We Ourselves Were In Egypt?

Rebecca Goldstein
Haggadah means narration, and tonight’s celebration insists on the moral seriousness of the stories that we tell about ourselves. Stories are easily dismissible as distractions, the make-believe we craved as children, losing ourselves in the sweet enchantment of “as if”. “As if” belongs to the imagination, that wild terrain governed by no obvious rules. But tonight we are asked to take this faculty of the mind, so beloved by children and novelists, extremely seriously. All the adults who have outgrown story time are to be tutored tonight, with the physical props meant to quicken our pretending, and the ways of the child to guide us.
It is not enough to merely tell the story, but we must live inside of it, blur the boundaries of our personal narrative so that we spill outward and include as part of our formative experiences having lived through events that took place millennia before we were born.
It is the imagination alone that can extend the sense of the self, broaden our sense of who we really are. We are Jews, insists the tradition, and the identity of an individual Jew is never strictly individual but also collective. By extending our personal narratives to include the formative tale of Jewish identity we appropriate that collective self as part of our own.
But the tradition also insists on possessing tonight’s story in more general moral terms, the Torah reminding us never to oppress the stranger, “since you know the soul of the stranger, having been strangers in the land of Egypt.” This story that we relive tonight is meant to grant us knowledge of “the soul of the stranger,” and there is nothing more universal than that soul and our knowledge of it, and it is only the tutored imagination that can lead us to it and to the compassion it yields.
Tonight is the night that we sanctify storytelling.

The Haggadah Is the Script for a Sacred Drama
Lawrence A. Hoffman
Liturgy in general is sacred drama--sacred because of the way it is "performed" and the personal stake the performers have in performing it. It is clearly "theater": people play roles (getting an aliyah, opening the ark), they wear costumes (tallit and kippah), and they have assigned lines to chant or read out loud. Unlike ordinary drama, however, it is not performed for an audience. The performers and audience are one and the same. They do not just "play" the roles; they are the roles, and they take the roles so seriously that they internalize them as their identities. When the actress playing Lady Macbeth leaves the theater, she is not expected to murder someone on the way home; when Jews put down their Haggadah, they are expected to have a heightened sense of Jewish identity and to be more attuned to their Jewish responsibilities. People, that is, who leave the Seder and ignore the plight of the homeless have missed the point...
Dramas have shape and direction; they tell stories that establish a problem and then solve it in the end. The Haggadah presents the foundational story of how we got here, and as its problem, it asks, implicitly, why it matters, if the Jewish People continues. Each year demands its own compelling solution. That is why its script remains open and why, also, we have to reenact it year after year. If it comes out exactly the same as the year before, we have failed our dramatic duty. If we finish the Seder knowing for certain why the age-old tale of Israel's origins informs the people we are and the lives we pledge to lead, then, and only then, can we conclude Dayyenu--that... is enough.

Arthur Green
The Chasidic commentators tell us that it is at night, here in the dark night of exile, when we most need to remember that we have already come out of Egypt. For Jews living in the ghetto or shtetl and under the constant threat of oppression that was indeed a saving message. The fact that God had already redeemed us from an even worse burden of enslavement held out the hope that another redemption might come as well. For Jews in places of great darkness--the Holocaust among them--no memory was more precious.
But what of us Jews who are not oppressed, or at least not in the obvious ways that our ancestors suffered? We too are commanded to remember the Exodus every day. What is that memory supposed to mean for the likes of us? I look to two ways in which the commandment to remember applies to us. We need to ask ourselves every day, "To what am I enslaved?" We have neither Pharoh nor czar restricting our lives, but let's try on a few other categories to see where the shoe might fit. My need for a big monthly paycheck? Is that an "enslavement"? My vision of success, the constant push to higher and higher achievement? Am I enslaved to that? Or worse--am I enslaving my children to it? A life of affluence? Do I suffer from the "affluenza" disease that marks too many Americans? How about addictions? entertainment? the computer screen? Are these not "enslavements" in my life? "In order that you remember" means we need to ask ourselves these questions every day. Remember each morning and night what it is like to wake up to newly won freedom, and ask yourself how you can get there again, back to that moment of singing at the shore of the sea.
But we who are not obviously oppressed also have to remember that moment each day for the sake of those who still do suffer the old-fashioned kind of Egyptian bondage. There are real slaveries in the world, terrible sites and times of human oppression... In our post-Holocaust memory we have seen one episode after another of terrible human suffering, whether caused by natural disaster or at the hands of beautiful humanity... War, famine, earthquake, tsunami, and war again. Each of these creates misery and oppression, as we live on in comfort busily securing our own success.