Tonight and tomorrow are a special Shabbat called Shabbat HaGadol – the Great Shabbat or the Big Shabbat.

Shabbat HaGadol is the Shabbat that precedes Pesach. It usually precedes it by several days. The fact that this year it leads right into the first Seder is unusual and technically inconvenient. It means that our Passover preparation would have to be completed a day early; our houses already cleared of chametz, the haggadot pulled out of storage or downloaded and printed, the bulk of the Seder cooking done.

It is not clear why Shabbat HaGadol is called Shabbat HaGadol; not clear what is the great or big or great big part of it. But we know what it commemorates. In Exodus 12:3, the Children of Israel, still captive in Egypt, nine plagues down, awaiting liberation, receive a commandment from God to prepare a lamb for slaughter – every single household. The households are to choose the lamb on the 10th of Nisan, which in the year of the Exodus happened to be on Shabbat.

The Children of Israel are instructed to bring the lamb into their homes and watch over it until the 14th of Nisan. Then at twilight, they are to slaughter the lamb, putting its blood on the doorposts and lintels, which we know in hindsight is to ward off the Angel of Death, and then roast the lamb on the spit and eat it with matzah – unleavened bread – and maror, the bitter herbs. They are instructed to eat it with their shoes on, ready to leave Egypt that very night.

This is the custom that gives rise to the annual Passover offering in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, and which later morphs again into the Passover Seder after the Temple is destroyed. Every year on the 14th of Nisan we reenact this meal that took place in the 430th year of our slavery, on the eve of our liberation.

So that’s the story of the Shabbat before Pesach. But what about it makes it Shabbat HaGadol – the Great Shabbat?

Some say it is the simple fact that this is the first time the Children of Israel receive a commandment from God. Don’t forget that they don’t receive the Ten Commandments and the hundreds of others that are spelled out until they are at Mt Sinai, seven weeks later. Before this, while individual figures are called by God and given tasks – Moshe most famously – nothing had actually ever been asked of the People as a whole. Making this a BIG moment. Shabbat HaGadol.

Our medieval commentators give us many other reasons why that moment of Torah could make for a BIG experience, feeling their way into that moment of our story and what it might have felt like. The excitement and fear of the impending departure. The magnitude of the coming plague of the death of the firstborn Egyptians. The momentousness of rising up to respond to a community-wide, national demand for the first time. This was a moment of a new kind of group formation. We were not just bound to each other in suffering but also in rising up. The Children of Israel, for the first time, were ready to say “yes” to liberation – even when that liberation came at night, on the heels of plague, in a moment of shock and grief. And it was the collective “yes” that made the liberation take place. The Children of Israel were children no longer. Shabbat HaGadol: the Shabbat of the grownups.

There are only two specific customs associated with Shabbat HaGadol. One is the custom for the rabbi to deliver to the community an especially long drash. Seriously. Some even joke that that is why this is called Shabbat HaGadol – Shabbat of the big, big sermon. (We’ll see how this one goes; I make no promises either way.)

The other custom is that we have an unusual haftarah portion. We read the third and final chapter of the Book of Malakhi – the final and shortest book of all the prophets of our Hebrew bible. It is in most ways a typical prophetic book, rebuking the people for not following the law, for not taking God seriously, for being lax in their practices. And it is atypical in that it is not clear who the author or prophet is supposed to be. The name Malakhi might not be a name at all, but the simple word: malakhi – “my angel” or “my messenger.” And after two chapters of rebuke, God says, hin’ni sholeach malakhi ufinah derekh l’fanai – “behold, I am sending my messenger, my angel, to clear the way before Me.”

This is followed by a final prophecy of a better world – a time of reconciliation. Of comeuppance, of course, for the wicked and the oppressors. But closing with a specific and very memorable promise: that God will send the Prophet Elijah, the one we open the door for every Seder night:

וְהֵשִׁ֤יב לֵב־אָבוֹת֙ עַל־בָּנִ֔ים וְלֵ֥ב בָּנִ֖ים עַל־אֲבוֹתָ֑ם

“And he will turn the hearts of parents toward their children and the hearts of children toward their parents.”

This is a very famous line of prophecy that captures a different angle of what we might seek in a vision of the future. Other prophets describe a perfected world in metaphoric terms – lions and lambs. They envision national peace. But Malakhi here, whoever that is (and some say it is the Prophet Elijah himself!) draws us to a different kind of heart space. He offers a promise of peace and reconciliation that is familial and generational. Intimate peace. Peace within families. The hearts of children and parents turned toward each other. But also beyond the living family and across generations, including those who are gone and those yet to be. Because avot in Hebrew are not just parents but all our ancestors. And banim are not just our children but all our descendants.

This closing line of Malakhi is about how we are or can be connected back through time and forward through time. How we might heal the wounds of our ancestors which have become our wounds as well. Healing them for our sakes and for theirs. Another reason why Shoshana’s work on healing intergenerational trauma is so appropriately tied in with this season of Seder and this story of Exodus. There is something profound about the intergenerational telling in this season, the commandment that we tell our Exodus story to our children and to tell it not only about our ancestors but as if we ourselves had left Egypt. This season reminds us that our ancestors’ experience is our experience too. And it will be our children’s experience unless we change it. The wounds of our slavery are still with us. Just as the wounds of slavery are still with us in this country. And a piece of the healing is telling the story, being a conduit point between past and future. We gather at the table to tell the story to the next generation, even while our plates are filled with the flavors of our grandmothers’ kitchens.

So what are we doing to turn our hearts toward the ancestors? What does it mean to do so? I know that this week I have been having an uptick in dreams in which I visit ancestral places – shtetlakh of Lithuania and Poland, as well as one particular decommissioned prayerhouse in southwestern Germany. I wake up in the morning with a persistent desire to go there and daven in that space all day, singing new Jewish energy into it after over a century of silence.

But turning our hearts toward the ancestors also means trying to repair the damage our forebears inflicted – not just our immediate forebears but the progenitors of this country too – and in that way reduce the damage that we ourselves re-inflict.

And what does it mean for us to turn our hearts toward our descendants? How do we turn our hearts toward all who follow? Not just our own children, but generations we can’t yet foresee? The future children of this Earth? Perhaps we need to keep in mind the principle embodied in the Native American Haudenosaunee Confederacy – that the decisions we make today can’t just be good for us; they need to be able to sustain the people seven generations from now. Reb Zalman adopted this seven-generation thinking in his ideas of “integral halakhah” – that our Jewish decision-making now, our Jewish creativity, needs, in part, to be in service of the Jews who will follow seven generations hence, and the Earth that they will be inhabiting.

So the descendants are waiting to see the choices we make. As youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman reminds us, paraphrasing Lin-Manuel Miranda, “history has its eyes on us.” *

We might also begin to fulfill Malakhi’s prophesy by simple engagement and exchange between living generations.

Two years ago I spent Shabbat HaGadol not at shul but at a convent. I had friends, part of a group called Nuns and Nones, who were piloting an intergenerational reside ncy at the Mercy Center in Burlingame, home to the Sisters of Mercy. This group of millennials, some of them Jewish, were exploring with the Sisters how wisdom and mission can be passed from generation to generation, in both directions.

The evening was beautiful, with communal singing, the breaking of bread, shared exploration of ideas. Rabbi Diane Elliot taught about Shabbat and Rabbi Burt Jacobson offered a teaching comparing the words of Jesus to those of the Baal Shem Tov. We celebrated in that little bubble, laughing and singing, until the security guard had to come and ask the nuns to hold it down, it was getting late. But in the warmth of that big night of Shabbat candlelight, the hearts of the young were turned toward the elders; the hearts of the old were turned toward the youngers, just as Malakhi prophesies every year on Shabbat HaGadol.

So we move from Shabbat HaGadol directly, without passing go, to our first seder night tomorrow. The night of telling the old stories, the ones we know so well: we were slaves to Pharaoh, Pharaoh laid harsh labor upon us, God brought us out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, had God not done so we would be slaves still. If we had come out of Egypt and not received Torah, not received Shabbat, dayenu, it would have been enough.

We tell the old tales not as they-stories but as we-stories, still working through how we carry our enslavement with us and still chewing on what freedom might be. We tell the old stories and let the youngest at the table ask the questions. And we respond as honestly and as carefully as we can, knowing that our answers will have ripples for seven generations. And in that moment of honesty, with Elijah the prophet – messenger, angel – at the door, the hearts and trust of those who were and the hearts and trust of those who will be are all in that moment turned toward us.

* Amanda Gorman holds a special place in our congregational heart this week, as congregant Rita Rowan’s 7-year old grandson Jeremy became a social media darling for having dressed as the poet for his school’s “Dress Like Your Idol” day. Gorman herself filmed a video response to him.

Also you can find out more about Ner Shalomer Shoshana Fershtman’s work on healing from intergenerational trauma by clicking here. Find out more about Nuns and Nones by clicking here.