D’var Torah – Shabbat Shemini d’Pesah 5782
Click HERE for an audio recording of this D’var Torah
A D’var Torah for Shabbat, the seventh day of Pesah
By Rabbi Cantor Sam Levine (’19)
One of the key passages of the Passover Haggadah comes at the end of the maggid section: b’khol dor vador hayyav adam lir’ot et atzmo ke’ilu hu yatza miMitzrayim – “In every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as though they personally had come out of Egypt…” This is a call to memory – to a national memory that has, to a large degree, been constructed for us. We are enjoined to “regard ourselves” as though we had personally come out of Egypt based on the information that we have been given, or at least based on a version of the story that has been passed down to us.
We are the people of memory. The Hebrew root z-kh-r (meaning “memory” or “remembering”) appears 228 times in the Hebrew Bible, and the Read More >
