Thou Shalt Tell

The rabbis of the shtetl used to give but two sermons a year. One of these was on the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—Shabbat Teshuva—the Sabbath of Return. The other, as is the case with this sermon, was on the Shabbat preceding Passover—Shabbat Hagadol—the Big Sabbath. It might have seemed big because traditionally the rabbi would give lengthy detailed instructions on Passover observance.
 
My father—a modern suburban American rabbi—delivered a sermon virtually every week,  and rather than to burden the congregation with details of Passover kashrut, he  drew from the holiday liturgy another reminder of one of his favorite sermon topics. Based on the Biblical injunction to teach our children the story of our redemption from slavery at the Passover Seder each year, this Shabbat Hagadol sermon emphasizes the need for education in and commitment to living a full Jewish life—not only for our children’s sake, but for ourselves as well.

If Jewish life is to continue meaningfully we shall have to overcome this tendency to live our Judaism by proxy and restore our individual selves to the center of Jewish living.

TONIGHT, IN JEWISH TRADITION, is one of the most important Sabbath Eves of the year. It is the Sabbath before Passover and is known as Shabbos Hagadol, the Great Sabbath. On this Sabbath all good Jews looked forward to the holiday to come and the rabbis reminded their people of the proper manner of observance and the meaning of the festival. Of course, we hardly need to be reminded of the basic significance of Passover. Its main theme is fundamental in Jewish thinking. Passover brings us a glorious story of a people’s march to freedom, of the birth of a nation, and this episode, with the preceding centuries of slavery, is the sharpest memory that Jews have preserved from the past. Over and over again the Bible refers to it, and because of this experience Jews are urged to treasure freedom and to oppose oppression not only for themselves but for everyone.
 
But there are also other implications of the festival that can be found, certain minor themes which form the background for the major one. And one of these is the reminder of the role of the individual in keeping and transmitting our faith. In the Passover story in the Book of Exodus we read,

V’higadta l’vanecha—thou shalt tell thy son in that day saying: It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt.[1] 

Here is a commandment [that places the emphasis on][2] the individual Jew to tell his offspring the story of the Jewish past, and not only that but a reminder that what happened to the Jewish people collectively must also be considered as something done for each and every Jew personally. There is a personal involvement reflected in both the responsibility for transmitting the story of the Passover and in our concept of its significance. The Jew is not told to send his child to school for Jewish information; he is not to send his child to the priest or to the temple for instruction. Thou shalt tell him. And this does not just mean a responsibility for telling or giving information. Transmission of our Jewish heritage is more than a telling. It is a living. It is setting an example. It is the creating of a home with Jewish atmosphere and Jewish feeling. This is the primary means we have of influencing our children.

To bear this out we have but to note that the most important aspect of Passover observance is the Seder,[3] a home ceremony which is celebrated in intimate family surroundings—a ceremony which creates a special Jewish atmosphere in the home—a ceremony which emphasizes the role of the parents and encourages the child to ask questions so that the father may the better be able to instruct. To be sure this is a ceremony for the first nights of Passover only. We do not duplicate the procedure on any other occasion of the year, but its spirit is one which is basic to Jewish life at all times. Where is the child to get his Judaism? In the religious school? Of course, we must send children to school. In the temple?  Of course, we must train children in the art of worship and teach them to bow before the Almighty. But most important of all, the child must get his Judaism in the home. Thou shalt tell thy children. The power of home example determines more often than not whether a child will be responsive to temple and school. The attitude of the home will determine whether or not the child will take his temple and school seriously. The kind of Judaism that is practiced in the home determines the importance of Jewish attitudes and Jewish practices in the mind of the child. We see this all the time in our own school. Where parental attitudes are positive toward Judaism our children are susceptible to what we try to give them, and where we have problems with the children the likelihood is the parental attitudes are negative.[4]

This personal involvement, however, is not merely a matter of influencing children. It is important for our own personal religious development and satisfaction—that a Jew functions best and assumes his Jewish responsibilities best when he feels himself personally involved in the Jewish story. The Haggada[5] for Seder tells us that each Jew must feel as if he himself had come forth out of Egypt. In the story of the Four Sons,[6] as a matter of fact, that son who does not feel personally concerned with the proceedings is called a rasha, a wicked one, and he is told that if he had been in Egypt he would not have been considered worthy of being redeemed. The Jewish story is not to be considered dry history out of the past. It is to be considered the story of our personal family tree. It is not just the collective ancestry of the Jewish people that was redeemed from Egypt, but our grandfathers, our fathers, even us, ourselves. This is the ideal Jewish attitude. And when we have such a close personal involvement with our tradition, then we are much more apt to exert ourselves with our Jewish responsibilities for the present. A man can sympathize with the needs of other families but he usually exerts greater effort and is ready to sacrifice for his own. We need, therefore, not just a warm feeling in our hearts for the collective entity of which we are a part—the Jewish people. We need a sense of family belongingness, of personal involvement in all that the Jewish people have accomplished or hope to accomplish in the present. We cannot say the Jewish people are the people of the book and shirk our own responsibility for studying that book. We cannot say the synagogue is important as a house of worship and then withdraw ourselves personally from participating in that worship. We cannot say the Jewish people need Israel or must maintain philanthropies and Jewish institutions, and forget our own personal responsibility for what the Jewish people must accomplish. We, the individuals, are the Jewish people. The Jewish people as a whole cannot accomplish more than any of its individuals is willing to do.

It is one of the problems of our time that Jewish loyalties and obligations are thought of in a collective sense, and we seem to forget the significance of the individual. Collectively we create synagogues and schools and are proud of Jewish causes and institutions, but personally we permit ourselves to be assimilated into the manner of the environment and homes are losing their Jewish stamp, our pattern of life is losing its Jewish flavor, and we think our Jewish institutions—religious, charitable, and Israel—can run without us. We want the synagogue to observe the Sabbath and the home is entirely wochidig.[7] We want prayer in the synagogue, but the home is never humble and thankful. We want to teach Jewish ideals to our children, but in the home and marketplace it is what is practical and what is pleasurable that is most often followed.
Judaism was not meant to be compartmentalized. There is no such thing as a Jewish way to be followed in the synagogue and the school and a different standard for the home and the world at large. Everything we do is to have a background of Jewish meaningfulness, a unity of spirit.

Passover, through the Seder and its ritual, dramatizes the need for a personal Judaism as well as a group loyalty—the importance of a sense of personal involvement and commitment, a readiness to give to Jewish living and thinking a high priority in the scheme of things and not to make them secondary to convenience or conformity to the standards of the crowd.

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan[8] once pointed out that in former years each Jewish home hired a Shabbos goy[9] who was supposed to be helpful around the house so that the family might keep the Sabbath without violation. Now he says, Jews hire rabbis who are supposed to keep the Sabbath for them so that families can break it without being troubled. If Jewish life is to continue meaningfully we shall have to overcome this tendency to live our Judaism by proxy and restore our individual selves to the center of Jewish living.
 

[1] Exodus 13:8

[2] Ballon typically typed every word of his sermons, double-spaced, allowing for insertions and corrections in the spaces between lines of text. Regrettably, some of his insertions are hand written and undecipherable, or on occasion the sense of the edit is clear even if the complete text has not been entered. In these cases I provide brackets to indicate that I have had to exercise some editorial judgment to make the language flow as it might have as he spoke the words from the pulpit.

[3] The Passover Seder ("order, arrangement") is a Jewish ritual feast that marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. The Seder is a ritual performed by a community or by multiple generations of a family, involving a retelling of the story of the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt.

[4] This begs a personal note: there were notable exceptions to this rule. It no doubt was a source of much frustration that Ballon’s two sons were often among the worst offenders when it came to religious school diligence and cooperation. Fortunately he did see the day when his first born, Rabbi Jeffrey Ballon ז״ל, became an ordained rabbi. I can only hope that he had the vision to foresee the day when I too would find deep meaning in so many of his words, and the heritage he so fervently tried to impart. Of course, our sister, Martha, was always well behaved!

[5] The Haggada(h) is a Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover Seder.

[6] The traditional Haggadah speaks of "four sons"—one who is wise, one who is wicked, one who is simple, and one who does not know to ask. Each of these sons phrases his question about the Seder in a different way. The Haggadah recommends answering each son according to his question, using one of three verses in the Torah that refer to this exchange.

[7] A simple translation from the Yiddish is "weekday" meaning, in this context, that Shabbat is no different than any other day of the week.

[8] Mordecai Menahem Kaplan (1881-1983), was a rabbi, essayist and Jewish educator and the co-founder of Reconstructionist Judaism.

[9] A Shabbos goy, (Yiddish) is a non-Jewish individual who regularly assists a Jewish individual or organization by performing certain acts on the Sabbath which are forbidden to Jews within Jewish law. The phrase is a combination of the word "Shabbos" meaning the Sabbath, and "Goy", which literally means "a nation" but colloquially and practically means a "non-Jew."