph:
So pharaonic oppression, deliverance, Sinai, and Canaan are still with us, powerful memories shaping our perceptions of the political world. . . . We still believe, or many of us do, what the Exodus first taught, or what it has commonly been taken to teach, about the meaning and possibility of politics . . .
— first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;
— second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;
— and third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.” There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.
L’Chaim. Chag Sameach. Happy Passover.