Ki Tavo

You shall then recite as follows before the Lord your God: “My father was a fugitive Aramean. (arami oved avi) He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation.

26:5

If the above verse sounds familiar, it should; on the night of Passover, after the youngest child asks the Four Questions, the answer in the Haggada quotes our verse…The major reason for using the passage as the basis for seder discussion…is because it is couched in the first person. In essence, the authors…and sages…are teaching that in order to have a proper effect, objective long-ago history must become transformed into subjective personal memory…

Shlomo Riskin (Contemporary)

The phrase “Arami oved avi” are puzzling…(we can interpret them two ways). According to Ibn Ezra, the word “avi” refers to Jacob on account of the subsequent phrase: “and he went do Egypt and dwelt there few in number.” According to Rashbam, the Aramean who was the worshippers “father” was Abraham. The epithet “Aramean” fitted Abraham who had been born and bred there more than Jacob who had stayed there a mere twenty years. It was also fitting that the text began from the beginning of Jewish history, bringing it down to the moment the worshipper stood in the Temple with his basket of firstfruits.

Nechama Leibovitz (20^th Century)

The land of Canaan was not the original home of our forefathers. Abraham was born in Aram; it was Aram that he called his country and the land of his birth. He himself had no right of domicile in the land, so that his descendants could have enjoyed that same right as his legal heirs. Our original ancestor had no home in the land that is now the homeland of his descendants…As for his first grandson, Jacob/Israel, whose name the nation now bears – when he journeyed back tohis Aramean home as a refugee…he Aramean homeland had no use for him…

Samson Raphael Hirsch (19^th Century)

All this proves that our possession of the land is not due only to the oath to the patriarchs, seeing that no specific generation had been promised that fulfillment would occur during their lifetime. Had it not been for the liberation from Egypt after 400 years of servitude, there is no knowing which generation would have seen God’s promise fulfilled. The cause for the 400 year delay was the “Arami”, i.e. Lavan, who had caused the jealousy between the sons of Leah and Rachel, since Lavan had switched daughters when Yaakov was under the wedding canopy. Had Lavan not done so, Joseph would have been Ya’akov’s firstborn and no one would have had cause to be jealous of him.

Moshe Alshich (16^th Century)