by Rabbi Eli Birnbaum, Stanmore United Synagogue
Tell me a story
It may seem like a childish request, but here is the truth: no-one ever fully grows out of that child who wants nothing more than to lose themselves in a world of pure imagination.
Storytelling has always been the universal language of communication. The Chauvet cave system in the south of France is famous for its series of remarkably well-preserved cave drawings, considered to be the oldest on the planet. Some depict the day-to-day lives of our ancient ancestors, hunting deer or warding off predators. But others depict something closer to imagination: pictorial tales of dramatic volcanic eruptions, rhinos competing for territorial supremacy with lions and even hints to an early belief system in various gods.
In this vein, it is worth mentioning the comments of the Mishnaic sage and famed convert to Judaism, Onkelos. In his seminal translation of the Torah, Onkelos renders Bereishit 2:7 thus: “And Hashem God created the man as dust from the earth, and He breathed into his nostrils a soul of life; and it was in Adam as a power of speech”. What sets us apart from other sentient creatures is our ability to communicate. We are, as Aristotle put it, a “social animal”.
Storytelling is part of the very fabric of society. Our shared narratives can bind us to and establish commonality with almost total strangers, leading to remarkably quick and deep levels of cooperation. It is no coincidence that the Hebrew word for telling over a story – Haggadah – shares a phonetic connection with the word for a bundle tied tightly together: Agudah.
It is also no coincidence that storytelling is at the very heart of the Pesach celebration. At a simple level, there is an intrinsic and profound inter-relationship between freedom and the power of a story. A slave’s imagination is barely his own. His every waking moment is dedicated to the wants and whims of his master. He collapses exhausted into bed at the end of a laborious day. He dreams of one thing: freedom. What he imagines beyond this will be dulled and narrowed by the acute drudgery of his day-to-day experience. Pity him, for he has no other frame of reference.
This is echoed in the Israelites’ complaints in the desert: “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt, the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic!” (Bemidbar 11:5). Imagining a land “flowing with milk and honey”, a land within which they will be able to build their own society and culture, is beyond the grasp of a generation raised in slavery. ‘Give us what we already know, just more of it!’
The free person suddenly has all paths open to them. Every fork on every road is another chapter in a book that they write, knowingly or otherwise. So, there is an intrinsic and profound inter-relationship between freedom and the ability to tell a story at all.
Pesach is our annual invitation to embark on that journey, to raise our heads above the parapet of the familiar world that is and start imagining the world as it could be. To do this, we must first radically adjust the way we tell stories.
Reimagining imagination
We contrasted the restricted, narrow imagination of the slave with the open-ended imagination of the free person. Seder night delicately balances the two. As we eat the matzah, referred to as the ‘bread of affliction’, we lean like kings. The food that is meant to symbolise the very mortar of our slave labour (charoset) is the sweetest and most delicious thing on the table! Perhaps it can be said that Seder night therefore speaks to the contrast and paradox thrown up by the enslaved/free mindset. The former is at risk of never being able to dream beyond the parapet of a lived experience totally beholden to the whims of a master. But by the same token, the latter risks losing sight of the wood for all the trees he might imagine.
And this brings us to the absolute core of Pesach as a space in time: freedom is not a goal. It cannot be. It is too chaotic, boundless, intoxicating. Freedom awaits on the other side of the Reed Sea, but it is not journey’s end. It is merely the start. The true finish line lies forty years in the distance, across deserts, mountains and rivers. And that finish line resembles more closely a matured version of freedom that has grown beyond the latent embryonic stage: statehood and national responsibility. The hard slog of building a country, culture and faith from nothing.
To begin understanding the process of defining and then refining the free imagination, we must first make the following rather painful observation: the way we encounter stories in the West is many miles removed from Seder night’s intention.
Once upon a time, the child within us possessed the ability to build entire worlds! Back gardens turned effortlessly into magical fantasy forests complete with firebreathing see-saws and knights in shining wellington boots. Imaginary friends competing for time on the best swings.
And then, at some point in our development, we stopped imagining. We abandoned the art of dreaming and outsourced our imaginations to television and film studios, to publishing houses and record labels. To make matters worse, we pay them handsomely for the privilege!
In the era of the infinite scroll, Reels, Shorts, streams and subscriptions, the marketplace of imagination is so very crowded and so very noisy that it becomes very difficult to hear our own internal voice, to understand which narratives we genuinely share, and which are simply foisted upon us by the automated algorithms of wider society.
Pesach urges us: reimagine how you imagine.
It does this right at the end of the Maggid stage of the Seder, when we are so hungry even the matzah and maror (bitter herbs) look appetising. There, we quote the Mishnaic sage Rabban Gamliel (Pesachim 10:5): “In every single generation, every person must see themselves as if they personally left Egypt, as it is written (Shemot 13:8): ‘And you shall tell your child on that day, saying: “For the sake of this, God did this for me when I left Egypt”’”. How do we achieve this?
The Never-ending story
In Hebrew, we possess two words for the process of storytelling. ‘Sippur’, shares a root connection with a peculiar group of words: Barber (‘Sapar’), border (‘Sephar’) and money-counter (‘Saphar’). At first glance, they appear to have no interconnection whatsoever. But take another look. All three words imply differentiation and separation. This coin is not that one. This hair is no longer attached to that head. This country is not the same as that. So too ‘Sippur’. This is storytelling as it exists in the commercialised West: A gap in time when we pay to get lost in the distant past or fictional future, temporarily separating ourselves from everyone and everything around us.
‘Aggadah’, shares a phonetic connection with the word for a bundle tied tightly together: ‘Agudah’. This is the storytelling of shared narratives that bind us to and establish commonality with almost total strangers. Be that through a community, a school, or even an entire country, this is storytelling as the creation of common spaces where previously there were none.
Seder night overtly leans (no pun intended) toward the latter. The simplest clue is in the name of the book we use: The Haggadah. As we warn the ‘wicked’ son, this is not the moment for the individual to lose themselves and drift away from the group.
Whereas Western imagination is the process of shutting out everything around us for a few hours, preferably in absolute silence save for the crunch of popcorn, Jewish imagination encourages the organised chaos of a noisy, almost raucous shared table, replete with questions, answers, songs and of course – the crunch of matzah.
On Seder night we quote Rabban Gamliel’s teaching in two parts, but it is easy to miss the second section. This is because the Maggid section appears to be winding to a close as we raise the second cup of wine in a toast while reciting the ‘first half’ of the Hallel thanksgiving prayer.
The second part of Rabban Gamliel’s teaching is hidden at the outset of that segment and, intriguingly, forms the introductory paragraph to Hallel: “Therefore, we must thank and praise…” Stitch them back together and the two parts reveal something remarkable: Because we can see ourselves as if we personally went out of Egypt, therefore we are obligated to sing songs of thanks.
In other words, once a year we stop outsourcing our imaginations. I personally believe this is why the Haggadah is famously the only classic piece of Jewish literature written anonymously. Its passages, poetry and prose are merely a starting point, an introduction to the main, feature-length story: the one we write together, generation after generation, with chisel on clay, quill on parchment, pen on paper or finger on screen, weaving thread by thread the shared narrative of Haggadah. And for this reason, the Haggadah does not begin with a ‘Once upon a time’. The story is still happening, and we are the actors, each of us assigned a starring role as part of a national imagination reclaimed and reawakened.