This Shabbat, the Shabbat immediately preceding Pesach, is known as Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Shabbat. According to tradition, the day that the Israelites got the instruction for each household to slaughter the lamb, the Pascal sacrifice, was the 10th of Nissan. That year, the 10th was Shabbat. While it wasn’t until the 14th of the month that they made the sacrifice, that Shabbat was a turning point. It was when they saw there could be something on the other side.
That Shabbat was the first Shabbat haGadol, the first Great Shabbat, because it, and the lamb that was acquired on that day, was a symbol of hope for redemption. We honor that Shabbat today and embrace the hope that it represents as we, too, await redemption.
The haftarah chosen for Shabbat HaGadol is from the prophet Malakhi, and in this haftarah the prophet promises the Israelites that God will again find them favorable and bring them redemption. The concluding verse of the haftarah reads:
הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי שֹׁלֵחַ לָכֶם, אֵת אֵלִיָּה הַנָּבִיא--לִפְנֵי, בּוֹא יוֹם יְהוָה, הַגָּדוֹל, וְהַנּוֹרָא. Lo, I will send the prophet Eliyahu to you before the coming of the great, fearful day of Adonai (Malakhi 3:23).
Some say this haftarah was chosen for this Shabbat because it says ‘this great/gadol day.’ Others explain that it’s because this passage invokes the prophet Eliyahu, the prophet we invite into our seders each year. Eliyahu, the harbinger of the Messiah, is also a symbol of hope. We invite him into our seders in the hope that like we’ve just told the Exodus story where God redeems the people from their slavery, God will also redeem us. Believing that Eliyahu might join our seder is a manifestation of the hope that we have as Jewish people. That hope is a fixture of who we are and it pushes us to look forward, to believe that times can and will be better than they are today.
Living in a broken world, we repeat the Exodus story each year not just because it’s part of our story as a people, but because we believe in the hope that it brings to our not-yet-redeemed world. This Shabbat haGadol serves as an invitation to have a Shabbat of Hope, a Shabbat where we believe in the possibilities for the future.
