A Haggadah for the Internet Age

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/04/the-new-american-haggadah.html


Tonight is the first night of Passover, the holiday most celebrated by Jews the world over, and this year, many Seder-goers will be reading from “The New American Haggadah,” brought to us by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander. The challenge at the heart of every Passover Seder is analogous to the one posed by works of literature: the reader’s empathy should be triggered such that he is transported to a different time, place, and mode of thought. “In every generation,” the Haggadah instructs us, “a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out from Egypt.” But how exactly do we get into the mind-set of an enslaved Israelite while sitting at an opulently set table, with kids horsing around, and the smells of a roast teasing us from the kitchen? A lot depends on a lively telling of the Exodus from Egypt, and so it’s not surprising that two novelists have tried to reinvigorate the story for their own cohort of readers.

But this is no straightforward task, as the Haggadah is not a traditional narrative. It doesn’t engage us through the usual strategies of evocative description or heroic characters or a journey marked by obstacles: it is instead an unruly, layered, shifting text resembling a post-modern pastiche. The Haggadah was compiled over hundreds of years, and draws on a variety of sources: fragments of Biblical verse, Talmudic argumentation, folk songs, ancient prayers, and ritual instruction. At one moment you’re in the scholarly center of B’nei Brak in the third century, listening in on a dispute between two rabbis about the proper time to recite the she’ma prayer; then you’re reciting a blessing as you perform one of the Seder’s many strange (and strangely pleasing) rituals, like the dipping of a green vegetable into salt water; then you’re bellowing out—in celebration or in horror, it’s often hard to tell—the list of the ten plagues that God brought down on Egypt to hasten the freeing of the Jews.

If the Haggadah is meant to guide us through the Seder (“the order”), why is it so disorderly? The form of the book reflects the very difficulty of the imaginative act each person is expected to perform: taking himself out of his own reality, back through time, into the shock of enslavement. Called to attention by the strict ritual code of the Seder—first washing the hands, then blessing the wine, then breaking the matzo—our thoughts soon meander. The Haggadah, too, is meandering, fragmented and keyed in varied tonalities: it asks its readers to fill in its many gaps, to make sense of its contradictions. Its main purpose is to raise more questions and invite deeper reading. In this way, the very old book is a thoroughly modern text. There are thousands of editions of the Haggadah, each with its own illustrations, commentaries, and records of regional customs, though the main body of text has been kept intact since around the second century C.E.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/04/the-new-american-haggadah.html#ixzz1rMMQkv51

[cbayer]

1. I heard the two authors interviewed the other day, and it was very interesting.

They both consider themselves atheists, but in no way mock the book or the traditions of Passover. They are bright and funny and wise, imo.

Wish I had a seder I could attend where they used this edition. Maybe next year.