NEWTON, Mass. — There is nothing new about a Haggadah with a social action theme. Contrary to what Rabbi Maxwell House might have us believe, a Passover seder that doesn’t touch on current issues of justice and freedom barely earns the right to call itself a seder.
As Rabbi Arthur Waskow explains in his introduction to The Shalom Seders, a compilation of three haggadot by the New Jewish Agenda, the very word haggadah (literally, “telling”) teaches us to rewrite the Haggadah.
“Freedom is always a-borning,” writes Waskow, “and so is the Haggadah, the telling of freedom. Its old questions lead always to new questions; so these Haggadahs are retellings, with new questions…Every year and every generation, Passover comes as a moment of birth.” And the words of the Haggadah teach the same lesson: “In every generation, a person is required to see herself or himself as if he or she personally left Mitzrayim,” the narrow place of enslavement.
There is only one way to really feel that sense of freedom, and that is to retell the story, to make it alive in our own day and to hold the burning questions of our time right alongside the questions of our ancestors.
This retelling is a big task; it is not always easy to identify — or to speak — all of the brokenness that requires fixing, especially in the middle of a big family dinner. Fortunately, we have some help. What is different about some of today’s haggadot is that they push us to identify these themes of freedom in the Passover story. They encourage us to ask the questions of our time, to go beyond the telling of the actual Exodus from Egypt, and to make the link between the work of Moses and Miriam and the work that we have before us today.
A vegetarian option has become a must in almost every family; there is inevitably someone — and often many — at the table who won’t connect to the possibility of having eaten the sacrificial lamb, even in a past life. There are a couple of ways to get around this.
One is to provide a vegetarian shank bone — usually a beet, for its bloody red color. The other is to go for the full package and actually use a Haggadah for vegetarians. The best of the bunch is the Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb, by Micah Publications — “a vegetarian Haggadah that celebrates compassion for all creatures.” Compiled from two earlier versions, the Journey of the Liberated Lamb and the Haggadah for the Vegetarian Family, this Haggadah offers a collection of readings and ideas related to developing and articulating a respect for all living beings.
The book begins with an interesting essay about the Jewish value of avoiding meat; the editors bring sources from all over Jewish tradition to prove the point, and they suggest that while the house is being cleaned for Passover, a full survey and cleaning of meat products should be done as well.
In addition, the book includes a number of vegetarian recipes for Passover meals: a seder roast, an Israeli casserole and a chopped “liver” spread. The book’s title is taken from the story of Moses running after a lamb that had fled from his herd, helping the lamb quench his thirst and carrying him back to the field.
Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb, the editors write, is meant to be read as a poem; it might also be used in shorter segments in conjunction with another, more user-friendly Haggadah.
The compiled seders published by New Jewish Agenda, The Shalom Seders, offer several opportunities for social action and reflection at once. With three haggadot within one volume, the book includes a Rainbow Seder, originally written for Passover 1969, the first anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; a Seder of the Children of Abraham, focusing on building bridges between Arabs and Jews; and a Haggadah of Liberation, which began as a collection of stories on women’s liberation, and now reads as a tale of resistance of both men and women, mostly during the Holocaust.
One could imagine an interesting seder based on this Haggadah, with readings from each of the three sections. The Rainbow Seder begins with the lights turned off, and a short retelling of the Creation story. “In the beginning, darkness covered the face of the deep. Then the rushing breath of God hovered over the waters…”
The middle section is revamped here to include the fuller story of Abraham’s children, both Isaac and Ishmael. Quotes from the Koran, Anwar Sadat’s speech to the Knesset, and personal anecdotes of the conflict in the Middle East are interspersed with the four cups of wine, representing security, trust, hope and peace, and a reinterpretation of the 10 plagues, to include 10 different cities where needless killing has occurred in the war.
The final section of The Shalom Seders is A Haggadah of Liberation, originally written in 1971 by a group of Jewish women in Portland, Ore. Updated every year until the book’s publication in 1984, the Haggadah is now simply an expression of a hope for redemption for all genders.
For seders with a feminist focus, there is much usable material in other publications. Three different haggadot — The San Diego Women’s Haggadah, The Dancing with Miriam Haggadah (by Elaine Moise and Rebecca Schwartz) and The Journey Continues: the Ma’yan Haggadah — suggest that a women’s Haggadah is best used outside of the first or second night of Passover. These haggadot are meant to be read at women’s gatherings either before or during Passover, where women can share with one another in a unique community of mothers and daughters, partners, sisters and friends. The San Diego Women’s Haggadah suggests the seventh night of Passover as a time “when we could rest and recline as free women.”
The 10 Plagues are read twice, once as the plagues brought on the Egyptians, and again, with a drop of wine poured at each mention, as the plagues brought upon Jewish women (“the consistently male image of God…the education of our young women not being taken as seriously as that of our young men… “)