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Karpas: Seeing the Blossoms
Contributed by Noraa Kaplan

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

Spring is the season of rebirth, regrowth, and renewal. After months of lying dormant, almost dead, the Earth goes through a period of rapid change. The nights get shorter, the days grow warmer, and flowers begin to bud. The choice to set the Exodus story during the early spring must have been deliberate: watching the Earth come back to life after the barren winter can be enough to convince us of the possibility of miracles. 

The very first mitzvah that Hashem gave B’ney Yisra’el, before they even left Mitzrayim, was to treat the month of Nisan as “the beginning of months, the first month of the year for you.” (Exodus 12:2) The Torah doesn’t call the month when the Exodus took place ‘Nisan’ though, but Aviv, which in modern Hebrew simply means ‘spring.’ The name Nisan wasn’t adopted until the times of Babylonian captivity. It is closely related to nitzan, a Hebrew word meaning ‘blossom’ which only appears once in the Tanach: “Blossoms are seen on the land, the time of singing has begun, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.” (Song of Songs 2:12)

The Zohar, Kabbalah’s mystical core text traditionally attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, begins with an interpretation of the verse above. “In the beginning,” Rabbi Shimon opens, “the blossoms appeared on earth.” In these blossoms, he saw the whole of creation. Commenting on the verse’s strange repetition of the word eretz (meaning ‘land’) he says the first usage refers to the third day of the creation narrative, when the waters were parted to make room for dry land, so plants could grow, while the second refers obliquely to Shabbat. First we read ‘the land,’ then ‘our land.’ Which land is this? Eretz ha-Chayim, the Land of Life—another name for the World to Come. We see two great redemptions in this verse: the parting of the Red Sea so our ancestors could cross on dry land, and the coming redemption of the revolution. 

The Sages taught that it was in the month of Nisan when our ancestors were redeemed from Mitzrayim, and it will be in Nisan when we are redeemed again. All moments are charged with revolutionary potential, but maybe there’s something in the spring air that makes that potential feel more real. Tonight, let’s allow the presence of that potential to rest among us. Now that the “winter is past, and the rains are over and gone,” (Song of Songs 2:11) let us remember to look for the nitzanim, the possibilities that are blossoming all around us. 
 
haggadah Section: Karpas
Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan

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