Shabbat Hagadol 5785 - 12th April 2025
You can listen to Rabbi Howard sermon here or read it below.
“Behold, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before the coming of the great – hagadol, today is Shabbat Hagadol - great and awesome day of God. He will reconcile the hearts of parents with their children, and the hearts of children with their parents, so that when I come, I do not strike the whole land with utter destruction.” (Malachi 3:23-4)
This is, how to put it?, the last word in prophecy. Literally so: the last words of the last prophetic book. When the Hebrew Bible came to be edited, and a running order constructed, the last words chosen were a hope linked to a threat. The anonymous speaker, who takes for himself the portentous name of Malachi – “my messenger” – brings prophecy in Israel to an end by announcing a new hope for the people, a hope for transformation, but a hope that is conditional, a hope shadowed by the threat of a catastrophe: “utter destruction”.
The time is late 6th century, early 5th century, BCE, and the people had only recently returned to their land after the trauma of exile. And as he channels the voice of divinity, the prophet draws on the only other figure from the tradition apart from Moses who was characterised as hearing God at Sinai, namely Elijah: “Behold, I will send the prophet Elijah to you…”. Elijah who hears the still, small voice of God (1Kings 19), and soon after disappears into the ether – it is he who will return, with a new responsibility: to bring parents closer to their children and children to their parents. This is Elijah’s new role - to be a family therapist, so to speak – and, for reasons not quite spelled out but left for us to ponder, the very future of the nation depends on it.
So yes, Malachi announces that hope will arise, but it is balanced with this threat, which is unequivocal: if something doesn’t change there will be “utter destruction”. That’s quite a choice by our tradition - a touch of Beckett one might say - for prophetic literature to end with hope yoked to the threat of catastrophe. Everything could be lost, again. Fail, fail again, fail utterly.
And what makes the difference, the difference between a future of celebration and wellbeing, and future of mourning and loss? It seems to depend, in the prophet’s finely-tuned consciousness, on a dynamic that every era faces – between the generations - a fraught dynamic that is part of daily life, for families, for societies, and - in the mind of the prophet - is what will determine how history turns out, for good or for ill. And what the prophet intuits is that hope for the future depends not on the grand themes of politics or economics but on emotional relationships, how parents can be reconciled with their offspring, and how the younger generation can be reconciled with their parents. Here, the drama of intergenerational conflict is the engine of history. This is the prophet’s conclusion – and the conclusion of prophecy.
This is a text we could unpack and interpret at any historical moment and it would have a relevance, it would pose questions, it would provoke, it would warn, it would encourage reflection on whether there is something inevitable, universal, about one generation not seeing eye to eye with the other. But we are not living at any time in history, we are living now, in the midst of a world, and a Jewish world in particular, in intense turmoil. So today I am inviting you to reflect on these verses in the light of where we are now, as Jews, in our families and in our communities. Because the conflicts are real and the stakes are high.
And at the moment – and it’s the second year this is the case, the second time we have gathered for seder since the bloody dramas of October 7th 2023 and what has followed it, all the horrors that have forced their way into our seder gatherings – at the moment, these dramas in Israel, in Gaza, in the West Bank, are the inescapable accompaniment to our Pesach celebrations and gatherings, celebrations still shadowed by the agony of hostages unreleased, by our awareness of violence and illegality, by our pain at blood shed indiscriminately, the blood of young and old, of Jew and non-Jew. The first plague, we recall, is the plague of blood, rivers of blood – such an eternal image…
When I have been talking with people about their seders - who will be there, the issues and questions they are brining to the table - it seems that certain themes are present, certain issues where the hearts of parents and the hearts of children may or may not be aligned.
You see, the seder has always celebrated our survival as a people, our miraculous survival as a people, and it has pointed to our responsibility as Jews to engage with the project of bringing liberation to others, of responding with compassion to the needs of society – the very first text we say, as we break the matzah, is ha lachmah anya (“this is the bread of affliction our ancestors ate)” – and the symbol is not just about the unleavened bread of the Pesach story but the generations of affliction that Jews have suffered, what we have had to swallow down; our ancestors have been eating symbolically the bread of affliction wherever they found themselves in the world; but we break the matza at this point – because we live in a broken world; and we hide a part of the matza to be found by the next generation later on in the evening, they will discover in their turn (If they don’t already know it) that affliction is a part of this miraculous and fraught story of the Jewish people.
But the text doesn’t stop there because our history is not one of self-pity - ‘oh look how everyone hates us’: some Jews feel that and want to tell the Jewish story that way, as if that’s all that needs to be said about being Jewish, it is the antisemites who make us Jewish - but the Haggadah passage flows on, uninterrupted, and speaks about the responsibility to use our understanding of oppression and affliction in the service of others: “let all who are hungry come and eat”, it goes on, “let all who are in need come and share with us our Pesach” . The seder is not just teaching history but it is articulating, right at the beginning, a moral vision the Jewish people have carried and developed as a result of that history. The power of the story resides in our awareness, passed on through the generations, that we are a people who, yes, have been oppressed, but that then found themselves liberated from the harshness of oppression and committed themselves to feed the poor, to attend to those in need, to bring that freedom to others.
But now, at this point in our history, that next generation will turn to us and what will they say, what are they entitled to say? Well, you can write the script yourselves, because it is a script that of course is not only in the hearts and in the mouths of the younger generations of Jews, our children and grandchildren, but it also might be buried in the secret crevices of our own hearts: a script that might point to the suffering that is being caused to Palestinians, to their children, their families, their homes, their mosques, their universities, their hospitals and schools, their health workers and
doctors and journalists; and the hearts of our children, schooled in the moral vision of Judaism, the universal ethical vision of Judaism - of justice and compassion, of feeding the hungry, of hospitality, of care for the stranger - our children schooled in our progressive communities in a commitment to Tikkun Olam, the repairing of our broken world, this whole generation could turn to us and ask: so how can you justify this, and how can you celebrate this festival of freedom, in the midst of such oppression? If the purpose of being Jewish is to be the bearers of a vision, an ethical commitment to alleviate suffering, what does that mean for us now when we see Jews as responsible for so much suffering? When it really matters – and it does really matter - are you siding with power or are you siding with justice?
Although the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people have been going on for generations (it’s the equivalent of Israel’s ‘original sin’) - and although people sensitive to these issues have been introducing other symbols onto the seder plate in recent years, like olives from Palestine, lest we forget - something’s changed these last two years. We all feel it, the hearts of parents and the hearts of children have been carrying this burden when we read about freedom and slavery, hardheartedness, the death of innocent children - themes which have always been in the story - we are hearing these themes and relating to them in new ways, deeply uncomfortable ways sometimes. The final plague, the death of the firstborn Egyptian males, may always have been an element of the seder that raised ambivalent feelings in us; or the drowning of the Egyptians in the Sea of Reeds as the Hebrew people passed into safety; but these traditional motifs from the saga could be rationalised away, or symbolically addressed by diminishing our joy through a few drops of wine spilled from our cups.
But I wonder if those ways of addressing the moral complexities of the traditional story can help us any more in the face of what he know about the dead children of our own times in this current conflict. If the hearts of parents are to be reconciled to their children, and the hearts of children reconciled to their parents, there may have to be a lot of grief work to do, grief to be shared, a recognition that compassion is not the sole preserve of one generation, that both young and old can feel the sadness and the compassion, can weep with the fury and the pain of seeing what has unfolded this last 18 months, and counting…
There is a tragedy unfolding in Jewish history and the soul of Judaism is in peril. Can each generation recognise that they share the distress about this, the fears about this, the rage about this?
It may be some comfort, a little comfort – or it may not – to know that moral qualms about aspects of our story have a very old pedigree. Fifteen hundred years ago the rabbis of the Talmud looked at the story and they created a midrash, a story of their own, to give voice to their humanistic and universalistic impulses, when they thought about the drowning of the Egyptians, who yes were persecutors, you yes were oppressors and acted with cruelty - but were also flesh and blood; and perhaps victims in their own way, to the powers-that-be, as soldiers in armies so often are, drafted in and just following orders. But when the rabbis of old read the story, and thought deeply into the human dimensions of it, they said:
“At that time, the ministering angels wanted to sing a song of praise to the Holy One of Israel, blessed be He; but he restrained them, saying: “My creatures are drowning in the sea and you would sing before me?”
Temper your rejoicing, the rabbis were saying, because from the point of view of the divine, all human life is sacred, all life. And yes you have to deal with moral complexities and the complexities of the costs of freedom, but never forget that it is God’s creatures who are suffering, that the victims of your existential fears share a common humanity with you. Feel the compassion, they said, weep with the compassion, hold each other in compassion, each with another, each generation with the other. This is the only way we can retain hope in the world. This is the only way we can retain the hope for hope – share the compassion we feel for those who suffer, for those who die needlessly, heedlessly. Weep for the pity of it all, weep for the horror of it all.
Stop singing, stop defending the indefensible, stop justifying, stop rationalising, stay with the horror and the pity and your compassion. In each generation Pharoah’s hardheartedness is reborn, it is incarnated within leaders and followers alike. Leaders who lack compassion, followers who lack compassion. But the Jewish task is to keep compassion alive when others forget it. This is a transgenerational task: whatever the hurts you are carrying, do not let that hurt blot out your capacity for compassion.
If the generations around the seder table can keep in touch with their compassion, their shared vision of compassion, then maybe, maybe, hope might be present and we won’t have to face the alternative: utter destruction.
