You have cleaned the house, cooked the food, and set the table. The family has arrived. You sit down. And then the Haggadah opens and asks you the question it has been waiting all year to ask: “Are you ready to engage with me?”
That question is the engine of Rabbanit Yemima Mizrachi’s Passover Haggadah, Inspirational Reflections for the Seder Night. The holiday of Passover, she writes in her introduction, is filled with encounters: with tradition, with family, with ourselves.
Each of the 15 stages of the Seder is a door into one of those encounters. This Haggadah, complete with the full Hebrew liturgy in both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi versions, is built to walk you through every one of them.
She begins before the Seder begins. The weeks of exhausting preparation, she says, are not the obstacle to the holiday. They are the holiday. We are on a pilgrimage right now, the Rebbe of Piaseczno wrote from inside the Warsaw Ghetto. He hid his Torah teachings in milk canisters beneath the ground, believing someone would find them one day.
The happiness associated with this holiday is the small pain in our back and the hands that have become somewhat dry. Don’t take this exhausting journey away from us. By the time you sit down at the Seder table, Mizrachi is saying, you have already been changed by the getting there.
And she knows exactly who sits down. On this holiday, there isn’t a person in the world without “an empty chair” at the table, she writes, with a hole in his heart. For me, it’s my father. For others, it’s a relative who isn’t with them right now. For divorced women, it might be the children who are with the other side of the family. For singles, it’s the chair itself, which suddenly feels less stable beneath them.
Taking stock of broken vessels
The Seder night, she says, is precisely when God comes down and takes stock of His broken vessels. Compassion is stirred specifically by the loneliness felt on this family-oriented night.
At each stage of the Seder, alongside the liturgy, she places a reflection and then what she calls “Our Personal Avoda”: not a discussion question but a direction for prayer, in the moment, before moving forward. At Yahatz, she turns it toward the three places where we feel most incomplete.
Even the parts of the Seder that seem to resist meaning, she refuses to abandon. Of the long tally of plagues multiplied by rabbinical calculation, she writes: This list is one of the boring parts of the Haggadah. Why does it matter? Either way, it’s the same miracle.
In truth, though, this section is amazing. The Haggadah is telling you: Count. You’ve gotten used to so many wonderful things in your life. In the daily grind of life, you’ve forgotten so many moments of redemption and personal salvation.
Woven through the night are stories of Rebbe Nahman of Breslov, placed at the moments when a story can say what a teaching cannot. A man who travels to Vienna to find a treasure and discovers it was buried under his own bridge all along. A king who wanders his kingdom looking for one genuinely happy person.
They are not illustrations. They are the Haggadah reaching for the person at the table who is carrying something he or she has not yet been able to name.
The four cups are linked to the four matriarchs, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah, who hold our hands through the long night of redemption.
When the second cup arrives, Mizrachi writes about Rebekah sending Jacob into the dark to receive the blessing: I literally imagined her singing “One little goat, one little goat” as she tenderly draped the goatskin on the smooth neck of her beloved son Jacob and sent him off, laden with her prayers, with her tears, whispering quietly: “Enough. Tonight, tonight... is all yours, my son. Go!”
At Nirtza, she turns to the table one last time. Look around you, she writes. Do the people sitting next to you look pleased and fulfilled? Know that even if you can’t wait for the guests to finally leave, right now, at this very moment, God is so pleased with your Seder. As you should be, too.
After the songs, she includes a personal essay, “Abba’s Little Girl,” about the empty chair at her own Seder table, reserved for her father. It is the most unguarded thing in this Haggadah. She writes about the sundial her father drew on the freshly cleaned terrace floor, the No. 12 bus to Mahaneh Yehuda, the ancient sundial he showed her there, and how, at that moment, she felt like the sun.
Then she sings “Had Gadya” to his tune, knowing it is really a song about a father who paid two zuzim for one little goat and never stopped being a father.
The Passover Seder is right around the corner. Are you ready for the encounter?
Inspirational Reflections for the Seder Night
By Yemima Mizrachi
Maggid Books/Koren Publishers Jerusalem
460 pages; $33