One Little Goat

For a rabbi to preach about the seder on the final day of Passover – a yizkor sermon no less – shows questionable judgment, to say the very least. Like candy corn purchased the day after Halloween, no matter how tasty it may be, its arrival is a little too late. So I beg your forgiveness and your indulgence as I share with you my 2017 insights on the Haggadah; thoughts which may do you no good for this year’s festival, now in its waning hours, but will, I promise, not only serve you well next year, but also prove to be, like the afikoman, a small morsel to help frame this sacred hour of yizkor for which we have gathered.

Just before the holiday, our community was treated to a pre-Passover session taught by my beloved and honored teacher and colleague Rabbi J.J. Schacter, Professor of Jewish History and Jewish Thought and Senior Scholar at Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future. Among Rabbi Schacter’s many insights that evening was his suggestion that embedded within the Haggadah are numerous references – oblique and obvious, exoteric and esoteric – to the biblical figure of Joseph. Since his session, I have had the pleasure of reading an article Rabbi Schacter wrote on that very subject, enumerating all the places that our Haggadah, the story of our people’s liberation from bondage, makes veiled or open reference to Joseph, a figure who, at first glance, has no role in the story of our people’s liberation.

I begin with the most well-known reference, which – perhaps owing to its being a later addition to the Haggadah – Rabbi Schacter does not mention: Ehad asar, mi yodea? Who knows eleven? We know eleven! Ehad asar kokhvaya, eleven stars. The story behind the eleven stars, like the eleven stars of Van Gogh’s famed Starry Night, is never made explicit, but anyone with passing familiarity with the Joseph story understands it to be the eleven stars of Joseph’s youthful and indelicately relayed dream foretelling his brothers’ deference to him.

From here, the references become a bit more hidden. The Talmud (Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 65b) explains that in the time of the Temple, the meat of the paschal sacrifice was carried home by being swung over one’s shoulders. Why in this particular manner? Rashi explains, Derekh soharim yishma’elim, “in the manner of the Ishmaelite merchants,” that is, the ones responsible for Joseph’s arrival in Egypt. In other words, the paschal offering is meant not only to reference the sacrifice signaling Israel’s redemption from Egypt, but also to recall the near sacrifice of Joseph, whose sale into Egypt marks the beginning of our Egyptian sojourn. As for the famous Haggadah passage, Avadim hayinu l’paroh b’mitzrayim, “We were slaves to pharaoh in Egypt,” Rabbi Schachter cites rabbinic precedent that this verse may be understood to reference not only the pharaoh of Moses’s era, but the pharaoh of Joseph’s era and Joseph’s transformation from servant to free man.

How about the karpas, the green vegetable that is dipped in salt water? As any Hebrew school student will tell you, the salt water represents the tears of the slave, and the act of dipping signals the luxury of being a free man or woman. Rabbi Schacter, in unpacking the rabbinic sources, demonstrates an alternative, less well known tradition, namely, that the dipping is meant to remind us of the brothers’ dipping of Joseph’s coat of many colors in the goat’s blood to fool their father Jacob into thinking Joseph had been devoured by a wild animal. Rabbi Schacter discusses a less well known tradition of dipping the karpas in the haroset – traditionally red – all but making explicit the intimate connection between our seder dipping and the sin of Joseph’s brothers.

Other references abound. Why four cups? Traditionally, we say that the four cups refer to four different verbs in Exodus describing God’s mighty acts of redemption: v’hotzeiti, v’hitzalti, v’ga’alti, and v’lakahti. While this explanation may indeed be true, both the midrash (Bereshit Rabbah 88:5) and the Jerusalem Talmud (Pesachim 10:1) suggest that the four cups refer to the four times the Hebrew word for cup (kos) is used when Joseph interprets the dreams of pharaoh’s butler in the prison.

While the list continues (and there are copies of Rabbi Schacter’s article available for you to take home and read), as with all things, the question eventually becomes “So what?” If there is indeed a thread of Joseph – technicolor, seen and unseen – woven into the tapestry of our Haggadah, if the learned reader and discerning eye are meant to be ruminating on Joseph while eating their gefilte fish of freedom, why exactly would that be? What lesson would it teach?

It is at this point, while I proudly acknowledge my debt to Rabbi Schacter, that I humbly offer a different explanation than that of my beloved teacher.

The Haggadah, we know, spends the bulk of its time on the story of the liberation of our people, giving short thrift to the tale of our descent into servitude. That story, the final thirteen chapters of Genesis, is the story of Joseph, and it is not a pretty one. It is a tale of paternal neglect, fraternal strife, betrayal, trauma, deceit, deception, and abandonment. Nobody’s hands – not Joseph’s, not Jacob’s, and certainly not the brothers’ – are clean. It would be enough – dayeinu – were we only to focus on the dysfunction of our biblical first family as the prime reason resulting in our Egyptian sojourn. The close reader of the Joseph story knows further, and knows full well, that it was none other than Joseph who, in saving Egypt from the effects of famine, unwittingly set into motion an economy of debt-slavery that arguably gave rise to the slave culture of hundreds of years later. No Joseph, no Egypt; no Egypt, no slavery; no slavery, no redemption. At the most basic level, the tale of Joseph is in the Haggadah because it is the necessary “prequel,” the story of how we got to Egypt in the first place.

But that is just the beginning; it goes deeper. Important as it is – and it is – to tell the story of our glorious redemption, of God’s mighty hand and outstretched arm, we dare not sit down at the seder without at least giving a knowing nod, some sort of recognition, spoken or perhaps just understood, that we know the circumstances precipitating our people’s descent into slavery. We know that the story is complicated. We know that we could have been better – that everyone could have been better. The presence of Joseph at the seder table is important because it demands that we confront the difficult aspects of our family story. The descent must be told, not at the expense of the redemption, but to give the telling of our redemption authenticity and meaning. In telling of the descent, we communicate to ourselves, to each other, and perhaps even to God that we are capable of learning from our mistakes and thus worthy of forgiveness and redemption. Lest we forget, the final song of the seder, the strangest of all, Had Gadya, is a folksong about one little goat, a kid that was killed by the cat, that was bit by the dog, that was beaten by the stick, and so on and so forth. It may be a stretch, but could it be that Had Gadya is in fact the final wink to our Joseph? Was it not the slaughter of one little goat – in Hebrew se’ir izim, in Aramaic gadya – that set everything into motion in the first place? By this telling, the song and the seder conclude with the appearance of the Kadosh Barukh Hu, a grand and culminating theological catharsis of sorts. Having faced our past and told our story, we are now, as free men and women, ready to move forward with hope to the Promised Land.

There is no family that is untouched by complexity, not even – especially not even – those of our biblical predecessors. And when faced with that complexity, perhaps even trauma, we could, if we so chose, shove it under the rug – a strategy of avoidance that any therapist will tell you will serve only to perpetuate that anxiety and leave us further psychologically incapacitated. Far healthier than avoidance is to ask how we can, in spite of that complexity, rebuild in the face of loss. The first step inevitably involves retelling our story in the supportive presence of our loved ones. It need not be plastered on a billboard; it serves neither us nor our loved ones to wave the flag of our hurts and imperfections too publicly. But we must pause to give them their due, to respect them, learn from them, and grow from them.

At this time of yizkor, we recall our loved ones – their lives filled with redemptive, loving scenes. Those whom we recall have built us up and made us who we are. Our debt of gratitude to them is immense and immeasurable – beyond what we could ever repay. We also know that there is no life lived and certainly not any relationship, that is not without its imperfections. We all know that our loved ones, and often we ourselves, have been guilty, like Joseph’s family, of a misspoken word, a careless deed, or a caustic remark. Like the seder table itself, yizkor affords us the opportunity to sit in the supportive presence of family and friends to acknowledge our moments of glorious redemption alongside our wishes for do-overs – all with an eye toward moving forward. We reflect and express gratitude for the love, the wisdom, and the care that our loved ones have extended to us. And, no doubt, for some of us, perhaps many of us, we are also aware of the complexities, the places, the times when we could have been better, when our loved ones could have been better, when we should all have been better. It need not be spoken, we don’t need to wave a flag; it is understood without being made explicit. But it is important, critically important, to acknowledge. Because it is in that acknowledgement that we become wiser and stronger and develop the tools to develop a nuanced understanding of our loved ones, their wonderful and their not-so-wonderful aspects. Yizkor does not ask us to remember only good people, nor only the good of people. Yizkor serves as an opportunity for the living to construct a place in our hearts where the memory of a person can be held – without that memory incapacitating us and impeding our forward momentum.

As the children of Israel departed from Egypt, with Pharaoh in pursuit, without even enough time for the dough to rise, when every second counted, the Torah recounts (Exodus 13:15) that Moses paused to fulfill a vow – a task imposed on him by prior generations. What was that task, so important, so critical, that – with history hanging in the balance – Moses had to fulfill it? Moses, the Torah relates, went back to gather the remains of Joseph. He couldn’t leave, Israel couldn’t leave, the redemption couldn’t happen if he did not demonstrate to himself, to his people, and to God that the lessons and legacy of Joseph were not somehow integrated into their present movement forward. The remains of Joseph, the midrash explains, were no burden; just the opposite, they were the means, the vehicle by which redemption could happen. In the years to come, it would be Joseph’s legacy, in its perfections and imperfections, as much as the Ten Commandments themselves, that would guide Israel.

Today marks the conclusion of Passover. Before we leave, before our redemption is complete, we too pause. To gather our thoughts, to remember our loved ones, to build a place for them in our hearts – a place worthy of honoring them, a place not insistent on idealizing them, a place capable of keeping them close to us on our journey forward. Not in the Bible, not at our seder, and not in our own lives may we progress forward without remembering how we got there in the first place. In loss, in hope and in healing, may we all merit to sit together next year in Jerusalem.