April 5, 2025
Author(s):
Parshat Vayikra
Four Questions to Ask at This Year’s Seder
April 5, 2025 – 7 Nisan 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Rabbi Mishael Zion comes from a Haggadah-filled home: he is co-author of A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices (2007) and The Israeli Haggadah (2024), together with his father Noam Zion, who is the author of A Different Night: The Family Participation Haggadah (Hartman, 1997). Mishael was ordained by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York, has served as co-Director and rabbi of the Bronfman Fellowships, and founded the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture for Israeli Arts, Culture and Media leaders. He is also leader of the Klausner Minyan in Talpiot, Jerusalem, the neighborhood he was born in and in where his wife Elana, and their four daughters, live.
Sermon References:
We still believe what the Exodus first taught:
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.
– Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution
Where does Israel get the strength, the chutzpah, to go
on believing in redemption in a world that knows
mass hunger and political exile and boat people? How
can Jews testify to hope and human value when they
have been continuously persecuted, hated, dispelled,
destroyed? [Because they draw their strength and
hope from] the memories of the Exodus!
-Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, The Jewish Way
This is the bread
of poverty and persecution
that our ancestors ate
in the land of Egypt.
Let all who are hungry,
come and eat.
Let all who are in need,
come and share the Pesach meal.
This year we are still here-
Next year
in the land of Israel.
This year we are still slaves-
Next year free people.
-Ha Lachma Anya section of the Passover Seder
Hope, I thought, over and over again, trying to awaken it inside me. I called to it, out loud, in Hebrew even, perhaps it speaks Hebrew: “Tikvah! Tikvah!” I thought about Israel’s national anthem which is called “HaTikvah,” “The Hope,” and speaks of the hope held by Jews for two thousand years in exile, the hope of one day being able to live in their own country. It was a hope that often kept them alive.
Hope is a noun, but it contains a verb that propels it into the future, always to the future, always with forward motion. One could look at hope as a sort of anchor cast from a stifled, desperate existence towards a better, freer future. Towards a reality that does yet exist, which is made up mostly of wishes, of imagination. When the anchor is cast, it holds on to the future, and human beings, and sometimes an entire society, begin to pull themselves towards it.
It is an act of optimism. When we cast this imaginary anchor beyond the concrete, arbitrary circumstances. When we dare to hope, we are proving that there is still one place in our soul where we are free. A place that no one has been able to suppress. And thanks to this anchor of fearlessness, of freedom, in the souls of those who have hope, they know what the reality of freedom looks like. They also know how crucial it is to fight for it.
– Tikvah/Hope: The Enclave of Freedom in the Human Soul | David Grossman