The great Max Weber built modern social science on the backs of the major faiths, yet he remained, in his words, “religiously unmusical.” I always recall that phrase when I’m conscripted into religious events, which, because I’m Jewish and have a mother, occurs several times a year. We sit around the table, my family and I, battling through medieval Hebrew prayers we only vaguely comprehend, enacting rituals at once ancient and vital. An African-born clan whose shtetl origins in rural Lithuania stand to this day, Judaism is who we are. There is, however, no music in our practice.
Last Passover was particularly dissonant. Why was this Seder different from all others? For one thing, my cousins are parents now; everywhere, screaming babies bobbed away in Scandinavian contraptions. My mother and aunts are suddenly senior citizens, and the responsibility of holding these events, I realized, would soon fall on my generation. We will have to deck the Seder plate and chop the herring, literally keep the faith. These conundrums are as old as the Diaspora itself.
My cousin Janine, the flower child, resolutely took the family’s spiritual reins in hand. Bouncing a toddler on one knee, she read from a photocopied adaptation of the Haggadah — the literary component to, and the liturgy for, the Seder dinner ritual — named Our Seder. Normally, we pick our way through a ragtag collection of Haggadot, no two the same, each with its own awful translation or oddball anachronisms. Our Seder was a different species altogether. It opens with a twist: “And while Passover is a Jewish holiday, it is not only for Jews. We welcome our non-Jewish brothers and sisters to our celebration of liberation.”
Despite my non-Jewish girlfriend sitting beside me, this set my teeth on edge. Last I checked, Passover was about the Jews fleeing Pharaoh in sandals, carrying nothing but bags of crackers. “And let us remember,” continued Our Seder, undaunted, “that we retell the story of suffering not to dwell on the past but to use its lessons to make ourselves more sensitive and responsive to the needs of others and of our inner selves.” What was this — Eat, Pray, Kibitz? The plagues visited by God upon the Egyptians are augmented with a list of modern woes, among them “greed,” “pollution of the earth,” and “ignorance.” Then Our Seder asked us to sing Ed McCurdy’s anti-war ditty “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.” I braced myself for the ceremonial donning of tie-dye.
As the night wore on, Our Seder seemed to me more and more like a gargantuan act of relativism by way of liturgy. Its woolly Boomer liberalism was fogging my brain, and I wasn’t alone in this. But what was it about Our Seder that so troubled a family of over-educated, organic arugula–eating Jews? I stared down at my own illustrated Haggadah, a bar mitzvah gift from my grandfather, and mulled over the fact that there was no other work of literature I’d read so often, outside a couple of Tintin titles. And yet I couldn’t tell you what the plot was, whether there was one, or how it fit into a larger cultural framework. With the groaning of internal machinery I had long thought decommissioned, a minor spiritual crisis was under way. What did the book mean? And what answers did Our Seder hold for my generation, flailing through faded rituals, trying to remain whole?
Several months later, after walking a dozen sweltering blocks through a New York heat wave, I arrived at Assouline Publishing in Chelsea, and sat before an ur-Haggadah. Printed on vellum so luscious it practically stank of money, the book was heavy enough to bench-press, and so exquisitely produced that I assumed it would wipe Our Seder from memory. But it took mere moments to realize that the Assouline Haggadah and Our Seder — retailing at $550 and bubkes, respectively — were sibling texts locked in a filial battle, clamouring for approval from some unseen, shadowy patriarch.
“Haggadah” means “telling.” Reading it fulfills the scriptural commandment in Exodus to “tell your son” about the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt, and its recitation kicks off the week-long festival of Passover. In the Diaspora, the Seder takes place on the first two nights of the festival, and the Haggadah serves as the manual for this labyrinthine gorgefest. The proceedings involve the eating of unleavened bread (matzo), bitter herbs, and other symbolic markers of our afflictions in Egypt. There are hymns, there are prayers, and we cap it off with the kiddies searching for the afikoman, a piece of matzo hidden by the leader of the Seder. (This summary undermines the sheer length of the process — in excess of four hours if it’s done properly.)
Lurking at the Haggadah’s heart is the story of Exodus, which is to the Bible what Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction is to rock — so strident it makes the rest of the canon superfluous. Exodus doesn’t create the Jewish God; it complicates Him. In simultaneously freeing the Jews from bondage and killing every male first-born Egyptian, He becomes unfathomable. Furthermore, Exodus performs two important and lasting sociological functions: it creates Jewish exceptionalism (We were chosen! And saved!), and it defines Jewishness as an exilic condition.
The Haggadah doesn’t tell the story of Exodus so much as it depicts five rabbinical sages exegetically parsing it via Deuteronomy. Rabbis Eliezer, Yehoshua, Elazar ben Azariah, Akiva, and Tarphon spice up the biblical tale of the flight from Egypt by arguing over the minutiae of the Passover rites, which were originally compiled in the Talmud, the Jewish book of religious laws. We’ll avoid the scholarly bickering about when this occurred (very roughly, 200 CE), but one thing remains certain: the Talmud, and the Haggadah along with it, was a response to a catastrophe so great it threatened to destroy a people.
In 66 CE, when the Roman general Vespasian swept into Jerusalem, Judaism was a cultic, oral religion, with Herod’s massive temple as its lodestar. Everything happened in the temple complex. Four years later, Vespasian’s son Titus razed it to the ground. “Where was God under the rubble?” wondered the Rabbis. “How to praise him now that the temple was gone?” The sages agreed: Jews would have to become a people of the book, or they would disappear.
In a dazzling feat of spiritual and scholarly bravura, they compiled the Talmud, the text that has defined Jewish life for almost eighteen centuries. It meticulously redacts generations of oral religious injunctions, explains them, justifies them, chews them into a (mostly) digestible intellectual cud. The Talmud’s first compilers, the early rabbinical scholars called the Tannaim, had one principal concern: to establish that after the destruction of the temple, nothing had changed. It portrays, in one historian’s words, “the old in light of the new, and the new in light of the old.” The Talmud turned action, like the Passover sacrifice of the paschal lamb ordered by God in Exodus, into symbol. The Haggadah is conjured from the same alchemical matter.
The assouline office, cool when I arrived, was now as fetid as a shvitz. On my right sat notes on Our Seder; on my left, the hulking Assouline Haggadah. I thought of the farrago of food stained Haggadot that sits on my family’s Seder table; almost 7,000 different editions were printed between 1900 and 1939 alone, and we own a clutch of them. Ballasting this, a millennium of Haggadah history: handwritten, embossed, gilded, printed, hidden, desecrated, burned, saved. The Sarajevo Haggadah, perhaps the most famous example of how the text has weathered the centuries, was born in Spain around 1550, cast out during the Inquisition, reclaimed in Eastern Europe, hidden during the Shoah, recovered, and then hidden again during the Bosnian war. It has been touched by devotion and bravery and tragedy for five centuries, and it remains triumphantly intact.
