First Day Pesach 5711 Rabbi Dr Andrew Goldstein 19 April 2011

I’m sure I don’t need to tell most of you that the oldest shul in continuous use in Europe is the Altneu Shul in Prague.  Altneu is surely the one word description  of the Passover seder.  Pesach is the oldest of our festivals, yet it’s ever new.

What is its magic?  Maybe it’s the very essence of spring:  new life all around in nature, new colour, new hope.  Altneu…..the oldest festival yet ever new.  Last night I realised that it’s a year since Rabbi Pete Tobias and Tammy Goldstein & I finished and published our new Liberal Haggadah.  Tammy will recall with me the frantic work in the weeks & days leading up to last Pesach;  and now the new Haggadah is a year old.  This time last year I recall anxiously looking out for the annual crop of new Haggadot in case somebody trumped ours, but now a year on I realise I have moved on and given the Haggadah no thought until getting it out ready for this year‘s seder.  I did have a bit of a tussle with Liberal Judaism head office a few weeks back pointing out their tardy marketing, but I didn’t frequent Jewish bookshops this year looking to see if anybody had come up with a better one than ours.

Then I saw an article in which a reporter Michael Medved  described touring Jewish bookshops in New York searching for what was new in this Altneu book.  His results illustrate the wide and increasing appeal of this festival even in a non-religious age.  Published a month ago was “Our Haggadah: uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families” a real attempt to keep the peace and exclude neither side of a family, though interestingly this Haggadah appears tro be written by a Catholic not a Jew.  A more direct approach comes in the no holds barred “The Lamb and His Shadow : A Christian Passover Guide”   a new book for the many Christians who wish to observe seder with some intriguing new interpretations of the old rituals. Dipping the karpas a reminder of Jesus washing his disciple’s feet at the Last Supper.  The three matzos: not too difficult to guess their significance.  Not sure I will order this Haggadah but it doesn’t take too much imagination to assign Christian symbolism to the egg (they’ve pinched that one already), the bitter herbs, Elijah’s cup, Chad Gadya...although maybe the goat that gets eaten in verse one has to become a lamb.

A bit more difficult to second guess the “Haggadah for Jews and Buddhists” (2006) though the Four Questions are replaced by “Buddha’s Four Noble Truths”.  The introduction claims “the more violent elements of the Passover story are balanced by the emphasis on the peace and meditation of Buddhism”.  I know that, particularly in
America, there are hundreds of thousands of JewBu’s as they are called, but I’m not sure an authentic Jewish seder includes silent meditation: surely it should be loud singing, talking, reading and schmoozing.

What a difference a year makes.  The Haggadah that most influenced our book was “A Night to Remember:  the Haggadah of Contemporary Voices”, very much an anthology of Pesach thoughts woven around the traditional text.  It has some fabulous cartoon illustrations and we borrowed three, I think.  One we didn’t use pictures the ancient Israelites on the left of the picture following a sign to the Land of Israel, whilst on the right is a modern secular Jewish family going the other way following a sign to Egypt.  Even after Israel gave back Sinai it was a tradition for many Israeli families to spend the Passover holidays camping in the Sinai desert or by the Red Sea shores….back in Egypt.   I suspect this year Israeli families will think twice before spending their holidays returning to Egypt.  What a difference a year makes:  who would have thought last Pesach that Egyptians and Tunisians would be celebrating their new Freedom, although the final pages of their Haggadah story have still to be written.  Will it be real redemption or just a rehash of the old dictatorships?  And sadly the Libyans fear the Angel of Death might yet blight their story and the ending of the saga in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain is difficult to predict.

And the Jewish people?  A year on since last Pesach I suspect we have a little more cause for anxiety.  Israel certainly, as it awaits the repercussions of the Arab revolutions and the effects these might have on Hamas & Hizbollash camped out on its borders.  And in the Diaspora most Jews feel a little more uncomfortable with anti-Israel sentiment ever more strident and anti-semitism on the rise.

Maybe these fears explain the altneu magic of the seder and the festival. For when the Israelites were redeemed from Egypt, their celebration didn’t last long, and even their second deliverance at the sea of Reeds, was followed too soon by the reality of the wilderness before them;  the Promised Land not just round the corner.  Maybe this then is the reason the Seder is ever new, because redemption is needed over and again.  Only the fool or the naïve person thinks that the Promised land once reached will last for ever, without constant wariness, without new effort, without setbacks.  The seder allows us to rejoice in the freedom we know, in the redemptions from past persecutions (both distant and not so distant) and yet it ends by saying “Next Year in Jerusalem”…real freedom, real security, real peace lies in the future. In the meantime, every spring as the earth warms and new life is so evident we tell the ancient story and in its telling and in its ancient rituals and in its songs we do gain hope that Next Year we will witness the world in a better place and it is that hope that allows us to journey on as our ancestors always have.

As Saul Tchernichowsky wrote, and he was writing from the darkness of Tsarist Russia:  “A-aminah gam b’atid, af im yirchak zeh ha-yom.  Ach bo yavo  -  yis’oo shalom, az oov’rachah l’om mil’om:  In the future I believe/For, though distant, come it will/When nations shall each other bless/And peace at last the earth shall fill.”