IS THE SEDER NIGHT A HISTORY OR A MEMORY EVENING?

Last Pesach, an Orthodox friend of mine, Shmuly, was at a business meeting during the middle days of the holiday. When lunchtime came, his colleagues went out to local restaurants, but Shmuly remained at the conference table and took out his matzah and hard-boiled egg. As he unwrapped it, another colleague joined him and unwrapped his lunch too. It was ham and cheese—on matzah.

The colleague looked at Shmuly with a relieved smile and said:
“Boy, I'm glad I'm not the only one. It's hard to explain Passover, isn't it?” Well, today I want to explain the name of the holiday.

Let us consider for a moment this unique and remarkable Seder evening. It is a moment in time that brushes eternity. It is not unusual for a Seder to span three generations: grandparents, parents, and their children. If the average gap between generations is thirty years, the typical Seder will span sixty years of Jewish history.

Our ability to time travel goes back further than that. When grandparents are present at the Seder table, they share memories about the Seder they experienced as children. They tell us the stories their grandparents told them, the memories of the worlds they touched when they were young. Firsthand accounts that stretch back an additional three generations of Jewish history give us 120 years of firsthand Jewish knowledge at our Seder table.

The children at the Seder listen to their grandparents tell stories about their grandparents and will one day tell these stories to their own grandchildren. Add another 90 years on top of the 120 years, and you get 210 years of firsthand Jewish history linked at the Passover Seder!

Just fifteen such Seder tables take us back 3,300 years to that great night when the Israelites ate their matzah in Egypt preparing for the original Exodus!

I know of no other diner table like this in human history! It is a marvel of time travel.  
At the Seder night, we link our songs and prayers to all those generations of Jews who preceded us, in a vast symphony called the Passover Seder.  For the miracle of us being at the Seder we say together: שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶה

Given that Jews have such a long and remarkable past, it is more surprising that Biblical Hebrew has no word for ‘history’. When Modern Hebrew linguists needed a word for ‘history’ they were forced to borrow one and came up with: “Historiah”.

Absences speak loudly. One of the best ways to understand a culture is to notice which words are missing from its language.  For example, what is the word for “civility” in Modern Hebrew? Guess what? You can't say it in Hebrew because we don't have that word. They are still working on it. We have a different word, often found in place of civility, “chutzpah.” How do you say chutzpah in English? Chutzpah.  You see, the English have 94 words for civility but could not come up with one word that comes close to chutzpah, so they borrowed it.  

A week or two in Israel might explain why there is no Hebrew word for civility, but why don't we have a word for history?

The answer is that Judaism has something other than history. Our keyword is memory, “zachor” in Hebrew. The Torah uses the word zachor, “remember,” in one form or another an astonishing 169 times.  “Remember the Shabbat…” “Zachor, remember the day you stood at Mount Sinai…. “Zachor, remember that you were slaves in Egypt... Zachor, remember.”

There is a difference between history and memory. History is what happened to someone else. It lives in old books. Memory is what happened to me. My experience. It lives in our hearts.  

History is: His-Story
Memory is: My-story

History is someone else's story. It is about events that happened somewhere else, some other time, to someone else. Memory is my-story. It is the story in which I play a part. I received my-story from my parents who received it from their parents, going all the way back to the dawn of Jewish history.

This is what makes Pesach so special. It is more than history; it is living memory. The Haggadah is more like a family album than a history book.  The Matzah, Maror, and Charoset are family heirlooms, souvenirs of our stay in Egypt. They are tastes we remember deep within us.  Memory moves us, it inspires us. We cry with the bitter herbs of affliction, and we taste the sweet wine of liberation.

History is knowledge.  History is what I know.

Memory is identity. It is what I am.

Without memory identity vanishes. Tragically, we know this from the affliction of Alzheimer’s.  Just as it is with the individual, so it is with a nation.  A nation has a strong sense of self as long as it remembers where it came from and who its ancestors were, and what they stood for.

Each of the four cups we raise at the Seder is an act of memory and commitment. The story we tell is not yet done. It begins with our ancestors, fifteen Seder tables ago, and it continues with us, here, now.

We remember not out of curiosity or nostalgia, but because it is our turn to add to the story. Let us begin My-story!
 

I want to wish you and your family a happy Passover.
Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky