The Passover Seder

The Passover Seder is the ritual meal held on the first night of the Matzoth holiday, and the first two nights of the holiday in the Diaspora, commemorating the Exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, and God's promise to Abraham to free them and give them the land of Israel — an event described in the Torah as the founding moment of the Jewish people as a nation bound for the Land of Israel. Every element of the Seder — the retelling of the Exodus narrative (the Haggadah), the eating of unleavened bread (matzah), bitter herbs, and roasted lamb, re-enacts a journey whose physical and spiritual destination is the Land of Israel.

"Next Year in Jerusalem"

At the very close of the Seder, after the retelling, the meal, and the praises are finished, participants worldwide rise and declare together: "Next year in Jerusalem!" This declaration has been recited for centuries at Jewish tables in every country of the diaspora — a household in Poland, Yemen, Morocco, or the United States concluding its Passover Seder with the same single-sentence aspiration as a household in any other corner of the world.

The same declaration is repeated at the close of liturgy for Yom Ha-Kippurim, the other major point in the Jewish year when this hope is voiced aloud in unison by entire communities. That two of the most significant and happiest nights of the Jewish calendar — one commemorating national liberation, the other national atonement — both end with the identical wish to return to Jerusalem is no coincidence; it reflects how deeply embedded this aspiration is in the structure of Jewish religious life.

The date of the slaughter of the Passover lamb and the following 7-day Matzoth holiday is itself fixed by the Hebrew calendar, a lunar-solar system calibrated specifcially to the agricultural seasons of the Land of Israel rather than to the climate of wherever the holiday happens to be observed — a further, quieter reminder, built into the very timing of the festival, that the Land of Israel remains the reference point of Jewish life.