The Annotated Passover Haggadah,
eds. Zev Garber and
Kenneth Hanson. Denver, CO: Global Center for Religious Research,
2021. xiv + 351 pp.
Reviewed by Norman Simms
Recently Richard Durschlag, a rich Judaica collector, donated
some 4,500 versions of the Haggadah
to the University of Chicago library, and that number alone should warn us that
generalizations about the history, contents, purpose and function of the little
booklet that contains the order (seder)
of symbols and activities associated with the opening night or two of the
Passover (Pesach) holiday defies easy
generalizations. Everybody seated around the dinner table has their favorite
tunes, traditional jokes and family anecdotes to fill out or override the
shared text (or in some cases, the diversity of texts, translations and
paraphrases) of the Haggadah (the narrative of the Exodus from Egypt,
explanatory talmudic and midrashic discussions, organizing debating points,
private and ceremonial prayers and other rabbinical tales. The little books
come from every part of the Diaspora, as well as the Land of Israel, in many
ages, and there is a variety of cultural contexts and representing differing
theological points of view. Thus the appearance and performative style of these
many Haggadot trace out the complicated and ambiguous history of the Jewish
people over thousands of years. My own choice of
Haggadah is the one first published by Maxwell House Coffee just a few years
after World War Two: to me, as a boy not yet bar mitzvah-ed, it was the tradition itself and the words still
resonate with the voices and laughter of my parents, family and friends. It is
through this lens that I view the remarkable collection of notes, essays and
stories collected by Zev Garber and Kenneth Hanson.
There are three main sections to this volume. (1)
Seven relatively short comments by the two editors that describe define and
discuss the meaning of the essential elements of the seder table. (2) This
second section composed of the Hebrew/Aramaic text of the Haggadah, as edited
by Garber and Hanson and a modern English/American translation; there are three
excursions in background information, two by Garber and one by Hanson, followed
by a Rabbinical Index, a Source Index, and a list of Supplementary Readings by
Hanson. (3) In the longest section, there are seventeen miscellaneous
contributions, one each by Garber and Hanson, and fifteen other writers coming
at the general topic from a variety of angles, some very scholarly, others not
so much, and a few not at all.
In the first section, it seems both Garber and Hanson
have sketched out quick notes on points of scholarly interest about the
symbolic components of the seder.
These raise interesting questions, as they would if we were all sitting around
the table, knew each other well, and could debate points and joke about them as
families do on such an occasion. The things discussed seem to arise from a
contemporary American setting, but leave hardly any room for querying their
point of view—basically an educated middle-class Ashkenazi group. Yet it would
probably be a situation in which young people want clear answers that fit with
the world as they now know it, a world much more sensitive to ethnic, gender,
spiritual and political differences, where women would wonder why the language
of the translations doesn’t take their presence into account as more than
domestic beings.
The first time my wife, whose background is
Fundamentalist Christian, came to a Passover seder, she was shocked at the
shouting and joking, the variety of explanations people had and the presence of
young children racing about around and under the table. More than half a
century later, she understands very well what Jewishness is all about, and
recognizes the wit and teasing that makes up the seder, a way of integrating different kinds of people with
different points of view. In a sense, it is now clear to us that the order and
content of the meal and its readings take seder
not as a single order of presentation and performance, a right way to do
things, but in a much more lively and dynamic way of integrating and tolerating
many points of view, different traditional tunes and a variety of explanations
for the ceremonial foods, ways to distribute the shared meal and accommodation
to everyone’s patience and understandings. Some people allow the children to
steal the afikomen and later demand a
ransom for its return; others have adults hide the last piece of matzah, and
then make the children find it and pay them for their efforts.
The next section of this annotated version begins to
deepen the historical context of what Pesach has meant to Jews all over the
world. The text in Hebrew and Aramaic is given with translations into modern
American English. It would be interesting to see how modern Jews in other parts
of the Diaspora find ways in Spanish, French, German, and Arabic and so on to
find words and concepts to fit this traditional ceremony. We also wonder about
the variations that come to the fore in Eretz Israel amongst its competing and
sometimes hostile streams of Judaism. There will not be an original and perfect
version. Each exemplar is unique and the right one for its time and place. The
Haggadah, the seder and the very
notion of a Passover holiday did not appear full-blown all at once but
developed through many contentious periods, with editors and translators aware
of the dangers of hostile regimes ready to pounce on any sign of Jewish
intransigence or disloyalty.
Garber and Hanson do make some allusion to these
differing circumstances and consequences. But I wonder what they have to say
about the sidelining of women—from the mother and sister of Moses, through the
midwives who rescued Jewish newborn males to the vague hint that while male
babies were to be killed by Egyptian soldiers, females were to be kept in
(presumably sexual) slavery and “in their blood “(i.e., forced to have
intercourse with the taskmasters and guardians during their monthly periods).
The subsequent chapters give other scholars and participants in this exercise
in commentary a chance to have their say.
The two editors also wrestle with the question of the
pre-Judaic origins of the story in Middle Eastern myths and how, as in other
books of the Hebrew Bible, such pagan imagery and actions have been
rationalized into history, moralized into theology, and reduced to symbolic
gestures during the reading of the Haggadah. The contest between the forces of
darkness and light, of monstrous beings like the Pharaoh-Crocodile and Egyptian
wizards such as Moses and Aaron do not completely disappear. The two parallel
tales to Exodus, one with the breaking from his father’s idolatry for Abraham,
the other with the post-Destruction of the Second/Third Temple rabbis, sages
and scribes trying to gain control over their sense of loss, grief at the
ending of the Temple cult of sacrifices and transforming despair into
wish-fulfilment word- and number-play to exaggerate the triumph of God in
leading the Children of Israel to the reception of the Law at Sinai and then,
forty years on, the entrance into the Promised Land as free men and women.
A fourth tale is also told of pre-modern and modern
Jews in Galut (exile) and facing the
trial of their faith when confronted by what seems like dangerous tolerance and
assimilation, on the one hand, and the enormity of the crimes suffered under
Christian and Muslim rulers; from Eastern European murderous pogroms through to the genocidal Shoah, and under the humiliating
submission to the laws of Dhimmitude and violent and expulsive repression by
anti-Zionist regimes.
For someone like
myself who was brought up with the Maxwell House Coffee Haggadah as the
standard by which sederim at home in
Brooklyn or in a grandparents’ apartment in the Bronx were conducted and who,
now in my eighties is exiled on the other side of the world where the memory of those family gatherings are the
only way of being a Jew—where matzoh cannot always be obtained (this year we
could only get one small box of Yehudah gluten-free matzoh-like cakes and then
to make motzoh balls for the chicken soup we had to crumble up unleavened
crackers) , kosher wine most years a dream, and family (children and one
grandchild) too often too far away to gather—reading the translations and
commentary by Garber and Hanson both raises many questions I wish we could all
discuss, all night until a group of imaginary disciples come to remind us it is
time for the morning prayers; and grates on my ears—sometimes with neologisms
that seem out of place (even “house of slavery” instead of “house of bondage”
but mostly “Exodus narrative,” “referencing” and “mindful”); sometimes with
allusions to Christian saints, places
and events. But I will forgive all these anachronisms and culturally out-of-place
terms just for the lovely spell-check error of “a heavy yolk upon their
necks”—surely the best explanation for the burnt hardboiled egg on the seder
platter.
Then we come to the section of Supplementary Readings,
each of them on a separate topic within the general theme of annotating the haggadah shel pesach. They each also are
written in a different style, sometimes as a group of short paragraphs, a list
of interesting background facts, and sometimes as a personal essay on the topic
or a short story. It is hard to figure out who the audience is assumed to be,
whether a general group of non-professionals looking for guidance through the
intricacies of the Haggadah or specialists concerned with particular
geographical and chronological developments in the formation of the Passover
tradition. Unfortunately, especially where the writer is using English as a
second or third language, a good editorial hand might have smoothed out
infelicities in style and diction.
Kenneth Hanson, one of the two main editors who
contributed a significant number of little essays in the opening sections of
the book, here begins with a piece called “Textual Issues: The ‘Lost’ Supper,
Paul and Qumran: The Tail that Wagged the Dog.”
Fitting the legend of Jesus’ “Last Supper” into the history of the
rabbinical celebration raises important and very sensitive issues, some
specific to a Jewish audience who might find this upsetting and even insulting, while a Christian
readership might have different problems with the teasing away of views that
make Christianity and its rituals the triumphalist successor religion. On the
one hand, there is a view that sees the Qumran pietists (Essenes, some would
say) having withdrawn from the Temple cult to await a messianic coming near the
Dead Sea, escaping from Roman legions seeking to quell dissent, and Jewish
traditionalists who regard the strictness of their sect as contrary to
rabbinical values. That the Dead Sea Scrolls might reveal a shared source (sort
of) to the later Rabbinical version for the seder and one with the early
Christian version of a Paschal meal as the inauguration of Jesus’ emergence as
a savior figure through the bread and wine of the Eucharistic ceremony, is
debatable and should raise a heated discussion around a contemporary American
seder table.
Hanson cautions against taking the ceremonial Jewish
meal as a custom founded on and shaped after the development of agape
communion. I recall once being asked to conduct a Passover dinner for a local
New Zealand group of “Friends of Israel” who wanted to have the same experience
as Jesus had on the first night of Pesach. I said I would go through the
Haggadah with them but explained that the Jewish customs were established long
after the kind of meal associated with Temple sacrifice and family gathering
that someone at the time of Jesus’s putative life might have had. They didn’t care because they knew better, so
I went ahead and gave them a nice watered down version of the evening meal. It
was very strange and disconcerting. I never did it again. Hanson’s essay is
very interesting and I wish I had read it some thirty-five years ago; but it
would not have been appropriate then or now to mention to the kind of
Fundamentalist and Conversionist group at a little church in Hamilton.
Peter Zaas then presents an essay entitled “Eucharist
and Seder: What Should the Simple Scholar Say?” This is even more scholarly and
yet no less controversial than the previous essay. The stories, prayers, songs
and liturgical actions in the Haggadah came into being slowly, responding to
changing conditions of Jewish experience both in the Land of Israel and
throughout the Diaspora. In tandem or overlapping with revisionist groups that
would later be called Christians, the various meanings assigned to the seder are examples of what Zaas calls
“sacred nostalgia.” While rabbinical Judaism drew apart from the threatening
growth of Christianity, particularly after it was given imperial status in
Rome, the triumphant Christians sought to find ancient precedents so as to give
their radical new religion historical depth and authority. Unlike José Faur’s
several books on how much the early Christians not only mystified Jewish
symbols and customs and appropriated pagan ideas to incorporate into the
Eucharistic myths of salvation through sacrifice, blood and divine
intervention, Zaas seems to grant too much understanding of rabbinical
argumentation, post-Destruction replacement of the Temple cult by study of
Talmud and ethical behavior extrapolated from the Mishnah and Midrashim. The
question near the close of his essay—“Do we applaud or bemoan Christian
seders?”—comes down a typical Jewish ambiguous response: Don’t worry about the
answers, just keep asking good questions.
Zev Garber’s contribution to this section comes in an
essay called “Inserting Shoah at the Traditional Passover Seder: Interpreting
Anew the Five Cups and What would Jesus Say?” In a living tradition, there are
always new things added and old ones put aside or understood in radical new
ways. The fifth cup of wine offers an opportunity to keep the Haggadah
up-to-date and to wrestle with new questions of theology and theodicy. For
those of us old enough to recall the Holocaust, not necessarily as survivors in
the sense of those who managed to live through the horrors of such an enormity
of evil deeds and shameful rationalizations by people and nations that should
have known better and acted to prevent the murder of the Six Million, but to be
old enough to see our parents and relatives become aware of what had
happened—and to be struck dumb at first and so unable to react in any
articulate way, while their children could observe the powerful effect it had
on their own lives, whether by denial, by being driven to re-interpret their
own association with the religion of their parents and the communities left
behind in the Old Country, or by wriggling about in an effort to make it
tolerable to live with. Placing a fifth
cup on the seder table and making a
vow of “Never Again!” with that lump in
the throat and flow of tears that signified a sense of guilt for not having
been able to prevent the horror or to provide a reasonable explanation to the
next generation for whom it would only be “history.” It also can be discussed somewhat calmly without such intense pain as
a thanksgiving for the founding of the state of Israel, so that “Next Year in
Jerusalem” (with or without the qualifier of “rebuilt”) leads to a further
quandary or dilemma, of how to wish that the next year would be either the
messianic one Eliyahu ha-Navi will
announce finally or the time when we as a family make our Aliyah to Eretz Yisroel
and affirm a belief that “never again” can only happen when we are ready to
fight back against our enemies and not futilely howl our defiance into the night.
When I did take my non-Jewish wife to Israel, and after the painful and
humiliating experience of having my Jewish credentials doubted until my sister
found the rabbi who presided over my bar mitzvah in Brooklyn and had him write
a formal letter in Hebrew saying he remembered the chubby, pimple faced
thirteen-year-old as having earned his “fountain pen” way back in 1953, it was
not all as we assumed. One Passover we went to a kibbutz where the leaders made
a show of putting slices of white bread between two pieces of matzah and
parodying the rest of the meal. Another year—for we didn’t come back
immediately—we visited with friends who asked me to be rosh shulchan and explain the Haggadah to them. Yet I knew that
when troubles came—and they always did, with rockets shot out of Gaza and
troops guarding the Lebanon border where the son of another friend disappeared
in the blast of a roadside improvised device—that they would defend the
Promised Land, and that I was unfit for such action and too old to settle in a
foreign culture.
Garber then goes on to examine closely and studiously
the way Christians have tried to take over our celebration from Egypt, the
House of Bondage and the other places of exile we have had to escape from in
every age. It is very interesting, to be sure. He ends the essay with this
brief riddle. Christians have to see in the Jewish Passover celebration a
redemption that requires them to accept their guilt for the Holocaust and all
it stands for, without which there is only a hollow myth and an empty faith:
that is, “Christian suicide.”
Nathan Harpaz
offers the next chapter on ”Sample Haggadot and Sederim” which is not just a
survey of different artistic styles of illustrating the Haggadah but as the
opening unit tells us “Artists’ Perception of the Last Supper and the Passover
Seder.” His argument is that the
depictions of Last Supper derived from attempts to provide pictures true to the
Gospel event, since there was no Jewish meal until much later, families
gathering in Temple times to eat the paschal lamb, recite prayers and tell some
of the narrative of Exodus. When Jews did start to compose and distribute books
to accompany the emergent Passover evening meal, they often hired Christian
artists to do the illustrations or had artists in the Jewish community follow
the traditional images of ceremonial dinners available on the model of
ecclesiastical liturgy. But these art-historical matters are not covered in
Harpaz’s essay: Who chose the subjects to be drawn, who were the artists, what
training did they have, and what differences are there by historical period and
geographical place? Reproductions of the illustrations referred to might have
been very helpful, as well as a fuller list of authorities referred to.
Yitzchak Kerem then gives a brief overview of
“Romaniote and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Passover Haggadah: Excerpts and Related
Customs.” It is good to have this chapter focusing on Sephardic traditions to
help balance the preponderance of attention given to Ashkenazi examples. Again,
a series of illustrations would be helpful to show the differences in style and
production referred to. The one colour picture of the bitter herb, maror, shows how useful such
reproductions could be, perhaps even photographs of the different ceremonial foods
available throughout the regions of the Sephardic Diaspora he discusses, as are
the many excerpts in translation Kerem makes available to show the variations
possible within Jewish tradition.
Then comes a long detailed discussion by Diane Mizrahi
in her essay “A Chassidisher Pesach: Passover Traditions and Insights from
Chassidic Perspectives.” After a quick historical view of where, when and how
Chassidus began and the spread throughout Eastern Europe and eventually the
rest of the world, Mizrahi looks at the leading personalities and their
philosophical differences and thus how they influence the customs followed in
many of the existing Chasssidic communities, from the sixteenth century to the present.
Particularly from the way the Rebbes in each sect used Lurianic Kabbalah, the
diverse communities evolved their own variations of what was eaten, sung and
spoken about during the seder, strong emphasis being given to allegorical
interpretation.
Of course, not all Jews of the time welcomed the new
movement started by the Baal Shem Tov, and the Mitnagim who followed the Vilna
Gaon remain opposed to the irrationalities, non-scholarly approach. Other
Liberal, Reformed, Reconstructionist, Zionist, Progressive, Feminist and
secularized Judaism have their own ways of celebrating Passover.
On a visit to Melbourne, Australia a few years ago, an
elderly friend of mine—a Holocaust survivor—told me there were so many
synagogues and Jewish centres in the city that there was even one for atheist
Jews. “That’s the one for me,” I said. “What do you mean?” he asked, knowing me
well enough to intuit what I was about to say. “Well, some people say that at
the heart of Judaism there is such a strong anti-iconic and anti-idolatrous
respect for the Law, that even the worship of God is to be considered a form of
idolatry.” We both started to laugh.
In fact this is precisely the point Anette Boeckler
makes in her chapter, “Why is this Haggadah Different? Haggadot to the
Non-Orthodox Movements.” In our modern
world it is important for readers of this volume to remember that not all Jews
think feel or approach the holy days in the same way, that there are no popes
or priests or universally recognized authorities. Progressive (her catch-all term for Reform,.
Liberal, Reconstructionist, etc.) haggadot began to appear early in the
nineteenth century in Germany and then spread with the movement elsewhere in
Europe and other Jewish communities in the New Worlds. Prayers, meditations and
other passages were cut down for shorter readings and conformity to
contemporary liberal and scientific ideas. The idea of Passover in the United
States became more secular, merging often with national Thanksgiving meals and
celebrations of freedom. In due course, the language of the text was more in English
than Hebrew and Aramaic, the concepts made more rational, and the explanations
expanded to include new kinds of mixed and melded families and to keep the
whole format relevant for a post-Holocaust world.
I will skip comments on my own chapter, “Re-arranging
Things at the Table for an Isolated and Peculiar Jewish Community at the Bottom
of the World.” It is for others to decide it worth and relevance.
In the section of “Select Haggadah and Exodus Topics,”
William Krieger opens with “Asking for Directions on Pesach: Should
Archaeological Discoveries Change Our Views of the Exodus from Egypt?” These
are two separate questions, one having to do with openness to history,
including archaeology; and the other with custom, tradition and faith. Two
different matters of truth: the first is how we evaluate out of what kind of an
ancient culture Judaism arose, with concern for who were the people who created
the need for combining a tale of gods and men, themes such as, among other
things, darkness and light, slavery and freedom, anarchy and law; and the
imagery of walking safely through a divided sea and wandering in a maze-like
journey for forty years; and gathering at a holy mountain to choose between a
miraculous event at its summit or at its base an idolatrous ritual around a
sacrificial fire; with the agricultural cults that forbade carrying over
leavening from one season to another and thus needing matzoh to indicate the transition from profane experiences to
sacred consciousness; and second, how to discuss and describe the various
phenomena that constitute the Haggadah and the symbolic foods, actions and
behavior at the seder table; thus how we talk about the long term history of
the Passover celebration, the various specific occasions, and family traditions—how
such a combinatory event has held the Jewish people together over millennia and
thus how various changes made to the celebration over new generations adjusted
to changing circumstances.
Krieger addresses this problematic. But since I cannot
imagine (seriously) anyone who would take the Exodus story literally and have
found the participants around the seder table happy to argue whether single
incidents in the story had some historical basis (could there have been a great
drought and then windstorm that divided the Red Sea? What climactic events
caused the ten plagues?). Even the idea of four maps of Manhattan Island
showing different aspects of the same place does not quite fit with what is
going on in the Haggadah. More apt is his suggestion, taken from the
archaeologist Aren Maeir, that a biblical text could be seen as a multi-layered
tel. “with all its layers, contexts,
disturbances and artificial complexity.” Yet unlike a dig site of this kind, a
book of the Bible has been often edited, smoothed out, translated and adjusted
to different periods, rather than settled layer upon layer, with occasional
slips, collapses and robbers’ raids.
Another interesting suggestion Krieger makes is for
the book to be seen as “a repository for the collective memory of the people,
one that would be full of conflicts, anachronisms, and data points from each of
those periods.” But as with the figure
of the tel-site, the image of the repository takes something that is at once
dynamic—always in flux, even when claiming to be a letter-perfect copy of a
sacred original—and making it appear dead and over with; while at the same time
overly fixed, in the way a kaleidoscope keeps reconfiguring a given amount of
colored shiny flakes to spin around again and again, and a movement from
generation to generation and editor to editor who are all too lazy, stupid or
fascinated to notice the incongruities, contradictions and lapses into
nonsense.
Perhaps the Haggadah is just one of those almost
ephemeral books that become central to an individual or a family’s, something
which is precious, and has an accretion of nostalgic power, at the same time as
it gets re-copied generation by generation, not so much like a tel or a repository, but as a personal
play script: whether for a folk performance, each character taking away the part of the character he or she will
enact, and then reproducing from memory the rest and what is considered
appropriate for the time and place of performance. Everyone seated at the seder
table has his or her favorite bits, tunes that were learned as a child, voices
of times past making corrections and changes that are only ever spoken and
never written down: mistakes, contradictions and gaps, as well as jokes and
private anecdotes, considered just as important as the wine stains on the
tablecloth made by great-great-great grandparents and scribbles in the booklet
recently added by sons and daughter when they were just learning to write. Such
a book has many histories and may be considered a shared or public dream of
what it means to be Jewish.
There seem to be, as I mention in my contribution to
this book, at least four different stories weaving in and out of each other:
(1) the freedom journey from Egypt, (2) the constituting of a new monotheistic
idea and belief system that begins with Abraham becoming a wanderer in search
of a Promised Land, (3) a meeting of rabbis and sages after the Fall of the
Second Temple seeking to substitute discussion, debate, riddles and jokes for
the cult of animal sacrifices, and (4) the historical situation of the men,
women and children sitting around the seder table in the here and now—how did
such a diverse group come together, with all their varying backgrounds and
ideas about history, science, religion and unity (the idea of “Next year in
Jerusalem”, even if you already are a Sabra or an immigrant eating together in
the State of Israel).
Thus the dichotomy of religion and science seems
forced and irrelevant, neither literal meanings nor allegorical ingenuity are
called for. But then we see that Krieger is not asking general questions, but
specific matters concerned with contemporary American society, a society
plagued by Trumpism (in which the former president is symptom rather than
cause) and in which most people seem ignorant—perhaps willfully so—of both
religious and scientific methods, each term here made plural: there is no one
religion and no one science that does such and such. It all reminds me of a
time when a student asked me what Jews think about Jesus Christ and I asked
him: What do Christians think about Santa Claus?
Jonathan Arnold comes along next with “Exodus to
Leviticus to Haggadah: The Dynamism of Torahistic Law.” I like the term dynamism,
but I never heard of the word “torahistic”. If we accept his view that “Jewish
law not only embraces these myriad dualities, but dynamically adjusts them by
keeping the commandments alive in present memory, of which the Haggadah stands
as an example,” then I wonder why he doesn’t speak of rabbinical or Talmudic
Law. And also why there are only dualities, and not three-fold, four-fold or
any other number of possible alternatives to work with, or rather play with. If
the seder sets out the ground rules and the basic terms of a “participatory”
approach to the story of Exodus, then the questions of the four children to the
two parents or four, or however many adults are sitting around for the
discussion. But then Arnold stops and
leaves us all scrambling around searching for the afikomen.
Those questions become the subject of Leonard
Greenspoon’s “The Memory of God and the Blindness of Humanity: The Four
Children.” Here we find a learned, philological description of the many
versions and alternatives in translation of the four children, what they ask,
what they are answered, and what the differences signify. The trouble I see
here comes from his expectation that there should be a single authoritative
text and agreed-upon translation. But this is wishful thinking. There are many
haggadot, many translations, and many ways to play out the roles assigned to
the four children and their adult responders. Yes, and it does turn on what is
meant by that strange Greek term that has crept into the Jewish text: afikomen. It seems to be the last dish eaten at an
ancient symposium, after which the discussion closes and the tipsy participants
go home, without any special attention to what the food is or how it is
prepared. In the Jewish celebration, various as it may be in different homes
and in various times and places, the afikomen is a piece of broken matzoh taken from a layering of three,
the middle one thus broken, and one of its part disappearing, stolen or hidden
or somehow mysteriously made invisible.
Whether offered up for sale or ransomed from its
captors, the last piece of unleavened bread marks the end of the game, the
sacred time and place of reliving the many-layered telling of the story of
becoming a free people. How is this to be explained to a child—wise, wicked,
simple or simple-minded, or some mix-and-match set of variations? Greenspoon
points to the way in which the wise and wicked children basically give the same
statement, either as a question or an assertion, while the two other
sons/daughters (not necessarily young children, but those who “at some time”
will have to confront the meaning and nature of the seder) could be taken as
naïve, stupid, indifferent or uneducated. When will there come a time when of
all those who gather to perform the ritual of the sacrifice in the as-if form
of intellectual and emotional debates, some of these imagined future children
(no matter their age) will need to be instructed one way or another. These boys
and girls, men and women, are all of us in the here and now projected into the
time after the afikomen is retrieved and we all wish we could be together in a
different way “next year in Jerusalem.” In that time to come—next year, in
generations so far ahead we cannot imagine what they will be like, in messianic
time or once again at the very start of things, still slaves in Egypt, ignorant
wretches in the narrator land of Mitzriam,
ruled over by a Crocodile-Man who does not remember who we are and why we are
there—we have to ask “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Some
nights are happy, joyous celebrations of freedom; others are nights of darkness
and despair, not knowing who we can trust and what may come, if anything at all
to set us free from ignorance, oppression, self-delusion and arrogance. In every
age, when there are “some who rise up against us”, or when our own children
rebel against us, ask embarrassing questions, or turn away in silence, it is as
though we are still there waiting for something, anything, to happen. And we
cannot leave or talk about anything or anything else, until we eat a small
morsel of the afikomen.
Roberta Sabbath then breaks in with “The Dawn of the
Jewish Woman: Marginalization, Liberation, and the Exodus.” Instead of the four
sons or the forefathers or the other make characters of the story and the
leaders of the seder, we are asked to think about the women in the story, in
the Diaspora, around the ceremonial table and in the days to come. The mothers
and midwives who defied the command to murder all the newborn sons of Israel
and to enslave the daughters as servants and prostitutes, the mother of Moses
and his sister who played a ruse to save his life and have him brought up
safely right in the very heart of the Egyptian monarchy, the daughter of
Pharaoh who tricked her father and brought up the future leader, prophet and
savior of Hebrew slaves. The women who preserved the tradition and kept the
families together during exile, dispersion and persecution, those who keep the
home kosher and clean, who prepare the food for the seder table, serve it and
then clean up afterwards while the men and boys play their intellectual games
and drink too much wine. The women in our own day who have put themselves
forward to be rabbis, teachers, community leaders and preservers of their own
integrity, and even inventors of new ways to pass on transformed traditions and
ensure a future that goes beyond the afikomen and the pious wish to be next
year in Jerusalem.
Soon, however, Sabbath’s essay becomes a history of
modern Jewish feminism and lapses into the jargon and clichés of the genre:
“Rabbis may have been empathetic to her frustration, but the
institutionalization of suppressing women’s agency is clear and so embedded as
to have been unfixable.” They, too, these courageous, enthusiastic and
intelligent women have been thrown back to the beginning and have to work out a
way to journey into the world beyond the afikomen.
Next a difficult theological and technical essay in
theodicy, David Patterson’s “Haggadah, Shoah, and the Exigency of the Holy.” As
in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Patterson
sets out to "justifie the ways of God to men". We become “contemporary” with
the departure from Egypt with our ancestors, witness all the miracles, and
receive with difficulty and confusion the Law at Sinai, and at the same time,
whatever is promised, seemingly achieved and gloriously celebrated, we also
have to confront the Shoah, when the whole world was silent, God went into
hiding and six million of our friends and families died in a meaningless hell.
Since Patterson can’t blame God, he has to blame the Nazis, the other nations,
the Jews who didn’t cry out in agony loud enough. Aren’t the young Jews who
rebelled in the Warsaw Ghetto sufficient to redeem our history? Does the
founding a modern State of Israel compensate for the awful enormities of the
Holocaust and all the horrid acts of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism since? Is
it possible to believe in a God who does nothing to rescue his people? Can we
distract ourselves by playing word games and asking rabbinical riddles about
how God needs us to bring him to remember what by definition he cannot ever
forget, does it fall on our shoulders to repair the world first before he can
come to our aid? Does the covenant at Sinai still stand after such a flagrant
failure to act? God conceals himself,
his face and his awful powers, and we should respect him for that? So he weeps
for us, tells the angels not to celebrate the drowning of Pharaoh’s army,
and—boo-hoo for all his thoughts and prayers, tears and rationalizations! Many
years ago in Winnipeg, I knew an Irish university professor who, after several hours
of heavy drinking, would go out into the middle of the street late at night
when the temperatures were forty below zero, shake his fist at the heavens full
of terrifying frozen stars and silence, and say: “Jaysus, I hate yer bloody
guts!” I know how he feels.
Next comes “Passover, Holy Thursday, and Catholic
Liturgy” by Eugene Fisher. From the first sentence—or rather from the
title—this bothers me. I don’t think the Catholic Liturgy” is rooted in Judaism
and Jewish tradition.” It assumes that there is one liturgy with a strong
developmental line from what is supposed to be Passover in Jesus’s time (if
there were ever such a person or time) up to the present, no theological and
political splits and schisms over 1400 years), no changes (despite Reformation
and Counter-Reformation) and no wishful thinking today (despite or because of
recent Vatican Reforms, along with mistranslations, manipulations of the Hebrew
text and triumphalist assertions). And certainly no period when the Roman
Emperor Cult did not provide a basic model for the adoption or adaptation of a
prior set of Judeo-Christian sects in Jerusalem, Alexandria and elsewhere,
cults, denominations and “caliphates.” It is certainly interesting to watch
Fisher try to justify his argument.
Where Fischer sees the seeds of Christian liturgy and
mythology already present in the Hebrew narrative of Exodus—and not easily
transferable to the restructuring of that story in terms of the Haggadah—we see
the way the compilers, editors and commentators turned the ancient pre-Jewish
characters, events and themes into a powerful tale of return and renewal,
suppressing and transforming the pagan event into an elevation of Moses into a
Jewish leader and prophet. The New Testament sees its own prefigurative story
of salvation history, by turning the tone, rhythms and patterns of narration
and dramatic scenes so as to make them determined by precisely what the Jewish
redactors wanted to unravel, reconfigure and revaluate. The whole tone changes
when the Exodus event is read as a foretelling of Jesus on the Cross. The
writers who construct what would eventually be recognized as the Haggadah,
putting aside all the variations possible over Diaspora history, seek to avoid.
Most saliently, the removal of Moses from the story, except by implication and
allusion, shows that the rabbis wanted to keep any individual person from
standing at the core of liberation, that is, they did not want to give their
rivals in the emergent dangerously rival religion an opportunity of claiming
Moses as their own god in disguise. Then, in the Haggadah, they keep
interrupting the pace of the mythic narrative with discussions and prayers that
do not let the escape from Egypt climax in a denial of what Judaism is all
about: the receiving of the Law, the covenantal interdependence of God and
humanity, and the establishment of a government on earth based on Truth and
Justice. Christianity absorbs humiliation, pain and embarrassing hesitations
into a single man’s journey to redemption by the acceptance of martyrdom and
then transfiguration into divinity. For Jews, the elaboration of the cultic
sacrifices metamorphosis into an escape from idolatry, the rejection of cult
practices and the elevation of intellect over faith. Moses is enraged when he
sees Aaron allowing the foolish and frightened people to set up a golden calf.
He throws down the original tablets of the Law inscribed by God’s own hand.
Then, of course, he goes back up the mountain to take down by dictation a
second version of the Law, one that needs constant study, debate and evaluation
of how it should be applied. It even requires Jethro, the non- Jew, to help
control the still wild slave-deluded people. Imperfection and renewed attempts
mark the road from slavery to freedom, not an intrusive, blinding interference
in the development of reasonable arguments that replace magic, superstition and
the power of grace.
It’s nice to see Fisher’s vision of Christians and
Jews marching together into the future, learning about each other and being
tolerant of the differences: but never the twain shall meet. Unfortunately, the
columns of believers keep pulling apart and, because the size and influence of
the one far outweighs the needs of the other to keep protecting itself from
both external and internal enemies, the goals are quite different. Only by
avoiding the inner dynamic of each seemingly shared holiday can the two
religions co-exist and a few intellectuals sit down quietly to discuss their
differences without tearing each other apart. Except to keep the fighting
to\from breaking out into open violence, wherein the Christians take up their
triumphalist cudgels to berate the Jews for being a stiff-necked people who
cannot see that they will be completed and saved only by accepting Jesus on the
Cross as the climax of redemptive history; it seems the sharing of ideas and
the sharing of bread seems a futile exercise. Saying “Our liturgical
traditions, Jewish and Christian, are intertwined” doesn’t make it so. There
are not two roads, occasionally parallel and very rarely twisting around one
another, the two roads are going in different directions to very different
goals: Christians want to be saved from the sins of the world; Jews want to
sanctify the world.
Henry Knight, “Setting our Tables with Grace and
Respect: Reformed Table Talk for Post-Shoah Times.” The author identifies
himself “sacramentally” as “a self-consciously post-Holocaust Christian.” Even at this late stage in the Annotated Haggadah, I don’t know what
that means. Knight also sees that self-identification as troublesome. He has
been invited to the seder table and he politely accepts. But he feels that he
has not yet, as a Christian, repaired his relationship to Jews and Judaism.
Perhaps because there really is no post-Shoah time yet: the Haggadah asks us all to return to the
night of departing from Egypt and to recognize in every generation a similar
night to pass through before the afikomen
is found and consumed. Thus his Christian supercessionism status, which would
have him take the place of the Jews at the Passover Table, is not easy: he is
asked to sit in the Siege Perilous. A
place of honour or of horror? Whose table is it? Whose celebration? Whose story
of Exodus? Would a Jewish family try to re-enact the Last Supper round the
dining room table? Who would play Judas Iscariot? Chocolate covered communion
wafers?
But absurdities aside, Knight speaks of Christians
like himself limping “as a consequence of facing and facing up to the history
of supercessionism and its consequences.” Is this an allusion to Robert Graves’
tracing of the paschal lamb to the limping crane dance of ancient Greek and
Celtic heroes? It is embarrassing, though, to watch the author of the essay
squirm with guilt and shame as he tries to adjust to “our shared Abrahamic
legacy.” This reminds me of the Christian students who congratulated me for
being a Jew and yet refused to read any of the rabbinical texts assigned for an
“Introduction to Monotheism” course. The New Testament said it all, so far as
they were concerned. Other students simply scratched into their desks that
“Simms is the Devil Incarnate.”
But Knight is not like this, of course, and I want
to—to what?–to congratulate him for being a good Christian? His essay is
interesting and it is really not my intent to mock or belittle his efforts.
They are just kind of words I have heard before, at least not in my long exile
from the Exile of over fifty years. He illustrates his argument with a
triangle, the apex of which stands “God—Ultimate Partner/Witness” And just
beneath that balanced on the tip of the triangle “Partner—Witness”, and then at
the two feet of the figure “People—Partner” on the left and “People—Partner” on
the right. Then he explains this allegorical device: “Human partners
participate in and through covenantal bonds with one another and with God,
their divine partner.” He then tells us “This model of divinity is threatened,
if not utterly shattered by the radical suffering of the Shoah.” Would a Jew
ever illustrate his or her relationship with God by drawing a pyramid? The
explanatory caption to this stark emblem reminds me of something else: in
Milton’s Paradise Lost, when the Son
reports to his Father that Satan has rebelled and is leading a host of angels
to challenge his divine authority, God answers, with an ironic smile, “Nearly
they threaten my Omnipotence.” To which Christ replies, “Justly, Thou holdst
them in derision.”
“This logic,” after wrestling with a handful of Jewish
theologians, he says, “is also manifest for me at the Eucharistic table I host
as a Protestant Christian clergy person.” Post-Shoah Jews and Post-Shoah
Christians, he goes on to say, are rethinking their relationship to one
another, and he thinks of his Eucharistic table as joined with the seder table,
and everybody finds “room for the holy, in this otherness, to be embraced and
welcomed as well.” Sounds like, rather
than breaking the matzah, searching for the afikomen, and waiting for Eliyahu ha navi to fly in and take a sip
of wine, while the children are joyously playing under the table and the
grown-ups wittily arguing over how many plagues there were, somebody is
preparing to bake a challah, twisting
the dough into delicious braids—but its chamatz
and we can’t eat it until the day Pesach is over. The whole essay is full of
wisdom and penitence, to be sure, but the words and the concepts are Christian
and just don’t fit in. They are far too serious, somber and dark. I am looking
for chad gadya, the one little goat
my father bought for two zuzzim.
Maybe I can find something I can understand and feel
comfortable with in Susan C.M. Lumière’s “Manna and Matsa: Nourishment for the
Soul.” Like most contemporary Jews in America, she experienced her Jewish
identity mostly at the seder table, not as a religious celebration so much as a
family bonding, cultural affirmation of values and creation of memories to pass
on to the next generation. Describing herself as “a free spirit and
non-conformist,” her long life has been spent in many places, learning many subjects,
and passing on her knowledge to children
as a teacher and as a parent and grandmother. She was lucky enough to have good
teachers at various levels of her education and during her adult career. With a
loving family, a supportive Jewish community (actually many) and a joyful
disposition, she has led an enviable time on earth. Everything always seems to
come together at Passover, sometimes she attends three or four sederim with
family, friends and colleagues. None of this really requires a belief in a god
(whoever he/she./they/it may be) nor that one accepts the Exodus “event” as
myth, science or bubba meysa.
Then comes Zev Garber’s wife, Susan Garber, and a
story she wrote somewhat on the model of the Exodus narrative: “Ziva: The
Warrior of Light”. Or perhaps more like “Xena the Warrior Princess” of
television fame. Imagination is coupled
with scholarship and a strange tale full of practical wisdom, magical
occurrences, and Jewish wit comes out, something to please the females and
feminists at the seder table, the happy children running around underneath, and
the men pretending to be wise and ponderous.
The last word goes to the co-editor Kenneth Hanson
with a timely account of “The Virtual Seder: 15 Nissen 5780.” His wife and daughter far away in Russia
during the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020, his son across town but in lockdown in Florida
and well-supplied with food and electronic equipment, share their otherwise
lonely Pesach meal thanks to digital communications. Slurping chicken soup with
matzah balls across this artificial space, father and son sprinkle matzoh
crumbs across the time of remembrance. This may not be the first and the only
celebration conducted under such unusual circumstances, but it is not the worst
possible way to be together in voice, image and taste buds. After all, the
Haggadah asks us to act “as if” we were there then, while we know very well we
are here now. “Next year in Jerusalem” means whenever and wherever we can all
be together again.
. Chag someach!
