Free Download Haggadah

[Patricia]

Formore than a millennium, the haggadah has been the centerpiece of the Jewish holiday of Passover. The book sets out the ceremony for the Seder meal, when families tell the biblical Exodus story of God delivering the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt.

Consulting a rabbi from the Lower East Side, who declared that technically coffee beans were like berries and therefore kosher for Passover, Jacobs secured a rabbinical stamp of approval for Maxwell coffee in 1923.

It worked. According to a market report commissioned by the Joseph Jacobs Organization to guide its marketing efforts, Maxwell House became the coffee of choice for Jewish households around New York City.

Created by a collaborative team of LGBTQ and allied Jews, including Rabbi Micah Buck-Yael, this complete haggadah follows the traditional structure of the Seder with readings and questions about LGBTQ identity and life.

There is nothing in this "hagadah" worth considering. And while the authors might be Jewish, there is no question that they are mumars and probably rodfim as well. To compare this Hagadah to the Asufa Hagdah is an insult to those Israeli artists who work every year on the Asufa Hagadah.

Jewish disputes are only cozy and safe when we\u2019re powerless. When we do have power there is always friction. The Talmud tells us that the schools and Hillel and Shammai were frequently at odds with one another, and that Shammai\u2019s followers may have murdered Hillel\u2019s followers to secure a vote in a scene very reminiscent of January 6. This isn\u2019t to condone those actions\u2014the Talmud certainly doesn\u2019t\u2014but it gives you a sense that the disputes between these schools carried real hurt and anger. And we nonetheless laud them as paradigms of good disagreement!

Let me expand on this last point. Jewish creativity is essential for our future, and it can\u2019t happen unless people take risks. The seder is itself one such risk: the possibility of constructing a Passover ceremony in the absence of a Temple is bold and powerful, and it paid off. We want people to take those risks. If we don't we end up with a religion that has lost touch with reality.

The most powerful and riskiest image I have ever seen in a haggadah is this depiction of an Egyptian woman holding her dead firstborn after the final plague.

This image\u2014printed in an Israeli haggadah in 2013 and consciously modeled on Michelangelo's Piet\u00E0\u2014picks up on rabbinic stories about the fact that the Exodus was incredibly violent and left a lot of innocent dead. It could easily fit in the JVP haggadah; in fact it doesn't look that different from this year's World Press Photo award, which you can look up if you have the stomach for it. Nobody complained when this image was published in a haggadah. I am glad that it is part of the canon.

We can disagree about which haggadot are worth our time. A couple of years ago I pointed out that the right-wing Prager Haggadah was being given bad reviews from people who thought it was printed backwards, which says a lot about the audience. You could certainly claim that this means the Prager Haggadah is for Christians and is therefore a bad or illegitimate project, but I wouldn\u2019t go there. Our overall thrust must be to continue trying new things, to continue pushing forward. Ritual spaces, which we carefully cordon off from reality, are precisely the venues in which we should try to scare ourselves, to reach a little beyond what we think is possible. If you\u2019re going to hear out a difficult perspective once this year, let it be at the seder.

This is what I needed to do. As part of my research, I had to inspect every haggadah manuscript preserved in microfilm at the institute. This project sounds more daunting than it actually was, since what I wanted to check took about two minutes in each microfilm. (It took me longer to fill out the request slips than to look at the microfilms themselves!) And so, several days into the project, as I was zooming from one microfilm reel to the next, I suddenly glimpsed a bunch of pages in Latin, and then a haggadah with rather striking illustrations and, whizzing by me, haggadah pages with Latin inscriptions. I immediately stopped the microfilm reader, backed up to see if I was hallucinating, and there it was, several folios in a handsome Latin script followed by the illustrated pages of a professionally written haggadah, some with Latin marginal inscriptions. How interesting! I thought to myself, and then I ordered a printout of the Haggadah in order to look at it more carefully. The printout arrived, I put it on my desk, and it promptly got buried beneath a pile of other papers for several months.

Now, as it happens, I studied medieval Latin in graduate school, but that was long ago, and I was never a particularly good Latinist. To my good fortune, Christoph Markschies and I had become friends through our participation in the group at the Institute for Advanced Studies. After several months, once the microfilm printout resurfaced on my desk and I remembered it, I spoke to Christoph and asked him if he would be willing to help me read the Latin text. He graciously agreed, and we spent several hours reading the first section, but the work was very time-consuming, and we had our own projects to complete. Nonetheless, what we read had sparked our curiosity, and we decided to continue. Markschies proposed that he take a photocopy of the manuscript back to Germany and have a doctoral student in medieval studies there transcribe the text and do a preliminary translation into German. At the time, Markschies had just been appointed professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Heidelberg. At the close of the year, Christoph returned to Germany and I to Philadelphia and my position at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dear David: On Monday or Tuesday I will send you the whole Latin text of our document and the translation. For the moment we can say the following: our author is a monk, he is acquainted with many details, not only of the Haggadah but also of all the customs around the Haggadah. In the next attachment you will find the whole translation of the terrible Christian legend that Jews drop the blood of a child into the matzah. It is the first time that I have read this in a primary source (not in secondary literature), and I was really shocked when I went through the translation. On the one hand, the author is so well informed; on the other, he transmits the evil legend in the manner of a person who has never seen a Jew! This looks to me like a Janus-Kopf (Janus-head), our German word for a double-faced person.

This haggadah features the outline for a full seder including blessings over wine and symbolic foods, as well as a variety of thematic activities and discussion topics. The 2021 Haggadah uniquely focuses on the crises we have faced over the last 12 months including racial injustice and the climate crisis.

The Jewish holiday of Passover recalls and celebrates the freeing of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. The haggadah is the book that contains the ritual guide to the Passover Seder meal, along with scripture passages, commentary, prayers, and songs.

For centuries the haggadah has been one of the most celebrated items of Jewish literature and art. The Exodus narrative and its primary theme of liberation from oppression have resonated with people in many times and places over the centuries, who have adapted the haggadah to respond to political and social developments such as the Holocaust, feminism, and gay rights. There are many examples of both handwritten and printed haggadot with intricate illustrations. Some haggadot are unique masterpieces, while others have been printed in large, widely available editions.

Stephen P. Durchslag was an attorney for 44 years at the Winston and Strawn Law Firm in Chicago, serving as Chair of the Intellectual Properties Department of the firm. Now retired, he is currently pursuing a master's degree in Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. His wife Ruth is an ordained rabbi and psychologist, and they are the parents of two beautiful daughters.

In our haggadah, as in our lives, perhaps the lessons are in the journey and not in the destination. Torah itself is given in the wilderness. What can we learn in our wanderings, in the meandering and sometimes unwelcome turns of our lives?

I am told that in some Sephardic traditions we add additional questions to the seder: From where are we coming? To where are we going? What are we bringing with us? This is to remind us that the story is our story, the experience our experience, the journey our journey.

Last year, Sinai Temple members went on a mission to Poland. On a trip organized by our sisterhood, we traveled with March of the Living. We marched from Auschwitz to Birkenau, among more than 10,000 people standing side-by-side to signify the 10,000 people that were sent to the gas chambers every single day. We recited the Kaddish over mass graves of children, listened to the stories of Holocaust survivors, thanked non-Jews who jeopardized their own lives to save others, and mourned the millions who perished in Eastern Europe.

In other words, we can experience Passover, like the Israelites, as a communal journey undertaken with great hope but without complete certainty of how it will go, or where exactly we will end up. This is the possibility the traditional haggadah presents: of being surprised by what we say and hear and experience, and thus coming to know our tradition and one another differently. It offers a vision of politics, too: one that recognizes how building power and demanding justice begin not with a set of political propositions, but with cultivating relationships and asking questions, like the rabbis of the haggadah who stayed up all night telling one another the story until morning.

Emily Filler is assistant professor in the Study of Judaism at Washington and Lee University, and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Jewish Ethics. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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