B'chol Dor Vador
I’ve always liked the Seder. One of my first “intellectual” projects, back when I was in high school, was reading though Haggados, picking out commentaries I liked, and re-typing them to use at the Seder. (In MS Write, on a 386! I filled a two-inch binder with meforshim and stories, and I still have that binder of with my Pesach stuff.) As an adult who now leads my own Sedarim, I still enjoy the experience, and I value the Seder as a vehicle for transmitting Jewish tradition and culture. But as someone who doesn’t believe that yetzias Mitzrayim could have happened as depicted in the Torah, the interpretations and divrei Torah that get repeated every year now often fall flat.
The solution, I’ve found, is to recognize the story of yetzias Mitzrayim for what it is. It’s a myth, in the anthropological sense of the word. Like all myths, it’s a grand story set far in the past, populated by larger-than-life heroes doing great deeds. The point of retelling the story every year it isn’t to offer a didactic lesson about what our ancestors experienced in the distant past. It’s to pass on our foundation myth, the story we tell about the birth of our people which tells us who we are and how we are to live in the world.
Recognizing that what we’re conveying at the Seder is our mythology frees me to adapt its meaning in ways that genuinely speak to me, while the Seder itself has historical weight that I find meaningful. Over the last five or six years I’ve experimented with different approaches, and I developed a commentary that helps me engage with the Seder through a mythological lens.
The Haggadah has historically been the most frequently illuminated and illustrated Jewish text. I have over the years bought several Haggados that compile images from historical Haggados, and I’ve enjoyed using them. That inspired me to look for more. Over the past few years I’ve collected images from many historical Haggados to use at my Sedarim. They’re a window to how people over the centuries imagined the passages of the Haggadah, what their sensibilities were, and what they did at their Sedarim.
A couple of years ago I created a Haggadah that brings these historical images together with the standard text and my commentary. At first it was just for me, but when I shared draft copies with friends or with people who had asked in online forums for ways to make the Seder meaningful for themselves, the response was overwhelmingly positive. So I put together a more polished version, and I’ve made it available to buy on Amazon for anyone who might be interested.
Link to the Haggadah on Amazon
This is the introduction I wrote for the Haggadah I put together:
Introduction
“בכל דור ודור: Finding Jewish Identity in Our Founding Story” is for those who value the traditional Seder, with all its historical and cultural weight, and seek to find meaning in it that speaks to their own lives in the modern world. It takes the Seder seriously as part of our living Jewish culture, while recognizing that continuity does not require ossification and reinterpretation is not repudiation. In every generation, our story is retold and re-understood by those who inherit it.
The volume you’re holding is designed to be easy to use at your Seder table. The text of Magid is presented with an intralinear English translation, allowing you to read the traditional Hebrew text of the Haggadah and translate it into English by reading straight down the page, without the need to constantly shift between pages or columns. The accompanying commentary is formatted as concise bullet points that can be skimmed quickly as the Seder proceeds, and offers a mythic/cultural lens through which to frame both the text and the experience. Following the commentary on each passage are discussion prompts meant to encourage conversation among participants. These prompts invite readers to reflect on what they have just read, to connect the text to lived experience, and to hear how others at the table understand the story we are telling.
The commentary approaches the Haggadah from a cultural and mythological point of view. In this context, “mythology” is not used dismissively in the colloquial sense of something untrue. Mythology is the cultural narrative that a group uses to make meaning. It’s the stories societies tell about who they are, where they came from, and how they are meant to live in the world. Whether or not the events in a myth literally happened in the past is beside the point. The power of a foundational myth like yetzias Mitzrayim lies in its ability to speak to questions of identity, memory, and belonging. It’s a story that has been repeated for millennia, its meaning shaped and reshaped by every generation that has been asked to see themselves within the story “as if they personally went out of Egypt.”
This Haggadah is intended to appeal to a wide range of theological and cultural Jewish perspectives. The commentary avoids taking a position on questions of historicity or theology, and instead focuses on how the traditional text of the Haggadah, made up of passages that are centuries or millennia old, can be made relevant to our contemporary lives. The interpretations offered here are presented as a lens through which a passage can be understood, and readers are encouraged to actively engage with and adapt them to find what is meaningful to themselves. The goal is to find modern meaning in ancient texts without discarding the structure and language that have carried them to us across the centuries.
Alongside the text and commentary, this Haggadah incorporates illustrations drawn from historical Haggados spanning more than six hundred years, from the fourteenth through the early twentieth centuries. These images are included both for their intrinsic interest and for the perspective they offer on continuity. Jews in different times and places—medieval Spain, early modern Germany, and communities in the Americas and the Middle East in the modern era—sat at their Seder tables and viewed these images in their Haggados, just as we can now sit at ours and view those same images in this volume.
The images reproduced here have been digitally restored from public-domain sources. The aged paper backgrounds have been removed to allow the artwork itself to stand out more clearly, while the fading and cracks that show their age have generally been left intact, except in a handful of cases where the damage was severe. On some pages the layout was inspired by or elements were digitally reproduced from the historical Haggdah the illustrations originated in. The restoration process involved digital image-editing tools and, in some cases, AI-assisted techniques. The images almost always accompany the same passages they did in the Haggados they came from and show the different ways those passages have been imagined by artists over the centuries. Interestingly, in many cases artists clearly copied earlier illustrations. Sometimes the images are nearly identical, while other times they preserve the same arrangement of figures and objects while updating clothing, styles, or details to match what was contemporary to the artist. These images reflect the same desire for continuity and reinterpretation that this Haggadah seeks to embody.