Speech, Stories, and Slavery

Shabbat HaGadol 5776/16 April 2016

In the brisk Latvian autumn of 1963, sixteen-year-old Yosef Mendelevich learned of a small group of Jews who spent Sundays in a pine forest outside Riga known as Rumbuli. On November 29 and December 8, 1941, Nazis and Latvian collaborators had murdered 25,000 Jews in that forest; but for twenty years, amid the terror of Stalinism, Riga’s Jews had spoken of Rumbuli only in whispers. Mendelevich, however, heard that a year earlier the Jewish volunteers had identified the site of the massacre and were quietly working to clean up the site and erect a memorial.

Mendelevich was born in the years following the Second World War, well after the golden era of Latvian Jewish culture in the 1920s; while his parents nurtured some Jewish life in their home, his teachers’ and schoolmates’ virulent anti-Semitism pushed Mendelevich’s sense of Jewish identity below the surface. Still, the forest gatherings awakened something in him. Intrigued by the mystery taking place at Rumbuli, Mendelevich went looking for the site one Sunday. Gal Beckerman, in When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone, his masterful history of the Soviet Jewry movement, describes what happened next:

The first time I encountered Mendelevich’s story, I was baffled: how did an international movement to liberate Soviet Jews, strong enough to have contributed to the Soviet Union’s eventual downfall, emerge from an inchoate band of nostalgic, middle-aged intellectuals and disaffected teenagers? As Beckerman described their work to memorialize the Rumbuli massacre, their singing Palmach anthems and other nationalistic Israeli songs, and their clandestine study of historical works by Simon Dubnow — one of the Riga Jews murdered at Rumbuli — I couldn’t understand what common thread tied these disparate elements together.

The answer to this mystery lies in two well-known passages from the Haggadah. As with so many elements of the Haggadah, our great familiarity with the text and the urgency of getting to dinner before everyone melts down combine to leave some significant insights hiding in plain sight. Maggid, the storytelling part of the Haggadah, is framed by two famous declarations. At the very beginning, the Haggadah tells us:

And in the final passage of Maggid before Hallel, the Haggadah concludes:

I suspect if I asked what these two passages mean, taken together, most of you would respond that the Haggadah obligates us to tell, retell, and elaborate on the Exodus story year after year because of our responsibility to teach our children: “as it is said: And on that day tell your son.” Until last week, I would have said the same thing and moved on to a more “interesting” section; but last Wednesday, as I studied these two passages with Rabbi Elie Holzer, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, I noticed something remarkable. In assuming that we tell the story to teach our children, I not only missed the deeper meaning of these passages, I also fundamentally misunderstood the structure of these texts.

Of course, the authors of the Haggadah didn’t make it easy for us. They packed all the content of Maggid in between, separating the two texts by dozens of pages and at least an hour of conversation, sometimes much more; but they also placed them in the Haggadah in reverse order, with the instruction first and the reasoning behind the practice at the very end. If we put these two lines side by side and flip the sequence, the hidden message comes into plain sight:

Read this way, we see a very different purpose in the Haggadah. In each generation, each person is obligated to see — or perhaps, as Maimonides suggests, to present^[4] — oneself as being personally liberated from bondage; telling the story to our children is the mechanism by which we accomplish this self-perception or self-presentation; and we are all obliged to tell the story — even if we are learned, enlightened, well-versed — because the purpose of the Haggadah is not to communicate the content of the story but to demonstrate, through the act of storytelling, our personal liberation. 

Let’s journey back to the very beginning: Moses, commissioned by God, goes to the enslaved Israelites with God’s message of redemption; rebuffed, he famously complains to God, הֵן בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵל לֹא־שָֽׁמְעוּ אֵלַי וְאֵיךְ יִשְׁמָעֵנִי פַרְעֹה וַֽאֲנִי עֲרַל שְׂפָתָֽיִם, “Indeed, the Children of Israel have not listened to me, so how will Pharaoh listen to me, when I have uncircumcised lips?”^[5] But as the Holy Zohar notes, Moses has already raised this objection once before, at the Burning Bush: בִּי אֲדֹנָי לֹא אִישׁ דְּבָרִים אָנֹכִי גַּם מִתְּמוֹל גַּם מִשִּׁלְשֹׁם… כִּי כְבַד־פֶּה וּכְבַד לָשׁוֹן אָנֹֽכִי, “Please, my Lord, I am not a man of words, neither yesterday nor the day before… for my mouth and tongue are burdened.”^[6] At that time, however, God promised Moses, אָֽנֹכִי אֶהְיֶה עִם־פִּיךָ, “I will aid your mouth”^[7] — so why does Moses worry so much?

The Zohar explains that while the Israelites were enslaved, speech itself — any meaningful communication — was in exile. After centuries of oppression, the Israelites’ first appeal to God comes only after Moses finds his moral consciousness; but even then they could express themselves only with a sigh, a groan, an outcry: sound without content. Only at Sinai, when “God spoke all these words,”^[8] was the faculty of speech restored.^[9] For Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the Zohar’s reading of Exodus captures the essential distinction between slavery and freedom:

As a child, I wondered about Pharaoh’s decree to murder the baby boys: why doesn’t the Torah record our ancestors protesting? Even if they lacked the power to stop Pharaoh, throughout our history we see instances where Jews, with very mixed results, fought back against impossible odds: from the Maccabees and the Bar Kokhba rebellion to the Warsaw Ghetto and Sobibor, during the British Mandate and ever since the State of Israel was established, some Jews have always resisted our enemies. Why not in Egypt?

From the Zohar and Soloveitchik, we can understand the difference: our ancestors in Egypt suffered a fate worse than all other deprivations. Without the ability to speak, denied even enough voice to groan or cry, they literally could not object to their circumstances. This evisceration of speech, of thought itself, stands as a hallmark of totalitarianism. As George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 opens, Winston Smith sits down to write in a blank diary — a treasonous offense. Smith struggles to begin, however, not because he fears the consequences, though they are dire, but because he can’t formulate the thoughts he hoped to write down:

Big Brother, the totalitarian regime Orwell imagines, has not only stripped Smith of his political and economic liberties; it has fundamentally dehumanized him, denied him the ability convey sense and meaning that distinguishes Man from Beast. He has become so alienated from any sense of self, from any recognition of his own needs, that — like our enslaved ancestors — he can not give voice to his suffering. The same holds true for us. In order to see and present ourselves as personally experiencing liberation, we must first understand our tradition’s definition of slavery: a state of being in which we lack the capacity to experience our own distress as well as the means to communicate that suffering.

Herein lies the significance of storytelling at the Seder and the explanation for why we tell and retell the story even after we all know all the details, even when we know the words by heart: once we understand voicelessness as the defining characteristic of slavery, storytelling becomes the ultimate act of self-liberation. From this perspective, it seems almost inevitable that a small group of Latvian Jews, gathering to memorialize the massacre at Rumbuli, would coalesce into a resistance movement powerful enough to change the course of both Soviet and American history. As Beckerman explains:

Although they could not have explained it in these terms at the time — for the reasons we have already laid out — the group gathered at Rumbuli had started to develop a liberated consciousness. Through their efforts to mark the site where so many of their parents and grandparents were murdered, in their adoption of Israeli cultural touchstones, in their hidden study of Hebrew language, Jewish history and Jewish ritual, Yosef Mendelevich and his newfound community told and retold a story of Jewish experience different than the Soviet oppression that defined their lives up to that point. Those stories ignited the sparks of liberation, gave strength to the refuseniks of the 70s and 80s, and finally pushed open the Soviet Union’s gates and allowed our brothers and sisters to walk free.

Still, we must not lose sight of the Haggadah’s charge to us: בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר, “in every generation,” we must use storytelling to liberate ourselves. For American Jews, who enjoy a level of freedom our ancestors in Europe and the Middle East couldn’t possibly imagine, this poses a difficult challenge: if we understand storytelling as an act of self-liberation, from what oppression do we liberate ourselves today? Here we should not fall into the trap of literalism. As Rav Soloveitchik reminds us, we have now defined slavery in terms that transcend legal or economic definitions: “The unfree man differs, existentially, from the free man: one may, existentially, be a slave in the midst of political and economic freedoms.”^[13] Slavery dehumanizes the slave by stripping him of his voice, muting his self-expression; and yet there are so many things, even among the “political and economic freedoms” of America, that can silence us. Shame. Fear. Insecurity. Envy. Resentment. We must find a way to tell these stories — in life, if not at the Seder itself — if we hope to experience liberation. Storytelling, the means by which we sever the chains of emotional slavery, begins an irreversible process of redemption. As Brené Brown writes, “Once there is language, awareness, and understanding, turning back is almost impossible.”^[14] She teaches the same existential truth found in the Zohar and in the Haggadah: in order to be free we must find our voice, bring speech back from exile.

“When a people leaves a mute world and enters a world of sound, speech and song,” Soloveitchik writes, “It becomes a redeemed people, a free people.”^[15] For this reason we sing and tell stories, debate and reminisce, late into the night around the Seder table — but not for this reason alone. We tell our stories — and it is vitally important that the story be ours — because in telling our own stories we become conscious of our needs: Love, Equality, Compassion, Justice, Fellowship. These human needs, which each person experiences in her own particular way, form the basis of universal human morality. Rav Soloveitchik insists that “Whoever permits his legitimate needs to go unsatisfied will never be sympathetic to the crying needs of others.”^[16] Our capacity to care about and serve others depends on our sensitivity to our own needs; in order to work on behalf of another’s liberation, we must experience liberation ourselves. Our individual, personal acts of storytelling at the Seder contextualize our lives within the grand epic of human liberation. We tell these stories in order to see ourselves, present ourselves, as the ones experiencing liberation in the here and now. No matter how learned, enlightened, wise, or well-read, each of us enters Pesah in need of liberation from something; each of us leaves the holiday called to act in support of the liberation of others. We find our liberation when we begin to tell our story.

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