The Passover Haggadah

A Biography

Vanessa L. Ochs

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691201528
• Sujet: Teología y religión
• Sous-sujet: Teología judía

The life and times of a treasured book read by generations of Jewish families at the seder table Every year at Passover, Jews around the world gather for the seder, a festive meal where family and friends come together to sing, pray, and enjoy traditional food while retelling the biblical story of the Exodus. The Passover Haggadah provides the script for the meal and is a religious text unlike any other. It is the only sacred book available in so many varieties—from the Maxwell House edition of the 1930s to the countercultural Freedom Seder —and it is the rare liturgical work that allows people with limited knowledge to conduct a complex religious service. The Haggadah is also the only religious book given away for free at grocery stores as a promotion. Vanessa Ochs tells the story of this beloved book, from its emergence in antiquity as an oral practice to its vibrant proliferation today.Ochs provides a lively and incisive account of how the foundational Jewish narrative of liberation is remembered in the Haggadah. She discusses the book's origins in biblical and rabbinical literature, its flourishing in illuminated manuscripts in the medieval period, and its mass production with the advent of the printing press. She looks at Haggadot created on the kibbutz, those reflecting the Holocaust, feminist and LGBTQ-themed Haggadot, and even one featuring a popular television show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Ochs shows how this enduring work of liturgy that once served to transmit Jewish identity in Jewish settings continues to be reinterpreted and reimagined to share the message of freedom for all.

How the Haggadah Came to Be

Early Sources in the Bible, Tosefta, Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash

CHAPTER 1

The Bible¹ provides the backstory for the life of the Haggadah. It is the source of the exodus narrative and provides the core language, imagery, and the Haggadah’s raison d’être. It’s worth remembering that biblical narratives ordaining or describing observances of Passover are not the same as historical, ethnographic, or archaeological evidence. We don’t know if there ever were actual men and women who performed the Passover rituals the ancient Israelites were commanded to observe precisely as they were described—or at all. Were practices that were presented as being newly instituted by God indeed so very new or distinctive to the Israelites? Did Israelite leaders and parents succeed in transmitting the social and spiritual attitudes the Passover practices were intended to inculcate? We have hints, but not facts.

If we were to read the Hebrew Bible from cover to cover as a literary narrative,² we would see that the story of the exodus is foreshadowed before the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt under Pharaoh, before they called out to God for rescue and Moses cried, “Let my people go!” It begins in Genesis, with an ancestral dream: “As the sun was about to set, a deep sleep fell upon Abram” (15:12). Abraham (known as Abram before his encounter with God) sets forth on his sacred journey away from the home of his idol-keeping family toward a land promised by the one God who has spoken to him. God comes to him in a night vision, revealing a terrifying future for Abraham’s descendants: “Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not their own, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13). God tempers the awful news with consolation: “I will execute judgment on the nation they shall serve, and in the end they shall go free with great wealth” (Genesis 15:14). The entire story is summarized in Deuteronomy 26:10–14. Israel’s sacred history, declared at harvest time, later becomes the core of the Haggadah’s narrative.

Biblical themes of exile and slavery, followed by eventual justice and divine deliverance as God steps into history as a response to human suffering, find their way into the Haggadah. Abraham’s idol-worshipping ancestors emerge as central figures. Present, too, are his descendants who go down to Egypt and inherit Abraham’s destiny of enslavement. They cry out to God for help. The degrading servitude the Israelites endure in Egypt and the enemies of later generations who attempt to destroy them recall God’s prediction, as does the liberation of the slaves. There are sacrifices too, referencing the slaughtered lamb that, at the last moment, replaces Abraham’s son Isaac on his sacrificial altar, bearing witness to Abraham’s fidelity and God’s compassion.

There is no one single festival of Passover in the Bible, no one single authoritative account of how it used to be done originally and correctly. But there are multiple variations on a Passover (pesach) ritual found in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, I Kings, II Kings, I Chronicles and II Chronicles, Ezra, and Ezekiel.³ These variations are all symbolically present in the meal the Haggadah liturgy comes to orchestrate. The paradigmatic biblical sources for a Passover ritual are found in Exodus 12:1–20. On the verge of the departure of the Israelites from Egypt, God tells Moses and Aaron to relay that at twilight on the eve of fourteenth day of Nisan, families must sacrifice a perfect yearling lamb, smearing its blood on their doors with branches of hyssop. Lamb’s blood is the sign for the Angel of Death to pass over (Passover!) their houses when the firstborn children of the Egyptians are slain in a tenth plague. This food practice is set in a domestic context, involving the participation of the whole family, hovering watchfully over a lamb. Families (or combined households) are to roast their lambs over the fire and eat them with unleavened bread and with bitter herbs. (Hardly the seder we know and love, but it is already beginning to sound familiar.) There is a dress code of sorts: clothes secured for travel, sandals, and a staff ready in hand for the next day’s hasty departure. The dress is symbolic as well as practical, suggesting that this ritual meal, marking the protection of the endangered firstborn sons in the houses of the Israelites, also prepares the slaves for their new identity as sojourners. This one-time ritual is called, in retrospect, the Passover in Egypt, as opposed to the subsequent Passover that was kept annually.

Even before this hurried meal is consumed and the horrible night of waiting to depart begins, the Israelites learn something astonishing. For the rest of all time, they will be remembering both a ritual they have yet to perform and a liberation they have yet to experience. Before surviving a harrowing escape, enduring trials during the years of desert wandering, and coming into a promised land, even before they have performed the ritual even once, they are instructed to prepare to commit it to memory and to repeat it for all of time. This anticipated practice of a less hurried, symbolic meal is called the Passover of the Generations. Fusing one ritual for now, and one for the time to come, presages, as David Stern puts it, a “dramatic collapsing of time—past, present, and future—that . . . marks much of the inner dynamics of both the seder and the Haggadah as they subsequently develop.”⁴

The Passover of the Generations, celebrated in remembrance of being brought out of Egypt, is marked by seven days of eating unleavened bread in a leaven-free house. It is also referred to as the Feast of Matzot (unleavened bread), calling up the spring wheat harvest. The timing of the festival, at “the beginning of the months . . . the first of the months of the year” (Exodus 12:2), as well as elements of sacrifice and purity practices that might augur an auspicious year to come, call up the festival’s linkages to ancient Near Eastern New Year celebrations.

Mount Sinai is the setting for the next Passover narration in the Hebrew Bible. On the fourteenth day of Nisan, “at twilight, there shall be a Passover offering to the Lord, and on the fifteenth day of that month, the Lord’s Feast of Unleavened Bread” (Leviticus 23:4–6). The first and seventh days of celebration allow no work to be done as befits a sacred occasion, and all seven days require sacrifice to God. We are left to imagine how Passover is marked (or not) through the previous years of wandering until we come to a detailed description of the first Passover celebrated in the land promised to Abraham’s ancestors. New distinctions marking the return home accumulate. Men need to be circumcised so they are eligible to offer the Passover sacrifice. A new Passover diet is instituted: not just unleavened bread and parched grain, but local foods—the produce of the country, a bounty meriting thanksgiving befitting this time in the agricultural year.

The book of Numbers introduces a “do-over” policy. Those who cannot meet the obligation of the Passover offering on the assigned day of Nisan, either because they are in a state of ritual impurity caused by their contact with the dead or because they are away on a journey, can make it up a month later. Fail to do so, and they are cut off from their kin (Numbers 9:13).

When Passover becomes a pilgrimage holiday, it is set at the Temple in Jerusalem, the home of God and the cultic center where sacred practice is privileged and national power is centralized. Families leave home and head for the city, bringing firstborn lambs to be sacrificed by priests in the Temple precincts. Afterward, family groupings eat the roasted lamb along with matzah: “You shall cook and eat it at the place that the Lord your God will choose; and in the morning you may start back on your journey home” (Deuteronomy 16:7). In the Temple, the Levites chant psalms of praise and rejoicing. Their psalms provide the first liturgical materials the Haggadah draws on, and their musicianship presages the spirit of song that will eventually characterize the seder.

Passover observance at the Temple is the occasion for large-scale revivals, drawing attention to the national aspect of the celebration. Passovers in Jerusalem sponsored by King Hezekiah (reigning in the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE) and King Josiah (reigning from about 641 to 609 BCE) are royal extravaganzas. In Hezekiah’s reign (II Chronicles 31:1–27), a great crowd reassembles for a Temple celebration a month late; the “second chance” policy is invoked. It lasts not one but two weeks, and the Levites slaughter thousands on thousands of bulls and sheep. Rejoicing is unrestrained, as this has apparently not happened, it is claimed, since the time of Solomon. King Josiah then affirms his own power when it is his turn to sponsor Passover as a national unity holiday, assuring that all of Israel, those of the north and south, keep the outdoor communal meal. His Majesty’s largesse could not have gone unnoticed: he donates thirty thousand lambs and goats for the Passover offerings, and three thousand cattle. With singers at their stations, Levites (doing double duty as chefs and servers) “roasted the Passover sacrifice in fire . . . while the sacred offerings they cooked in pots, cauldrons and pans, and conveyed them with dispatch to all the people” (II Chronicles 35:13). The appraisal is again hyperbolic, and competitively so: since the time of Samuel, “no Passover like that had ever been kept in Israel: none of the kings of Israel had kept a Passover like the one kept by Josiah” (II Chronicles 35:18). How clearly the new and improved circumstances are linked to the old ways, yet there are changes. When kings are concerned, we do not hear concern about the efficaciousness or permissibility of their Passover innovations. They reflect their power and also the capaciousness and flexibility of this holiday, a sensibility the Haggadah will incorporate.

MISHNAH AND TOSEFTA: PASSOVER, AFTER THE TEMPLE’S DESTRUCTION

The sources of the Haggadah are found not just in the Bible, but in the Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmuds (of Jerusalem and Babylonia), and Midrash. The Mishnah was set down in writing in the Land of Israel under Roman rule at the end of the second century and the beginning of the third; the Tosefta, compiled around 220 CE, includes supplementary teachings. The term Midrash (compiled between 200 and 1000 CE) refers to the rabbinic interactions with the Bible that are of both a legal (halakha) and a sermonic (aggada) nature. The Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, compiled in the fifth and sixth centuries respectively, offer conversational scholarly reflections on the Mishnah that include debates on law, demands for precision and standards, chronicles of practices, and many digressions. These are oral traditions of rabbinic deliberation; when they were eventually redacted and written down, an enduring conversation speaking across generations was created, one that remains alive today.

After the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, there was no longer a place to assemble for Passover pilgrimage, no place for the Levites to sacrifice the lambs at meals of celebration, remembrance, and instruction. Without those lambs, the ancestral “condiments”—that is, the matzah and bitter herbs—might have been seen as culinary signs of divine impotence, designating rupture of the covenant. But they were not eliminated; they were repurposed to prompt new narratives, ones in which the enslavement of the past could suggest that the God who redeemed Israel before might do so once again.

Rabbinic sages forged new practices, maintaining continuity with the past through encounters with text, seen as a source of ongoing revelation. Through study, deliberation, and debate, generations of rabbis needed to develop alternative ceremonies so that Jews could continue to experience connection to God. At Passover, what could still stimulate the telling of the story of the Exodus and its redemption? What could protect against a desperate feeling of abandonment by God in times of exile or despair? The symbolic service of study and ritualized dining that developed was set at a new altar. Not the synagogue or study house, but the home table. (Actually, these were probably first like the minitables brought in and out to dining patricians of Roman Palestine.) Possibly, the rabbis anticipated that being aware of Passover observances taking place simultaneously in other households might cultivate the feeling of connectedness and people-hood⁵—what Victor and Edith Turner called communitas—once known by pilgrims assembling together.⁶

The rabbis’ efforts to reconstruct Passover did not come about overnight; these efforts took years to coalesce. Ritual changes responding to loss and trauma with resilience rarely emerge all of a piece and garner wide embrace; it’s a process, a messy one. There is inevitably dig-in-your-heels debate, personality conflict, power play, ritual trial and error. And Passover was no exception. Consider that in our own time it took fourteen years for the National September 11th Memorial Museum to be established because of the complex challenges of honoring different groups, including families of victims, first responders, Wall Street neighbors of many traditions, and even political stakeholders such as the Port Authority of New York and the city of New York.

What we do know is this: in the first centuries after the destruction of the Temple, there was still no definitive Haggadah, no written script explaining what to do and what to say. Lawrence Hoffman maintains that “the entire liturgy was orally delivered. We should abandon the search for an original (and therefore authentic) text; celebrants followed the structure of the night’s drama without being bound by it.”⁷ Nonetheless, we can still trace strands of its development.

The Tosefta revealed an ad hoc Passover home ceremony taking place between 70 and 200 CE and beyond. It was briefer and less elaborate than the one found in the Mishnah’s and may even have come first, as Judith Hauptman has argued.⁸ The Tosefta ceremony began with a blessing over wine. (Why wine? Perhaps to make the members of the household happy enough to think about redemption. Rabbi Judah specified: women and children should be gladdened with what is “appropriate” for them—which is what? Hard to say!) Following an hors d’oeuvre of dipped sweetbreads, a few psalms were recited at the table. If no one in the household could recite the psalms, they were to make their way to the synagogue to hear them, in part, and to return after the meal for the remainder. At the table, matzah was divvied up, and bitter lettuce was dipped into charoset. Then the meal. If there were specific words to be said at the table, the Tosefta did not record them. This meal could not be concluded with an afikomen, then described as a trail mix dessert of nuts, dates, and roast corn. Instead, there was the just-desert of an all-night, all-male study session that lasted until the cock crowed. Instructions took into consideration varying social scenarios: “A person must engage in the laws of Pesach all night, even if it is just him and his son, even if it is just by himself, and even between him and his student.”⁹ Ideally, sober and awake.

The contents of the study session of the Tosefta went without saying: it was the curriculum of all the laws of Passover that learned people presumably already knew. However, it was not meant to be a conventional lecture; there should be a dialogue. Or, as Michael Walzer writes, “Perhaps we should say simply that the covenant is carried forward on a flood of talk: argument and analysis, folkloric expansion, interpretation and reinterpretation.”¹⁰

The Mishnah (Pesachim 10) presented a more elaborate ceremony than the Tosefta. With its fixed step-by-step instructions, blessings, psalms (the selection referred to as Hallel), scripted and improvised give-and-take exchanges over Torah, God, and history, it presaged the Hag...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: The Life of the Haggadah
• Chapter 1. How the Haggadah Came to Be: Early Sources in the Bible, Tosefta, Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash
• Chapter 2. On Becoming a Book: From the Earliest Haggadot to the Illuminated Haggadot of the Middle Ages
• Chapter 3. The Printed Haggadah and Its Enduring Conventions: A Text of One’s Own
• Chapter 4. Twentieth-Century Variations: The Haggadah in American Jewish Movements, Israeli Kibbutzim, and American Third Seders
• Chapter 5. Haggadot of Darkness
• Chapter 6. The Haggadah of the Moment
• Acknowledgments
• Resources
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index