Within Each of Us Is a Piece of All of Us

March 2021 Charlotte Jewish News

By Rabbi Rachel Smookler, The Ruach

You know it's time to find a new Hagaddah when so many of the pages are stuck together by what appears to be charoset that fell from the spoon on its way to the Hillel sandwich, when words on the pages are blurred by errant wine drops, which most likely fell off of the pinky fingers of family and guests over the years on their way to dotting the rims of their plates during the recitation of the ten plagues. I realized the need for an updated Haggadah as I prepared to write this article, searching for one of my favorite paragraphs we read during the seder:

“B’khol dor vador khayavim anu lirot et atzmeynu k’ilu yatzanu mimitz’rayim.” In every generation, it is our duty to consider ourselves as if we had come forth from Egypt.”

This year, unlike other years when this paragraph feels purely allegorical, I have a new way to understand these ancient words. This is because, during the past year, my husband and I decided to finally get the ancestry test we had always talked about ordering. A few weeks after spitting into a test tube, first my husband’s results came back, and the very next day, I received mine. I was so excited to open my 23andMe app which shows the breakdown of your complete DNA profile, along with health reports.

What caused me to think about another important piece in our Passover narrative was the fact that when I opened up my ancestry report, although evidently 99.5% of my genetic makeup is labeled as Ashkenazi Jewish, I was able to see that my trace ancestry contained percentages of “Broadly West African, Native American and finally, Peninsular Arab.”

Passover came early for me this year and I was able to fully internalize the verses in our Haggadah from Torah which relate back to the Passover story. Upon entering the Land (Israel) which God has given us, we are commanded to recite the following:

“My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us. We cried to the Eternal,

the God of our ancestors, and the Eternal heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. The Eternal freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents, bringing us to this place and giving us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Deuteronomy 26:5-8)

Who knows whether or not the genetic results I received are accurate? But what they did do for me, were to remind me of what I already knew — that our ancestors lived in Egypt, (Africa) for hundreds of years and that our Haggadah teaches us to go back and back and back in our history, retelling our journey every year, remembering our humble beginnings. Within each of us is a piece of all of us. There is no concept of the “other” and there is no room for thoughts of the “other” in all of Judaism. The verse from Deuteronomy really is the entire Haggadah in a nutshell.

These words should be highlighted at all of our seders this year and every year.

May your Passover be filled with health, reflection and joy.