31 The Passover Haggadah The wine cup is raised: ‘This promise has sustained our fathers and us, For not only one enemy has risen against us; in every generation men tise against us to destroy us, but the Holy One saves us from their hand.
The wine cup is put down.
Consider, for example, what Laban the Syrian tried to do to our father Jacob. Pharaoh decreed only against the newborn males, but Laban tried to uproot all of Israel, as it is written: “The Syrian would have destroyed my father, but he went down to Egypt and sojourned there with a small family; there he became a nation, great, mighty, and numerous.”
He went down to Egypt, compelled by the divine command.
He sojourned there implies that he did not come down to settle in Egypt but only to reside there temporarily, as it is written: “The sons of Jacob said to Pharaoh: We have come to sojourn in this land because there is no pasture for your servants’ flocks, for the famine is severe in the land of Canaan.”*
four verses (Deuteronomy 26:5-8), which are here introduced to be mid- rashieally interpreted by quoting a series of other biblical verses, are mentioned in the Mishnah (Pesabim 10:4) as an essential part of the Haggadah @yn VIDA AW Ty °AK TATE).
‘The quotation from Deuteronomy 26:5 is commonly rendered my father was a wandering Aramean, the reference being to Jacob's hasty and unprovided flight from home to the land of Syria, where he sojourned in the service of his uncle Laban. This rendering is supported by Ibn Ezra, who explains the intransitive verb tax in the sense of poor and destitute. The Targum, however, yields the midrashie interpretation which is used by the Haggadah, namely: Laban the Aramean tried to destroy my father. Finkelstein endeavors to show that the midrash based on Deuteronomy 26:5-8, which forms the core of the Passover Haggadah, was composed in pre-Maccabean times, when Palestine was under Egyptian domination. ‘The declaration that the people of Israel were the kinsmen of the Syrians, the rivals of the Egyptians, hardly helped cement the bonds between Palestine and Egypt. “The Palestinian authorities were thus virtually compclled to create a midrash which made
"Deuteronomy 26:5. *Genesis 47:4. �
