Ha Lachma Anya - What is it Doing at the Beginning of the Seder?

by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein

Ha Lachma Anya – “This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt…” It is an Aramaic introductory paragraph for which there doesn’t seem to be a good reason.

This prayer comes from the Gaonic period. That’s why it is written in Aramaic which was the vernacular of Babylonian Jews. It actually reveals two fundamental messages of Pesach.

I. The first message is an ethical one. Why did God plan Jewish history to require that the Jews begin their national history as slaves? God said to Avram: “You shall surely know that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and they will be enslaved and afflicted for four-hundred years.”(Genesis, 15:13). Why was this beginning necessary?

The Torah tells us explicitly that we learned from our beginnings in slavery what it is to suffer, so that we would become sensitive to the suffering of others. “And you shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger because you were strangers in the Land of Egypt” (Exodus, 23:9).

Therefore, we are expected to love the stranger; to give tzedakah, to live lives of chesed. The Talmud says: “There are three characteristics of the Jewish people: merciful, humble, and doing acts of kindness (Massechet Yevamot, 79A.)

This is the first message of Egyptian slavery. This explains why Israel was among the first to rush rescuers to Turkey and Syria to help rescue people buried by a disastrous earthquake.

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This is why an Israeli hospital in Tzfat treats Syrian refugees and sends them back home with medications, without Hebrew writings on the containers, because these refugees would have been killed by their fellow Syrians if they were found to be using Israeli medications.

This is why Israel took in 800,000 Jewish refugees from the Middle East between 1949 and 1951, most of them poor, doubling its population at a time when there wasn’t sufficient food to feed the Israelis themselves.

“This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt” and, therefore, “May all who are hungry come and eat; and all who are needy come and join our celebration of the Passover.” This is the ethical lesson of Egyptian slavery.

II. The second message in Ha Lachma Anya is a message of hope. It is contained in the last two lines of the paragraph in the Haggadah: “Today we are here; tomorrow we will be in the Land of Israel. Today we are slaves; tomorrow we will be free people.” What is the purpose of those two sentences?

Rav Kook provides an answer. Jews in exile do not usually have things so good. Even when the situation is good, it is precarious. I visited the new museum of Polish Jewish History in Warsaw some years ago. It has a magnificent exhibit of 1,000 years of Polish Jewish history. If there is one lesson than one learns from visiting that exhibit it is that times were mostly bad, but even when they were good, it didn’t stay that way. Everything depended upon the prince or the lord and his favor. Nothing was permanent. Nothing was forever. This is the story of Jewish exile.

And this is the story of the exodus from Egypt. Things were so terrible. How could they ever get better?

What were the odds of a mass group of slaves gaining freedom from the mightiest power of the day: Egypt?

And yet, says Rav Kook, we were freed. We were redeemed. And, therefore, says Rav Kook, the author of Ha Lachma Anya reminds us: “Today we may be in difficult exile, but tomorrow we will be in the Land of Israel. Today we may be suffering like slaves, but tomorrow we will be free.” The lesson is: never lose hope! No matter how bad things are, believe in the future and work to bring about a better tomorrow.

It happened in the exodus from a terrible slavery in Egypt. It can happen for us today.

The end of the Holocaust in 1945, with all of its horror, can lead to 1948 and the start of seventyfive miraculous years of Israeli statehood.

The closing of the Straits of Tiran in May of 1967 can result in the greatest deliverance of our time in the form of the Six Day War and its results.

Natan Sharansky can languish nine and-a-half years in the gulag and he can be freed and become a Minister in two Israeli governments and he can serve a term of seven years as the Chairman of the Jewish Agency.

Never lose hope! Today the society in Israel may seem to be in a veritable civil war. We must believe that, as difficult as the issues may be, they will be resolved and there will be peace among Israelis. Today we may be frightened at the rise of antiSemitism. We must believe that as suddenly as it rose it will, please God, recede and diminish.

These are the twin messages with which we begin the Seder.

The ethical message of Egyptian servitude. “This is the bread of affliction; …”, therefore, we live lives of chesed and compassion.

The message of hope and redemption. L’shana ha-ba’a: It seemed impossible, but it happened; and it will happen again.

Please God: we must believe in l’shana haba’a. We must believe in this as individuals, with all of our problems, and we must believe in this as a people, despite all of our crises.

Chag Kasher v’Sameach