Shabbat HaGadol: “Being Here, Being There”

The late anthropologist Clifford Geertz once described the great challenge of studying remote civilizations as learning to straddle between “here” – the immediate world that a scholar inhabits – and “there” — the distant world that is being analyzed. A successful scholar is able to be simultaneously both here and there.

This dialectic resonates on Pesach night. We live in the present moment. Yet, we are charged to also inhabit a very different world from more than three thousand years ago. The Seder allows us to build a bridge between these two loci —here and there— by affirming our present reality even as it enables us to return to a time and place that is far away. In fact, only by constructing such a bridge can we fully understand the past, succeed in the present, and achieve a redemptive future.

In this year’s Drasha we will explore how the Seder facilitates this process by its deliberate structure, rich biblical and rabbinic sources, diverse ritual commandments, and progression of themes.

All men and women of the community are invited to attend.