”In every generation, each individual should feel as though he or she had actually emerged from Egypt.”1 So states the Passover Haggadah, the script recounting the drama of the ancient Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt, recited at the annual springtime feast known as the Seder. As this quotation implies, the Haggadah—the home liturgy of the Passover eve Seder—is more than a mere chronicle of events that occurred once and for all in the Jewish people’s mythic past. It is as well the ongoing diary of succeeding generations of Jews, reflecting their experiences, observations, and hopes as they relate to the Jewish festival celebrating redemption. When Jews recite the Haggadah, they are performing an act not only of remembrance but also of personal identification in the here and now. Each participant is adjured to breathe new life into the Haggadah, and Jews have done so by imbuing its pages with the ideas and concerns of their age. Thus each printed Haggadah serves as a barometer of sorts—registering fluctuations and gauging the mood of a particular Jewish community in its unique time and place in history.2
The following representative survey of twentieth-century Haggadahs will reveal the various ways in which themes and language of the traditional liturgy have been adapted to reflect the winds of change that have blown from time to time through sectors of the modern Jewish community. The first section of this study examines Haggadahs of the four major North American movements in Judaism—Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reconstructionist—to discover the extent to which their alterations symptomize more fundamental changes in the relation of Jews to Jewish tradition. The second section explores both how and why the two monumental events of twentieth-century Jewish history, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel, have managed to achieve unparalleled prominence in shaping the contents of Haggadahs. Finally (in the third section), the influence on contemporary Haggadahs of various political and social movements of a general nature (including Communism, anti-war protests, the feminist revolution, and even vegetarianism) and of a particularistically-Jewish nature (including the worldwide effort to liberate Soviet Jewry) becomes the focus.
Tantalizing though it may be just to sample the fruits of twentieth-century Haggadahs, I want to end my account by considering the salient question such a sample reveals: Are contemporary Haggadahs merely ephemeral expressions of the period in which they are produced, or do they have some staying power beyond the momentary concerns that produced them? We think of liturgy as spanning at least a few generations. Has the very nature of liturgy changed, such that liturgical texts now speak about and for transitory concerns that come and go, rather than tradition in the grand sense of that which came before us and that which we pass on to those we leave behind?3
Each of the terms “Reform Judaism,” “Orthodox Judaism,” “Conservative Judaism,” and “Reconstructionist Judaism” designates a particular position on the Jewish religious spectrum represented by a broad consensus of beliefs, institutions, and practices. The four movements are described below by isolating the ideological essences present at the inception of each.4 Though the movements vary from country to country and from era to era, the synopsis provides a benchmark for discussing changes made in the Haggadahs that the movements in question have issued and considered official.
(1) Reform Judaism, which emerged in reaction to the changed civil and economic conditions affecting the Jews of nineteenth-century Germany and France, originally declared Judaism to be nothing more than a religious faith, and so rejected Jewish national identity. Consequently, early Reformers eliminated liturgical references to Jerusalem and prayers for the restoration of Zion, and instituted instead a decorous service with rituals meant to provide spiritual sustenance. They jettisoned as well those ceremonies considered inconsistent with modern habits and views. Accepting as binding only the moral laws of Judaism and emphasizing the prophetic demand for social justice, they looked forward to an era of universal messianism, which would be ushered in by the fulfillment of the Jews’ mission: to teach the moral principles of the prophets to humanity.
(2) Orthodox Judaism, like Reform Judaism a response to the changes heralded by modernity, required punctilious observance of Jewish law as interpreted by Orthodox authorities. It held that the Torah was divinely revealed to Moses and that subsequent religious law as developed by the Rabbis is an expression of divine will, not subject to change by any modern interpretation—which (by definition) could not be authoritative relative to the biblical-talmudic heritage. The liturgy employed was that which was canonized during the early Middle Ages. Slight variations appeared from congregation to congregation, but these stemmed primarily from local practices and not from ideological differences.
(3) Conservative Judaism is a third interpretation of Judaism that originated in Germany and developed in the United States. It has been characterized by both its insistence on tradition and its openness to change. On the one hand, the Conservative movement maintained that Jewish law was binding. On the other hand, it found within Jewish history a process of evolution, which allowed for modifications in Jewish law when rooted in and consistent with Jewish practice. Therefore, the basic pattern of the liturgy was traditional and the references to Zion were retained, but some ideological changes were made and new compositions added.
(4) Reconstructionist Judaism, an indigenous American phenomenon, is the byproduct of the thinking of Mordecai Kaplan. Kaplan defined Judaism as an “evolving religious civilization,” whose standards of conduct are established by the Jewish People and whose common denominator is not beliefs, tenets, or practices, but rather the continuous life of the Jewish People. Judaism, according to Kaplan, must transform itself from a civilization oriented toward the life hereafter into one which can help Jews to attain salvation in this world—salvation meaning the progressive improvement of the human personality and the establishment of a free, just, and cooperative social order. Kaplan rejected supernaturalism and conceived of God as “the Power that makes for salvation.”
As might be expected from the synopsis above, Reform was the first of the movements to publish a thoroughly new and revised Haggadah. Its interest in adapting Judaism to the modern world led to the publication of The Union Haggadah: Home Service for the Passover Eve in 1908.5 The Union Haggadah was not the first of its kind. Over two decades earlier, H. M. Bien (1831–1895), an American rabbi in San Francisco and Chicago, but also an author, peripatetic merchant (from Fort Henry, New York, to Vicksburg, Mississippi), and even a state legislator for a time in Nevada, had authored the misnamed Easter Eve Haggadah in an attempt to provide a seder liturgy in the English language. But the first lasting accomplishment in that direction was the 1908 official document of the Reform Movement.
Significant emendations of and supplements to the text radically transformed the Haggadah’s appearance. Opening like an English book from the left (in contrast to traditional Haggadahs that open from the right to follow the flow of Hebrew), it was entirely in English, save for parts of blessings and a few key passages that were retained in the original Hebrew. According to its foreword, in an effort to update the “quaint and grotesque” illustrations of earlier Haggadahs which had been “reproduced with dreary monotony down to the present,” this book includes “artistic expressions . . . which shall reflect the present era.” Indeed, most printed Haggadah texts through time were largely reproductions of past models. Even the versions that came outfitted with illustrations were largely variations of perhaps a total of four archetypes culled from the Prague (1526), Mantua (1560), Venice (1599), and Amsterdam (1695) prototypes.6 Thumbing through The Union Haggadah, one views “The Seder Evening,” a display of bourgeois family life depicting a bare-headed father and mother with their children dressed in sumptuous garb in lavish surroundings, and a snapshot of the statue “Religious Liberty,” set in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, to commemorate the centennial of American Independence. Aesthetically this Haggadah was to be a thoroughgoing reflection of modern, especially American, sensibilities.7
Ideologically, The Union Haggadah is imbued with a Reform tenor. Intended “to face and honestly to meet the needs of our own day,” an effort was made “to embody the quaint form and the traditional sentiment of the Haggadah, as far as this is consonant with the spirit of the present time.”8 So, for example, the ancient custom of dipping a vegetable in salt water to recall the tears shed by the enslaved Israelites in Egypt is omitted, apparently because it was deemed “[in]consonant with the spirit of the present time.”
Other, more significant changes abound in this Haggadah to emphasize especially the Reform notion of the “mission of Israel.” This mission concept was in essence a radical reinterpretation of the chosen people idea, claiming that the Jews were singled out to be a light unto the nations who would spread prophetic morality to the four corners of the earth. No longer were Jews, as tradition enjoined, to wait patiently and passively for the divinely-ordained arrival of a personal messiah and the ingathering of the Jews to the Land of Israel. Rather, the Reformers insisted that for the sake of the “mission of Israel,” Jews had been exiled from their land to usher in a universal messianic era.
The “mission of Israel” doctrine, which served to legitimize the Diaspora-existence of Reform Jews, plays itself out on the pages of The Union Haggadah in two prominent places. In the traditional seder, a child asks four prescribed questions that have been in use for almost two thousand years, such as, “Why on this night do we eat only unleavened bread?” and “Why on this night do we eat bitter herbs?” The questions receive no immediate answer, but serve as impetus for an adult to retell the biblical story of the Exodus, a legend that underscores the powers of the Israelite God. In The Union Haggadah only a single question appears: “What is the [defining] characteristic of this Seder Haggadah?” (Mah tivo shel Seder haggadah zeh?) And the response is quintessentially Reform: “The delivered became the deliverer, when Israel was appointed the messenger of religion unto all mankind.” This is, pure and simple, the mission idea of Reform Judaism. The liberation theme of the ancient Haggadah has been reinvented and reinvested with Reform rhetoric: freedom becomes the condition of being free to dole out morality to the world. Aversion to the traditional messianic return is apparent in the closing line of The Union Haggadah as well. The yearning for all Jews to be “Next Year in Jerusalem” (which signifies the Messiah’s arrival) is conspicuously absent. In its stead is the universal hope that “God [will] Keep Us Safe from Year to Year.”
Like the Reformers, the Reconstructionists early on stamped their Haggadah with the seal of their unique ideology. In 1941, nineteen years after the founding of their first congregation, a triumvirate of Reconstructionists published the widely-controversial New Haggadah for the Pesach [Passover] Seder with a decidedly humanistic bent.9 The text had been updated so that the language and concepts of the ancient rite would “go straight to the minds and hearts of the men and women of [that] day.”10 Concerned primarily with the progressive improvement of the human personality, they constructed a wholly new understanding of the meaning of slavery. The traditional text contains an opening statement in Aramaic, Ha lachma anya (”This is the bread of affliction”), that frames the whole night’s liturgy: “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry, come and eat, All who are in need, come celebrate Passover. Now we are here. Next year in the land of Israel. Now we are enslaved. Next year we will be free.” It appears in the New Haggadah for the Pesach Seder but only along with a supplemental passage arguing that human beings can be enslaved to themselves when they permit harmful habits to tyrannize them. The Haggadah elucidates this point:
When laziness or cowardness [sic] keeps them from doing what they know to be right, when ignorance blinds them so that . . . they can turn round and round in meaningless drudgery. When envy, bitterness and jealousy sour their joys and darken their brightness of their contentment—they are slaves to themselves.
Likewise the symbol of the matsah, the unleavened bread which the Hebrew Bible claims did not have time to rise “because [the Israelites] were hurried out of Egypt” (Exod. 12:39), is reinterpreted in light of human interests and welfare. “Let matzah be a symbol for us today,” it is suggested in the New Haggadah for the Pesach Seder. “Let it teach us to find delight not in selfish luxuries . . . but in acts of helpfulness and kindliness. . . . Let us strive to bring about equality and justice for everyone.”
The preface promises that this new Haggadah will represent the Reconstructionists’ “own highest ethical standards.” In accordance with this mandate, it omits “all references to events, real or imagined, in the Exodus story” that conflict with what are taken to be modern ethical ideals. For example, the impassioned invocation of divine revenge against Israel’s enemies, known as Sh’fokh chamotkha (”Pour out Your wrath”), originally a response to the decimation of Rhineland Jewry in the First Crusade, but included ever since in the traditional text and recited as the fourth and final cup of wine is drunk, is altogether absent.11 Such vindictive words were apparently unsuitable for a Haggadah meant to promote humanity and goodwill within and among all people. Reconstructionists were clearly willing to submit the traditional text to modification and even excision, in order to make it comport with their beliefs and standards.
In contrast to the Reformers and Reconstructionists, who applied their ideologies to the text, the Conservative and Orthodox movements continued to maintain the traditional liturgy of the Haggadah until relatively recently. An official body of the Conservative movement did not issue a Haggadah until 1979.12 In the introduction to that year’s A Passover Haggadah, the editor asserts on behalf of the Conservative movement that every individual must tell his or her own Exodus “in the language we understand, in the metaphors we use and with the knowledge we have acquired.” Despite this instruction, the text itself retains the basic elements of the traditional Haggadah. Rather than reinterpreting themes and modifying language, the novelty is found in comprehensive marginal notes, which include:
(1) directions on how to perform seder rituals and why they are done;
(2) commentaries on the texts elucidating particularly difficult passages; and
(3) alternative, supplementary readings.
Most notable here is a six-page mini-anthology of texts devoted almost exclusively to the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel, to which we will turn in greater detail below. As the editor explains in the preface,
The radical transformation of the conditions and circumstances of Jewish life, since the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, must be mirrored in the Haggadah, to ensure that in each generation we experience the reality of the Exodus from Egypt.
The two monumental historical events of twentieth-century Jewish history are thus placed into the Haggadah framework, but interpreted here as a replication of an old pattern to history. Biblical Israel’s servitude-and-deliverance paradigm repeats itself throughout time; the Holocaust-and-the-foundingof-the-State-of-Israel is just contemporary Jewry’s subjection to this age-old cycle. As summarized in the introduction, the historical section is intended to “make explicit the theme that in each and every generation, [Jews] experience both persecution and redemption.”
The Conservative movement is surely not alone in its desire to update the Haggadah by weaving the vicissitudes of recent Jewish memory into its pages. Shlomo Riskin, an influential Orthodox rabbi instrumental in bringing about a revival in Modern Orthodoxy in the United States and more recently in Israel, published a traditional Haggadah in 1983, with his commentary throughout, simply titled The Passover Haggadah.13 In his final remark on the Haggadah text, he elaborates on the significance of the custom of reading from the biblical book of the Song of Songs during the Passover festival. Interpreting Song of Songs 5:2 (“My Lover knocks hesitantly yet audibly and hopefully”), Riskin comments:
[God] is anxiously waiting for us to open the door to Him. His knock indicates that He is so ever near to us. It was heard in the War of Independence [for Israel in 1948], in which a small group of Jewish fighters won against incredible odds over hordes of Arabs, and again in the Six-Day War, when our holy city of Jerusalem was liberated. But we have not yet opened the door to Him [emphasis added].
The seder seems to Riskin a most appropriate setting in which to recall Israeli history. For, as he implies, the same “mighty hand and outstretched arm” (Deut. 26:8) described in the Haggadah as taking the Israelites out of Egypt, was responsible as well for the startling military victories of the recent past, and continues even to the present to control the destiny of the Jews. The Haggadah thus becomes a serviceable forum for Riskin’s theology as couched in historical terms: divine providence is a reality.
Riskin’s Haggadah takes us to our next topic, since nearly every Haggadah published in the latter half of the twentieth century—whether issued by a particular Jewish religious movement or not—also features either the Holocaust or the State of Israel or both. After citing some other exemplifying instances of this phenomenon, I will discuss the reasons that lay behind the almost universal decision to include these colossal events specifically in the Haggadah—beyond, that is, the obvious emotional catharsis of recalling them during the most popular religious feast of the Jewish calendar, the Passover seder.
Among the hundreds of Haggadahs published since World War II, not only do the majority evoke in one way or another the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel, but in some cases, entire Haggadahs have been devoted to one or the other of these events. To take but one example for each event, a Haggadah published in Tel Aviv in 1953 is replete with illustrations specific to the newly-founded Jewish state.14 Israeli flags flapping in the breeze adorn the prayer, “This is the bread of affliction.” And to illustrate the overarching theme of the desired return of all Jews everywhere to their ancient homeland, around the Hebrew text, “In every generation, each individual should feel as though he [or she] had actually emerged from Egypt,” march a host of figures representative of Jews from various phases of the Jewish past: a desert-dweller, a Venetian Renaissance man, a Chasidic rabbi, and to cap the historical survey, an Israeli chalutz—the rugged pioneer dedicated to working the land of Israel. The traditional text is used throughout this Haggadah, with the sole exception of the final line of the text, which ordinarily reads “Next Year in Jerusalem,” but which is here amended to read, “Next Year in the Rebuilt Jerusalem.”
Even before the Second World War had ended, a Haggadah committed to the exploration of the Holocaust was issued.15 The artist, a survivor of the ordeals of Nazi terror, clearly outlined for the reader the purpose of such a Haggadah, writing,
This is an old Jewish book, one that speaks of such sorrow and hope. It now appears in contemporary dress, illustrated by one who himself has suffered the flames and escaped them. He was urged by the desire to vivify Jewish experience, as it finds expression in the words and pictures of the Haggadah. In its pages, the life experience of this generation of Jews would come alive.
The frontispiece shows a man hugging a Torah scroll tightly to his chest. He stands atop a globe being devoured in flames. Ringing the globe is a biblical verse, which while often appearing at the beginning of the Haggadah, here takes on heightened significance: “Open the gates, and let a righteous nation enter, [a nation] that keeps faith” (Isa. 26:2).
Other Haggadahs connect the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel by regarding these two distinct events as inseparable, as if the former produced or at least led inextricably to the latter. While scholars debate the reality of such a causal link, it is presented as irrefutable fact in many Haggadahs, including the four that are surveyed below. Given its central and characteristic theme of servitude-redemption—a movement from degradation to glory—the Haggadah has proved to be an ideal setting for proclaiming such a linkage. The traditional Haggadah retells the tragedy of Egyptian bondage and the connected divine deliverance of the People Israel, who are brought to inherit the ancient Land of Israel; modern Haggadahs use it also to retell, in sequence, the tragedy of the Holocaust (modern-day servitude) and the Jews’ connected triumph, again in the Land, this time by the founding there of the State of Israel (modern-day redemption).
Our sample in this regard is a quartet of Haggadahs, ranging chronologically from 1962 to 1993, geographically from South Africa to America, and linguistically from Yiddish to English. They all regard events of twentieth-century Jewish history as repetitive illustrations of the servitude-redemption motif. They will afford us the opportunity to evaluate the widespread practice of viewing Jewish history as an inevitable repetition of events that the pages of the Haggadah already display in a modern-day typological fashion.
The Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, an educational organization founded in America by Jewish Socialists who stressed Yiddish literature and Jewish history, published a Haggadah in 1962.16 In Hebrew, Yiddish, and English, the Haggadah contains the traditional text, illuminated by etched drawings with a strong Holocaust resonance. So, for example, one illustration depicts an ancient Israelite slave flanked by an Egyptian pyramid enmeshed in barbed wire. The symbolism is unmistakable: the Holocaust, as represented by so many twisted strands of fence, is but the last link in the chain of tragedies—commencing with their bondage in Egypt—that have befallen the Jewish people.
The centerpiece of this Haggadah is the “Seder Ritual of Remembrance,” which includes several passages and songs recalling “with reverence and love the six million [Jews] . . . who perished at the hands of a tyrant more wicked than Pharaoh.” Despite the sorrow, the supplemental ritual ends triumphantly, as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of Passover, 1943, is described in near-messianic terms:17
On the first day of Passover the remnants in the Ghetto of Warsaw rose up against the adversary, even as in the days of Judah the Maccabee. They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided, and they brought redemption to the name of Israel.
What provides the passage with particular power is its echo of an earlier prayer known as Hazkarat Nishmot Hakedoshim, “Commemoration of Martyrs,” which has been part of the liturgy ever since the First Crusade. Then too, German Jewry was decimated, as a result of which a martyrological encomium to those who died and a call for divine vengeance on those who had killed them was composed. The Haggadah’s authors knew it from their regular synagogue attendance. The recollection of the ghetto victims who were “lovely and pleasant in their lives” is taken directly from that prayer.18 The famous and hopeful words of the twelfth-century philosopher Moses Maimonides follow: “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the messiah; and even though he may tarry, I will wait every day for his arrival.”
In this Haggadah, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising replaces the State of Israel as a symbol for redemption. The freedom fighters of the ghetto, cast in the role of modern-day Maccabees, are testimony to the love of liberty kindled by the Exodus. The flexible servitude-redemption theme is thus stretched, encompassing events that transpired, according to the traditional Jewish reckoning, five millennia after the Exodus.
More mainstream than the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute’s Haggadah, but no less attuned to modern historical nuances, is The Passover Haggadah published in 1972. Its author, Conservative rabbi Morris Silverman, follows his own movement’s example of including the complete traditional text in Hebrew and English.19 But he breaks new ground with his addition of contemporary readings, including a lengthy section on “Remembering the Holocaust,” followed by a special ritual in which readers are instructed to drink an additional cup of wine “in gratitude for the State of Israel.” The traditional practice is to include four cups of wine, recalling the four different terms of deliverance employed in the divine promise to Israel: “I will free you . . . deliver you . . . redeem you . . . and will take you to Me for a people” (Exod. 6:6–7). But ever since the second century, there has been a protracted debate among authorities as to whether a fifth cup is required as well, for an additional expression of redemption is found in the next verse, “I will bring you to the land which I swore to give to [your ancestors]” (Exod. 6:8). An additional cup of wine thus has precedent in Jewish tradition and is logically applied here to what is perceived as the most recent redemptive act of Jewish history: the founding of the State of Israel. But by placing the ritual of a fifth cup of wine specifically following the section “Remembering the Holocaust,” the servitude-redemptive motif echoes loudly.
Am Yisrael Hai (“The People Israel Lives”) is the provocative title of a Haggadah published in South Africa in 1981.20 The Haggadah is a paean to the State of Israel, represented in its pages as the embodiment of the undying spirit of the Jewish people. The seven-branched menorah (candelabra), the official state insignia, appears on every page with the caption “Am Yisrael Hai.” On the title page appears the famous and prescient statement of the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904):
In Basel [at the first Zionist Congress in 1897] I established the Jewish state. If I were to say that aloud today, universal laughter would be the response. Maybe in five years, certainly in fifty, everybody will recognize it. If you will it, it will not turn out to be fiction.21
While the traditional text of the Haggadah is left intact, sketches of coins of ancient Israel, of Zionist and Israeli leaders, and of scenes of Israeli life are sprinkled throughout. Under a photograph of the Western Wall, the sole remnant of the Temple in Jerusalem recaptured by the Israelis in the Six-Day War, a caption reads: “In our days—the beginning of redemption.”
Though triumphant in tone, the Haggadah recalls as well the degradation suffered by Jews—albeit in a victorious way. Two snapshots appearing among the final pages of Am Yisrael Hai speak eloquently about the cycle of servitude and redemption. The first shows throngs of South Africans gathered at the annual Mourning Assembly in Memory of Six Million Martyrs at the West-Park Cemetery Monument in Johannesburg. The second displays a pilot of one of the Israeli Air Force C135 planes on its return from Entebbe with released hostages. He participated in the rescue of 104 hostages held for nearly a week in the summer of 1976 at the Entebbe airport by pro-Palestinian guerrillas. Make no mistake about it; according to the appropriately-titled Am Yisrael Hai, Jews throughout time have triumphed over adversity, as first told in the Haggadah of old.
The fourth Haggadah to reinvent the servitude-redemptive theme of antiquity in order to meet the needs of twentieth-century Jewish historiography is by none other than Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and premier advocate for preserving the memories of the Holocaust.22 This Haggadah is replete with allusions to the Holocaust but, unlike most, it seems to challenge the age-old image of the divine as redeemer. An excerpt from a heart-rending poem by Wiesel entitled Ani Ma’amin (“I Believe”) takes up this very theme.23
The verses, which were set to music and performed at Carnegie Hall in 1973, weave a tale of “An inmate. | A creature without a name, | A man without a face, | Without a destiny,” who does not partake of the Passover rituals. For he has neither a son to ask the four questions nor the strength to answer. Moreover, to him, signs of redemption ordinarily found in the Haggadah are meaningless: he maintains that Had gadya, the famous Passover song in which divine retribution is exacted and Israel triumphs, is misleading and that the ancient wish—Leshana habaa bi-Yerushalim (next year in Jerusalem)—will not be granted. Rather he predicts, “I shall not be in Jerusalem | Next year | Or anywhere else.” Nevertheless, despite unspeakable suffering and as the title foreshadows, the narrator still recites the Haggadah “as though [he] believe[s] in it.” He does not despair of ultimate salvation.
A similar note is sounded in Wiesel’s commentary on the final line of the Haggadah (“Next Year in Jerusalem”):
This article of faith, this song of hope which reverberates from century to century, . . . from massacre to massacre, is restated here tonight. Jews are being murdered again? Next year the killing will stop. Jews are again being starved and persecuted? Next year the story of their persecution will be told. Always next year. Next year in Jerusalem.
So the cycle of servitude and redemption is perpetually renewed, and Jews endure, recounting the woes of former ages.
This close reading of four contemporary Haggadahs reveals the extreme degree to which Jews continue in our own day to be bound by the theme of servitude-redemption, as crystallized in the pages of the ancient Haggadah. The critical events of twentieth-century historiography—the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel—are thrust into the old and familiar conceptual framework fixed in the Haggadah: persecution and suffering will ultimately yield to deliverance and glory. But if Hitler is Pharaoh and Germany is Egypt, there is no real novelty here. Both Holocaust and Jewish state are sapped of their specificity and uniqueness. Instead of colossal events in their own right with the power to transform their generation and make it “feel as though it had emerged from Egypt,” they are types, merely assimilated to the well-worn pattern of servitude and redemption.
How do we explain the tendency of modern Haggadahs to assimilate even the most extraordinary historical events to established archetypes? Yosef Yerushalmi suggests, “Perhaps even terrible events are less terrifying when viewed in patterns rather than in bewildering specificity.”24 It may be more comforting to regard the Holocaust as a contemporary manifestation of the servitude-redemption motif, than to try to make sense of it on its own horrifying and perplexing terms. But as the servitude part of the equation, it requires a parallel instance of redemption; for which the founding of the State fits the bill.
The particular reason for viewing contemporary events through the prism of ancient metaphors is hypothetical, of course. What is indisputable, however, is the fact that the Holocaust and Israel are so treated in virtually all modern Haggadahs that pause to treat them at all.
Equally indisputable is the way social and political movements of both a universal and particularistically-Jewish nature have left their mark on contemporary Haggadahs. Obviously the servitude-redemption motif of the Haggadah is of particular appeal to those longing to liberate themselves from the shackles of evil—whether that evil be perceived as capitalism, racial hatred and bloodshed, patriarchy and sexism, carnivorousness, or religious intolerance. The following is meant to illustrate some of the more innovative attempts to use the Haggadah as propaganda and manifesto.
In the decade following the Bolshevik Revolution, members of the Yevsektsiia, the Jewish section of the Commissariat of Nationalities of the Communist Party, were charged with the task of directing the cultural destinies of Soviet Jewry. Deeming Jewish nationalism and religion to be outmoded obstacles to proletarian progress, with the help of government agencies, the Yevsektsiia initiated and executed the liquidation of Zionism, Hebrew culture, and Judaism. Although Yiddish alone was now tolerated as the Jewish language, it was used largely as a means by which to indoctrinate Communist ideology. In step with the antireligious campaign then under way, a Communist parody of the Haggadah entitled Hagodeh far Gloiber un Apikorsim (“Haggadah for Believers and Atheists”) was published in 1927.25 Written entirely in Yiddish, it contains a pseudohistorical account of the origin and evolution of Passover. It attempts to demonstrate that Passover is not a festival of freedom but rather a vehicle for Jewish leaders to fetter the masses and imbue them with hatred of gentiles. Passover must therefore be eradicated.
Traditional elements of the Haggadah are parodied in the Hagodeh far Gloiber un Apikorsim. So, for instance, in the case of korekh, the act in a real seder of sandwiching bitter herbs between two layers of matsah, the participant in this seder is instructed to:
Put together the Second International and the League of Nations. Between them place Zionism, and say, “Let them be eaten.” May they be eaten up by the world revolutionary uprising of the proletariats.
In place of Hallel, psalms of praise to the divine, one is to:
Sing the “International” and say,
Down with the mildew of the ages!
Down with clerical nationalistic festivals!
Long live the revolutionary workers’ holidays.
While the Communists mocked the rites of Passover by altering them to nurture their own interests, peace-loving Jewish beatniks of a later era would develop a version of the Haggadah to express their own ideals. The Freedom Seder—known by aficionados as the “Hippie Haggadah”—appeared in 1969, complete with unorthodox readings by such men as “Allen Ginsberg the Tzaddik” (“righteous one”), “Rabbi Henry David Thoreau,” and “Shofet [‘judge’] Nat Turner.”26 The preface explains that this new book was designed to create a meaningful Passover seder in light of the dizzying array of historical events unfolding in the late 1960s in America.
Our efforts became sharper and more urgent in 1968, when the Passover came one bare week after the murder of Martin Luther King, the April uprising of Black Washington against the blank-eyed pyramid-builders of our own time, and the military occupation of our city. . . . And then we realized that in 1969, the third night of Passover . . . would be the first anniversary of King’s death.
Facing this confluence of dates, an interfaith community of rabbis, ministers, priests, and lay people, four hundred strong, met in a church basement in the nation’s capitol to celebrate what they designated a “new song of freedom” in the guise of a Passover seder. The written results of their liturgical efforts were published as only a “suggestion” to others. For, as they put it, “a Freedom Seder should be not only a ritual remembrance, but itself a [personal] political act.”
The Freedom Seder is more a montage of peace songs and inspirational readings than it is a conventional Passover Haggadah. Although some sections of the traditional text are retained, they are universalized, as in the Kiddush (the blessing over the wine):
Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast created the fruit of the vine.
Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe! who hast made of one earth, one flesh, all the peoples of the world; who didst exalt Mankind by breathing the life of the mind and the love of freedom into him; who didst sanctify us so that we might know and say . . . what was freedom and what slavery.
The Four Questions and their response appear as an inter-generational dialogue between stodgy elders and rebellious youth. The youth respond in this Haggadah,
Elders! We have heard your lessons so far, and believe them. But as the prophet [!] Dylan sang: The times they are a-changin’. We have lessons of our own to teach you.
A parenthetical remark then instructs participants to “put on a brief play or film, play a record, etc.” The Haggadah ends not with “Next Year in Jerusalem” but with songs such as “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “We Shall Overcome.” The Freedom Seder thus attempts to bring together the age-old story of the Exodus with the tales of efforts of modern Jews and blacks and other people toward their liberation.
A similar feat was undertaken by a partnership of Jewish feminists devoted to their own struggle for liberation from the patriarchy and sexism inherent in traditional Judaism. The text of The San Diego Women’s Haggadah stresses the role of women in the Exodus from Egypt and their ongoing fight for freedom.27 In fact, the authors claim, women took “the first steps towards freedom for the Hebrew people.” According to the Book of Exodus, the midwives, Puah and Shifrah, defied Pharaoh’s order to kill all Jewish males and “let the boys live” (Exod. 1:17). This pair was only the first in a long line of women, including others like Miriam (Moses’ sister) and Jochebed (Moses’ mother), who “took the initiative which led to liberation.”
In The San Diego Women’s Haggadah, elements of the traditional seder are transformed to reflect a feminist viewpoint. So, for example, in place of the ten plagues of Egypt which are ordinarily recalled at the seder, the authors offer an updated list of “Ten Plagues Brought upon Women in Jewish Life.” Although the Haggadah retains for the most part male-specific language to describe and address the divine, “the male image of God” ranks first on this slate. Other modern-day plagues include “lack of recognition for female rabbis, scholars and decision makers,” “repressive marriage and divorce laws,” and “women in Jewish education and community service not paid equitably.” As expected, four daughters—rather than the four sons of the traditional Haggadah—appear here with queries that range from “Why do we taste this bitterness and keep it fresh in our mouths?” to “Why do we find it so difficult to lean back and relax during this meal?”—a reference to the command to recline like free “men” [!] at the seder. This feminist Haggadah—part manifesto and part consciousness-raising—concludes by opening the door to welcome Miriam the Prophet, rather than Elijah.
Roberta Kalechofsky’s Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb for “vegetarians and . . . everyone concerned with unbridled cruelty” is far less traditional and far more satirical than The San Diego Women’s Haggadah.28 Complete with recipes for vegetarian liver and a “Seder roast,” it instructs vegetarians to replace the zero’a (a roasted shankbone of the seder plate representing the paschal lamb of old) with olives, grapes, and grains, which “symbolize the commandments of compassion for the oppressed found in the Bible.”29 As the text elucidates,
We use olives to commemorate the commandment to leave the second shaking of the olive trees for the poor (Deuteronomy 24:20) . . . grapes for leaving the second shaking of grapevines for the poor (Deuteronomy 24:21) . . . grains not to muzzle the ox when it treads out the corn in fields (Deuteronomy 24:5).
The Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb maintains that Moses was chosen to lead the Israelite people out of Egypt because of his heroic behavior toward animals. While tending the flocks of his father-in-law Jethro, one lamb chanced to escape. Moses, discovering the weary runaway by a pool of water, hoisted the lamb upon his shoulders and carried it back to the flock. Whereupon the Israelite God enjoined, “You, Moses, shall lead my people.” Despite its zealous campaign against cruelty toward animals, the Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb ends with the traditional rendering of “Chad Gadya,” the song about the kid, which was gobbled up by a cat, which was bitten by a dog, which was beaten by a stick.
Members of various political and social movements have obviously used the Haggadah to underscore (as in the cases of the anti-war movement, feminism, and vegetarianism) or even to subvert (as in the case of Communism) its message of liberation. The Exodus of a particular people, they argue, is a universal clarion call, inspiring contemporaries of all stripes to seek freedom from newly-evolving and newly-defined categories of bondage. Thus the Haggadah becomes a catch-all receptacle in which to pour the latest revolutionary stream. In the midst of this universalizing trend, however, one Jewish movement has been resolute in retaining the Jewish particularism of the Haggadah: its cause was the liberation specifically of Jews, the Jews of the former Soviet Union.
The Jews of the USSR comprised the third largest Jewish community in the world. In the early 1970s, they began an active fight for the right to maintain their own religion, language, and culture, and for some, to leave the country. As relations between the United States and Russia reached a nadir, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) was created as the central coordinating agency for policy and activities on behalf of the Jews in the USSR. Jews worldwide joined the battle to liberate their coreligionists from the shackles of intolerance, and as part of that effort, thousands of American-Jewish households remembered Soviet Jewry especially at Passover, with an innovative ritual that quickly became a regular feature of the Seder and of new Haggadahs. It was called “The Matsah of Hope.” This newly-created custom entailed setting aside a piece of matsah as “a symbol of hope for the millions of Jews of the Soviet Union . . . [to recognize] that Soviet Jews are not free.” It continues, “Thus shall our brethren know that they have not been forgotten. They shall yet emerge into the light of freedom.”30
In 1987, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL) published an entire Haggadah devoted to this issue in cooperation with the NCSJ—a noble but perhaps miscalculated effort in light of subsequent history.31 Nevertheless, the Freedom Haggadah for Soviet Jewry, aiming to “understand the plight of Soviet Jewry in the context of the Passover holiday,” places the Soviet Jews at the end of a long line of generations of oppressed Jews, including the enslaved Israelites, the victims of the Holocaust, and the Jewish community of Ethiopia. It would seem that the ancient chords of the Haggadah blend harmoniously with particularistically-Jewish political movements.
Having surveyed ten decades of twentieth-century Haggadahs, we can definitively conclude that this ancient text has been transformed by a formidable array of innovations. Whether on account of religious belief, historical event, political leaning, or mere taste, the traditional text of the Haggadah has been illustrated, supplemented, modified, and in some cases, altogether replaced. Of the four religious movements of Judaism, adherents of Reform and Reconstructionism were quick to make the Haggadah reflect their ideologies; while Conservative and Orthodox Jews, faithful to their own tenets, acted at a far slower pace. The frequent references to the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel in the modern Haggadah contemporize for some the movement from degradation to glory, first codified in the Exodus story and now used to find meaning in the inexplicable. The central theme of the Haggadah has itself become a platform upon which many have preached the message of servitude-redemption to express more modern liberationist yearnings, both universal and particularistically-Jewish.
It remains an open question whether or not these contemporary Haggadahs are merely ephemeral expressions of the period in which they are produced. On the one hand, it might be argued that in the case of some new Haggadahs, it is their very intention to be eventually rendered obsolete. After all, once liberation comes in the form of a tolerant society, who will need a Freedom Seder? Once Judaism is liberated from its patriarchal and sexist fetters, who will need a feminist Haggadah? The particular messianic yearnings writ large on the pages of these new Haggadahs are meant to be time-bound.
Yet, on the other hand, the Haggadah is designed to be a script for Jews throughout the ages to retell and reenact the Exodus from Egypt. Conservative voices may judge the modern exemplars of Haggadah reformulation as “trendy,” or at least, as unequal to the task of carrying tradition forward through the centuries. They are not all of a piece, of course; some are more “traditional” than others. But some, certainly, seem almost to be counter-narratives to the traditional tale rather than carefully construed exegeses of that tale, albeit designed to address today’s contemporary reality rather than the worlds of experience that Jews have long ago left behind. The proper rejoinder, of course, is that merely reiterating the tale as it once was told to us is insufficient, as we now try to tell it to others. According to the Haggadah itself, “In every generation, each individual should feel as though he or she had actually emerged from Egypt.” To codify one text for all time is to deny successive generations the opportunity to tell their own story. As it says in the Haggadah: “Whoever elaborates upon the [story] of the Exodus from Egypt deserves praise.”
1. The Haggadah, based on Exodus 13:8, “You shall explain to your son on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt,’ ” but rendered in gender-inclusive language.
2. See esp. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History: A Panorama in Facsimile of Five Centuries of the Printed Haggadah from the Collections of Harvard University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Philadelphia, 1973).
3. Cf. exchange by Lawrence A. Hoffman (“What Is a Liturgical Tradition?”) and Mark Searle (“Two Liturgical Traditions: Looking to the Future”) in volume 2 of this series, The Changing Face of Jewish and Christian Worship in North America (Notre Dame, 1991), pp. 3–28, 221–44.
4. Note that each of the movements has evolved and changed dramatically since its inception. The sketches herein should not be taken as wholly accurate descriptions of present-day Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Judaism.
5. The first edition of the Union Prayer Book (1892), the American Reform movement’s liturgy, contained a ritual for the seder based on the German work of Leopold Stein, who had attempted to create a new liturgy for the seder in 1841. After its elimination from subsequent editions of the Union Prayer Book, it was published by its author, I. S. Moses, in separate book form in 1902. In 1908, the Reform movement for the first time published a Haggadah of its own, apart from its prayer book: The Union Haggadah: Home Service for the Passover Eve (Cincinnati, 1908).
6. Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History, p. 51.
7. American Jews have attempted regularly to assert their loyalty to the United States, at times by highlighting the confluence of themes suggested by the American War of Independence and the Exodus. A splendid example is Abraham J. Klausner’s The Bicentennial Passover Haggadah (New York, 1976), which, among other gems, contains an updated version of the Passover song “Who Knows One?” (a counting song similar in nature to the “Twelve Days of Christmas”). The lyrics include: “One is the good ship Peartree which in 1654 brought the first Jewish settlers to these shores. Two are the early settlers Jacob Barsimson and Asser Levy who demanded the right to serve in the defense of their country. . . . Eight are the words ‘And thou shalt proclaim liberty throughout the land!’ (on the Liberty Bell which are excerpted from the Hebrew Bible). . . . Twelve are the American Nobel laureates of Jewish descent who brought pride to their country.”
8. Foreword, The Union Haggadah.
9. Mordecai M. Kaplan, Eugene Kohn, and Ira Eisenstein, eds., The New Haggadah for the Pesach [Passover] Seder (for the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation) (New York, 1941).
10. Preface, The New Haggadah for the Pesach Seder.
11. The traditional text reads, “Pour out Your wrath upon those who do not know You and upon the governments which do not call upon Your name. For they have devoured Jacob and destroyed his home” (Ps. 79:6–7).
12. Michael Strassfeld, ed., A Passover Haggadah (New York, 1979), “the first Haggadah to be produced by an official body of the Conservative movement,” according to its preface. The Conservative Movement’s United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education had published a children’s Haggadah in 1964, but this was the first work published with rabbinical approval and intended for actual family use.
13. Shlomo Riskin, ed., The Passover Haggadah (New York, 1983).
14. Ch. Gatzler, ed. and illustrator, Passover Haggadah (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv, 1953). A similarly interesting and unconventional Haggadah emerged in Israeli kibbutzim (collective agricultural settlements, largely socialist and secular). They contain myriad quotes from Song of Songs evoking nature, and provide supplementary readings by Zionist poets and authors. See, e.g., Shomer Hatza’ir, eds., Haggadah Kibbutz Version (Rehavia, 1950), which changes the Haggadah conclusion, “This year here, next year in Israel” to “This year here, next year all the House of Israel [here].”
15. Abraham Regelson, translator, and Siegmund Forst, illustrator, The Haggadah of Passover (New York, 1941).
16. Saul Goodman, ed., Passover Haggadah (New York, 1962).
17. On April 19, 1943, a German force, equipped with tanks and artillery, penetrated the ghetto in Warsaw in order to resume deportations of Jews to death camps. The Jewish fighters met the Nazis with stiff resistance. Despite overwhelmingly superior forces, the Germans were initially repulsed, and the Jews were able to fight on for a total of twenty-eight days. Sporadic resistance continued until August 1943.
18. See Philip Birnbaum, Hasiddur Hashalem: Daily Prayer Book (1949; reprint ed., New York, 1995), pp. 383–84.
19. Morris Silverman, ed., The Passover Haggadah (Bridgeport, Conn., 1972).
20. Solomon Fedler, ed., Haggadah for Pesach “Am Yisrael Hai” (Johannesburg, 1981).
21. Lit., “If you will it, it is no legend” (aggadah). Aggadah is the opposite of Halakhah, Jewish law, and connotes imaginative exegesis, akin to what we mean by fiction.
22. Elie Wiesel, commentator, and Mark Podwal, illustrator, A Passover Haggadah (New York, 1993).
23. Ibid., pp. 98 and 99.
24. See Yosef H. Yerushalmi, “Clio and the Jews: Reflections on Jewish Historiography in the Sixteenth Century,” American Academy for Jewish Research Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem, 1980), esp. p. 18, for a discussion of medieval Jewish chroniclers’ failure to regard events of Jewish historiography in their specificity. I see a similar phenomenon among Haggadah editors in our own day.
25. M. Altshuler, ed., and A. Tishler, illustrator, Hagodeh far Gloiber un Apikorsim (1927).
26. Arthur I. Waskow, ed., The Freedom Seder: A New Haggadah for Passover (New York, 1969).
27. Jane Sprague, ed., The San Diego Women’s Haggadah, published by The Women’s Institute for Continuing Jewish Education (1980). For an earlier version of a feminist Haggadah, see Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, “Jewish Women’s Haggadah,” in Elizabeth Kolton, ed., The Jewish Woman (New York, 1976), pp. 94–102.
28. Roberta Kalechofsky, ed., Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb (Marblehead, Mass., 1988).
29. Vegetarians draw on a talmudic passage which attributes to the fourth-century authority, Rabbah, the substitution of a beet for the shankbone (Pes. 114b).
30. E.g., in Silverman, The Passover Haggadah.
31. CLAL and NCSJ, Freedom Haggadah for Soviet Jewry (1987).