By David Wolpe
Wednesday, April 01, 2026
Every rabbi—and, more broadly, every community
leader—struggles with the question of antisemitism in both a professional and a
personal register. If I give a sermon about the Sabbath, I will be greeted with
polite nods and smiles. Speak about hatred and the rafters will ring. Conflict,
danger, and hatred are, by their nature, arresting; they cut through the
ambient noise of communal life. Our reaction to antisemitism is immediate,
visceral, and impossible to ignore.
That reality presents an obvious temptation: to return
again and again to antisemitism as a central organizing concern of Jewish life.
Within the Jewish community, this is not merely a rhetorical question but an
ongoing and often heated debate. How central should antisemitism be to our
communal agenda? How does it compare in urgency to education, to internal
cohesion, to spiritual growth, to the myriad responsibilities that attend any
religious, ethnic, and—yes—tribal community? Is it the defining issue, or one
issue among many?
I find myself holding a response—quite literally—in my
hands. It is the Haggadah, the book that guides a Passover Seder. The rabbis
who shaped the Haggadah some two millennia ago understood the depth of enmity
Jews faced. But they did not permit it to overwhelm their spiritual
sensitivities. The Haggadah is not a denial of antisemitism or an evasion of
it, but a calibration of its place. Although the Haggadah is perhaps the best
known work to Jewish laypeople, it is also a template for communal leadership.
The Haggadah’s most famous declaration is stark and
unambiguous: In every generation, they rise against us to destroy us. This
is not a metaphor. As former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Abba Eban is said to
have once written, “There are things in Jewish history too terrible to imagine,
but none so terrible that they did not happen.” This line functions as both
memory and warning, collapsing past and present into a single moral horizon.
The Haggadah insists that Jewish vulnerability is a recurring feature of
history. Who today can doubt that declaration?
At a climactic moment in the Seder, we open the door and
recite a passage asking God to “pour out Your wrath upon the nations that do
not know You.” Each year that moment is both emotionally raw and theologically
charged. But we are not pleading for human vengeance; rather, we plead for
divine justice. The anger is real; the retribution is not ours. The Haggadah
teaches us to voice the pain of the community without letting anger or pain
metastasize into self-destructive fury.
Paying homage to the pain of the past is well known to
those who have attended a Seder. Yet the overwhelming majority of the text is
devoted to other themes: liberation, education, memory, gratitude, and
ultimately redemption. The narrative of oppression is the precondition of the
story, but it is not the story itself.
The Seder begins not with denunciation but with
invitation: Let all who are hungry come and eat. Before we remember our
historical travails, what was done to us, we say who we are—a people mindful of
those in need. Morality mixes with memory, for each is essential to the other.
The Haggadah is, above all, a teaching document. The Four
Questions, each asking something about the anomalies of the Seder (e.g. “Why is
this night different from all other nights”) are traditionally asked by the
youngest present and frame the entire experience. The Seder is designed to
provoke curiosity, to stimulate inquiry, to ensure transmission. The rabbis
understood that transmission is both general and particular: The message
endures but must be filtered through the ability and temperament of different
students. The Four Children—the Wise, the Wicked, the Simple, and the one who
does not yet know how to ask—are not a charming literary device. Each is
provided with an answer, which together form a theory of education. Every child
comes to the table differently, and the obligation of the teacher is not to
deliver a uniform message but to find the point of entry particular to each
learner. The text repeatedly insists on telling the story “to your child”—in
language suited to this child, in this moment. Attention is a deep form of
homage and even of love.
The Seder is about character formation. That is why the
matzah is a central symbol—called the “bread of affliction,” it is also the
bread of haste, of transition between slavery and freedom. The bitter herbs
evoke suffering, but in the framework of redemption. Through all of these, the
background of slavery is presupposed, but the experience of the Pesach is not
focused on the agony of oppression. It is the road to redemption.
No more striking instance could be given of the
philosophy of the Haggadah than its ending. It ends with songs—playful,
repetitive, even whimsical. “Chad Gadya,” “Echad Mi Yodea”—these
are children’s songs, placed at the end so that children will sustain their
delight throughout the evening. The final declaration—Next year in Jerusalem—transcends
anger and grievance and looks hopefully to a time when the world will not be
convulsed with human suffering.
If we read only the line about enemies rising in every
generation, we might conclude that the central task of leadership is vigilance
against threats. As important as vigilance is, defending matters because there
is something worth defending. The primary work of the community is not to
fixate on its adversaries but to cultivate its own internal life—to educate, to
transmit, to celebrate, to bind its members to one another and to a shared
story of purpose.
A beautiful midrash (a rabbinic legend) on the Song of
Songs makes this point. When God offers the Torah to Israel, the people are
asked to provide guarantors—figures who will vouch for their commitment. They
propose the patriarchs. God declines. They propose the prophets. God declines
again. Only when Israel offers its children as guarantors does God accept. The
future, not the past, secures the covenant. The burden of transmission falls
not on the heroes of the past but on the living generation. The Haggadah
embodies this insight. Its orientation toward children is not merely
sentimental; it is strategic and theological.
To focus exclusively—or even predominantly—on
antisemitism is to misread the lesson of Passover. The Haggadah leaves no doubt
that antisemitism must be confronted and resisted. But the Jewish people are
not about the hatred that had swirled around them; we did not survive because
of animus but in spite of it. Judaism is the evidence that tradition and wisdom
and covenant can keep a people alive for thousands of years.
The genius of the Haggadah is that it both remembers and
teaches. It acknowledges danger and celebrates deliverance. It gives voice to
pain and channels it toward a higher moral horizon. It insists on the reality
of threat while refusing to allow that threat to monopolize the our
imagination.
For those of us charged with leading communities today,
the Haggadah is a roadmap. At each Seder we open the door in hopes of
redemption, that Elijah the prophet will walk in and announce the coming of the
Messiah. But Elijah’s failure to appear does not leave us with despair, but
with the tools to build our lives and our world, and prepare to open the door
again next year.
To hold a Haggadah is to hold more than a ritual text. It
is holding the wisdom of our ancestors, reminding us that human enmity is not
new, dangers have been faced before, and resilience, faith in our future, and
trust in God have ever been the path forward.
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