Here is one of my favorite stories: Way back it the woods in a rural state a tenant farmer named Jeb Jones took over a farm which had never succeeded. Through diligent and tedious work he made it into a productive farm. One day the county preacher came visiting and saw this now successful farm. He said to Mr. Jones;” Well, Jeb, it looks like you and the Lord done struck up a good bargain.” Answered the tenant farmer: “You’re right Mr. Preacher, but you know, until old Jeb came along, the Lord wasn’t doing such a good job of it himself.”

I often think about this story around Pesach time. Look at the Haggadah and inquire WHO is the hero of the Exodus? The more traditional the Haggadah, the more obvious is the answer: It is GOD! In the actual narrative Moses and Aaron are barely mentioned, and only as doing the bidding of God. And as for the heroic women like the Egyptian midwives. Shifrah and Puah, who nursed all the babies, or Moses’ brave mother Yocheved who hid the baby or his sister Miriam who carried out the rescue of Moses by Pharoah’s daughter? or his (perhaps black) wife Zipporah (who circumcised Moses’ children when he got “cold feet”) where are they?

Yes, it is GOD who is the author, the architect, the producer and the director in all the activities. Moses(and to an extent, Aaron) is often like a puppet doing the will of God.

Is the above hyperbole? Perhaps, but only slightly. At least in reading the text, and choosing which stories the Haggadah would choose to place within its pages, the rabbis consciously made the choice to maximize God and to minimize the independent role of the people .It is then that I think of old Jeb Jones who understood that God need partners to accomplish His intentions.

I have a dear friend who collected Haggadahs and had a wonderful “road show” where he went to communities to display and explain them.---over 900 Haggadahs. And EACH of them had a different emphasis. Some are conventional Haggadahs, also some beautifully illustrated Haggadahs, some Zionist Haggadahs, some Haggadahs of the different religious movements. Some are socialist Haggadahs, some were Women’s Haggadahs. Some of them are new age Haggadahs, some of them are 1960’s style radical protester Haggadahs, and on and on, and on. They appealed to all different types of Jews. AND NONE of them saw GOD as the sole or even necessarily the main hero Some are even brazenly atheist Haggadahs. They all tell the same story of the Exodus as our Jewish model for redemption. But they all share a different emphasis than the rabbis had when they created the original Haggadah. In one way or another they put human beings at least as necessary crew members of the plane, some even as co-pilots.

There is a well known theological assertion that human beings are a “SHUTAF LAMAKOM, a “partner with God” It does not claim whether human beings are a “co-partner”, a silent partner, a junior partner, a senior partner or any other kind of partner. But they all elevate the role of human beings far beyond what we find in the Haggadah.

Somewhere there has to be a balance between the role of God and the role of human beings to improve the world we inhabit. I have no expertise (nor space here) to explore that relationship in detail. But I would suggest that we might start by thinking about Farmer Jeb, who instinctively understood what it was all about.

Chag Samayach