Maggid means retelling the story of the exodus from Egypt.

In every generation, we must see ourselves as if we personally were liberated from Egypt. We gather tonight to tell the ancient story of a people's liberation from Egyptian slavery. This is the story of  our  origins as a people. It is from these events that we gain our ethics, our vision of history, our dreams for the future. We gather tonight, as two hundred generations of Jewish families have before us, to retell the timeless tale.

Yet our tradition requires that on Seder night, we do more than just tell the story. We must live the story. Tonight, we will re-experience the liberation from Egypt. We will remember how our family suffered as slaves; we will feel the exhilaration of redemption. We must re-taste the bitterness of slavery and must rejoice over our newfound freedom. We annually return to Egypt in order to be freed. We remember slavery in order to deepen our commitment to end all suffering; we recreate our liberation in order to reinforce our commitment to universal freedom.

So what is the story?

How did the Jews end up as slaves in Egypt?

The story goes that in ancient times this guy Abraham started to realize that the statues his friends worshiped were just statues. The idea of a spiritual—rather than physical—God inspired him to leave his family (in the Torah he really just dips out in the middle of the night) and begin a new people in Canaan, the land that would become Israel. Abraham asked God for guidance and God promised that he would give rise to a great nation, but that his "descendants will dwell for a time in a land that is not their own, and they will be enslaved and afflicted for four hundred years; however,... afterward they shall leave with great wealth."

In the years that the Jews lived in Egypt, numbers grew, and soon the Jewish community became the People of Israel. Pharaoh was freaked out by this, so he enslaved us. We were forced to build pyramids and do difficult labor. The Egyptians feared that even as slaves, the Israelites might grow strong and rebel, so Pharaoh decreed that all Israelite baby boys should be drowned. At this point, God stepped in, by speaking to Moses via a burning bush. God told Moses to demand that Pharaoh release the Jews, and explain that things would go super awry if Pharaoh didn't listen. Naturally, Pharaoh didn't, and so God hit Egypt with io plagues, each increasingly worse.

Passover is one of the most meaningful holidays in Jewish culture not only because we celebrate liberation, but also we celebrate the fact that God himself—not an angel or prophet—acted to free the Jewish people and lead us to Israel.

The tray with the matzot is moved aside, and the second cup is poured.


haggadah Section: Maggid - Beginning