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Maggid - The History of the Story
Contributed by Izzie Gall

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

After the Afikomen is put away, uncover the matzah and lift up the plate for all to see. 

This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are in need come and partake of the Passover meal. Now we are here; next year may we be in the land of Israel. Now we are slaves; next year may all be free!

Put down the matzah and continue.

"The recalling of the Passover story is the central component of the Passover Seder, and there are a wide range of traditions in how the story is told. The book of Exodus in the Torah  is  the Passover story, and we could simply read Exodus next, but that would miss the point and take quite a while. In the traditional Haggadah, parts of the story are related several times, from different perspectives, and in different levels of detail. The point isn’t to read the story as it’s found in the Torah, but to retell it in a way that makes meaning to each of us here tonight." -- Heather Rayne

Archaeological evidence is somewhat at odds with the story of Exodus. There are no records of the sudden enslavement of another nation, nor a large emigration like those described in the Torah, from Egypt -- a nation famous for meticulous documentation. However, as archaeologist Carol Meyers tells us, Canaanite slaves were frequently sent to Egypt by their rulers as tribute to Pharoah, or came on their own during droughts and famines, as the Torah tells us Abraham and Sarah did. And these people, after mingling and joining together in Egypt, may have returned to Canaan in small groups -- at least, smaller than the 600,000 men - and their famliies - described by the Torah (Exodus 12:37).

"[There] are one or two Egyptian documents that record the flight of a handful of people who had been brought to Egypt for one reason or other and who didn't want to stay there. [While] there is no direct evidence that such people were connected with the exodus narrative in the Bible [...] it's possible that a charismatic leader, a Moses, rallied a few of those people and urged them to make the difficult and traumatic and dangerous journey across the forbidding terrain of the Sinai Peninsula, back to what their collective memory maintained was a promised land." -- Carol Meyers

Richard Elliott Friedman, a prominent professor of Jewish Studies in the U.S., theorizes that the Israelites in Egypt were the Levites, and that that tribe as a whole left Egypt in the Exodus. When they joined the other tribes of Israel upon reaching Canaan, their story became a cultural touchstone for the whole nation. "And that is how a historical event that happened to the Levite minority became everybody’s celebration—how we all came to say that we were slaves in Egypt, although that was not the experience even of most Israelites of the period." -- Richard Elliott Friedman

"Even though [the story of Exodus] may be rooted in some cultural memory experienced by only a few people, it became a way of looking at the world that would have great power for generations and millennia to come—the idea that human beings should be free to determine the course of their own lives, to be able to work and enjoy the rewards of the work of their own hands and their own minds." -- Carol Meyers
haggadah Section: Maggid - Beginning

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