Book review: “The Passover Haggadah: A Biography” by Vanessa L. Ochs

A Haggadah is a “telling,” and Vanessa L. Ochs’s 2020 book The Passover Haggadah: A Biography is a telling of the life story of this Jewish ritual of remembering and honoring the Exodus from Egypt.

To write “this Jewish ritual,” however, is a bit misleading.

The Haggadah is one ritual, enacted annually at the seder table, but there have been more than six thousand versions — more than six thousand Haggadot — over the past two millenniums.

As Ochs, a rabbi and a religious studies professor at the University of Viginia, points out, publishing new versions is good business today.

There are Haggadot from celebrities, and as coffee table books, and for gay Jews, and for busy people (such as 30 Minute Seder: The Haggadah That Blends Brevity with Tradition by Robert Kopman with illustrations by Bil Yanok) and for just about any interest (such as The Baseball Haggadah: A Festival of Freedom and Springtime in 15 Innings by Sharon G. Forman with illustrations by Lisa J. Teitelbaum).

For Harry Potter fans, there’s The (Unofficial) Hogwarts Haggadah by Moshe Rosenberg and Aviva Shur. And, for non-believers, there’s The Unorthodox Haggadah: A Dogma-free Passover for Jews and Other Chosen People by Nathan Phillips, marketed as a “God-free Haggadah for Jews who enjoy the cultural aspects of the religion but not so much the dogmatic ones.”

 

“A home ceremony”

One reason for the thousands of versions is that the Haggadah is a kind of folk ritual that was created for the seder in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.

Its aim is to fulfill the Biblical injunction to pass along the story of the Exodus. But there was no single author nor editor. Indeed, the ritual exists outside of formal Jewish law:

Whereas Jewish law stipulates that the Torah scroll must be read from and the Scroll of Esther must be heard, no laws stipulate how the Haggadah should be read aloud or heard…This s a home ceremony, so no guardians stand by to correct words that are inadvertently skipped or misread.

 

One version

Ochs provides a synopsis of a “fairly traditional Haggadah”:

• A listing of the fourteen steps of the ritual.
• The first of four blessings over wine.
• Instructions for washing one’s hands.
• A blessing over a green vegetable.
• The breaking of matzah (unleavened flatbread) and setting half aside in hiding.
• A summary of the Passover and an introduction of the theme of slavery and freedom.
• A child asks four questions, only vaguely answered.
• The telling of a story of four archetypal children.
• Many passages of rabbinical literature.
• Instructions to name the ten plagues.
• The singing of the cheerful song “Dayenu” (“It would be enough.”)
• Psalms.
• Handwashing.
• A blessing before eating matzah.
• A blessing for eating bitter herbs.
• A ritual for eating a sandwich made of bitter herbs and a condiment called charoset.
• The eating of a festive meal.
• Instructions to eat the hidden matzah.
• Grace after meals.
• A welcoming of the prophet Elijah.
• More psalms.
• Popular liturgical songs.

 

“Hard questions”

The spirit of the Haggadah, Ochs writes, isn’t the following of such complicated steps inflexibly.  It’s to use the ritual as a jumping off point to serious talk.

A Haggadah comes to life when it leads those who have gathered to use it to ask hard questions about slavery, exile, redemption, and freeing the oppressed…

It is especially lively, but in a different way, when it fades into the background and gives rise to the conversation of those seated at the seder.

 

“A commonplace book”

Ochs describes the Haggadah as “a commonplace book chronicling generations of verbal, illustrative, and ritual strategies that were considered in their times and in their places, suitable for the task of transmission.”

In other words, over time, each family, each community adjusts, refines, expands, reduces and revamps the Haggadah for its own needs, to fit its own hopes and memories, to face its uncertain present and future.

Unlike most religious rituals, the Haggadah has no “official” version and no strict requirements for legitimacy. As a result, it’s fluid and informal and can be refitted at any time.

That’s why there are so many Haggadot. And, Ochs writes, there’s another reason: The Haggadah ritual is imperfect:

• It has an unwieldy, unfocused text.
• It doesn’t work well for those who haven’t studied the Hebrew Bible closely.
• It recounts the joyous salvation of the Israelites from Pharoah but doesn’t help the participants “understand why God appears to no longer hear the suffering of God’s children or to provide salvation.”

 

“Hallmark disjointedness”

Those imperfections, however, don’t nullify the value of the ritual. Indeed, it is as if they mirror the imperfections of human beings themselves. They also serve as a spur to those taking part in the seder to make it real for themselves as opposed to simply repeating hidebound formulas.  Ochs writes:

The Haggadah stays alive not because it has been preserved unchanged, but because it has been perpetually reimagined—five thousand times, six thousand times, with more to come…

As a text meant to be recited at a dinner table overflowing with food and wine, the Haggadah works because it trains its celebrants to digest metaphors and experience them as spiritual facts…

The Haggadah’s hallmark disjointedness and absence of literary unity preserve its being endlessly in process, stable in its instability, and always needing repair.

 

“Unlike any before”

Indeed, Ochs ends her book with a quote from a 2012 New York Times essay by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, “Why a Haggadah?”:

The need for new Haggadahs does not imply the failure of existing ones, but the struggle to engage everyone at the table in an ancient story in a time that is unlike any that has come before.

Every age will be “a time unlike any that has come before.” And every age will need its Haggadot.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

6.16.26