Book Review: 'Tis the Season for Haggadot

Ah Passover! What a time of year, right? You get to spend hours cleaning your house of all that chametz (leavened goods made of barley, wheat, spelt, rye, and oats) and other shmutz that might have accumulated over the past year, while also meal planning the most amazing chametz-free week of food that won't fill you full of potato starch, potatoes, and more starch.

Preparing for the season, I've lamented that our books are all packed up and leaving on a barge for America today. I also don't have all of the haggadot that I used when I was living in the U.S. (because I sold them ... sigh). We don't have many things laying around that offer Pesach-season inspiration, unfortunately, so I've been blessed with the most amazing seasonally inspiring books from Mosaica Press, including Darkness to Destiny: The Haggadah Experience by Rabbi Immanuel Bernstein.

I'll admit right off the bat: The cover is cheesy in the style of so many pieces of Judaica these days, which is off-putting if you don't spend a time reading books of the Feldheim/Artscroll variety. But please, give it a chance!

One friend commented that the haggadah "seems a bit 101," which in truth is the way you want a haggadah to be. Sitting at a Passover seder table is not the place to be knee-deep in midrash, folks. It's small morsels of awesome, inspirational thought that will get you through the seder and allow you the option of participating by providing the other guests with some fun facts, tidbits, and takes on different aspects of the seder "service."

Reading through Darkness to Destiny, I was inspired to pursue a few topics and even wrote about them on About.com. I had zero clue that the four cups of wine were in any way remotely related to the dreams that Joseph interpreted in the Pharaoh narratives. Curious by this morsel shared in the commentaries in the beginning of the haggadah, I ended up writing up a look at the different reasons for the four cups of wine at the Passover seder for About.com. That led me to considering the three matzot and the reason for having three instead of, say, four (as is the theme of the seder with the cups of wine, the sons, and so many other things).

And this, folks, is what you want in a haggadah: Questions that raise more thought-provoking questions. The theme of Passover is, of course, "Why is this night different than all other nights?"

So if you're still considering what haggadot to have at your seder, may I suggest this mix-and-match selection for the diversity of your guests that includes this very easy-to-read take on the classic.

I Have Seen Upon the Earth

From a 1934 translation of Moses Ibn Ezra's אשר בנה עלי ארץ. It reminds me much of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), but almost darker in a way. Then again, I'm of the school of thought that Qohelet was a rather uplifting book, if anything. This, on the other hand, is dark, I think. This poem was found in a text by the JPS from 1934, and the poem was translated by Solomon Solis-Cohen. The book itself is part of a collection of Jewish Classics published in the 1930s.

"I Have Seen Upon the Earth"

I have seen upon the earth spacious mansions,
Palaces of ivory, with lofty chambers
And pillars upon carved pedestals --
Houses richly adorned and filled with things of
beauty --
And, as in a twinkling, I Have seen them heaps of ruins,
Wherein none might dwell.

Tell me: Where are they that builded?
And where are they that inhabited?
Where are their souls and where are their bodies?
And what hope is there for man,
Save to await death,
With the grave ever before his eyes --
For time is a herdsman,
And death like a knife,
And all that live, as sheep.

For the curious, I'm currently inventorying a book collection bestowed upon my department by a rabbi who passed away many years ago. The collection includes many siddurim, machzorim, and a bounty of personal, handwritten notes by the rabbi who donated the works. There are a bajillion haggadot, too. The rabbi, of the Conservative flavor, had many beautiful and old books, and I've found one dated to 1861. For a bibliophile such as myself, this project is absolutely amazing and thrilling. I'm a huge geek, so everytime I find something older than the 1960s I get stoked. Here are a collection of haggodot, some from the 1940s, others from the 1950s, and a few from what I believe is the 1960s. Missing from this photo is an original Maxwell House Haggadah from 1935, which was the third year of printing for Maxwell House and their haggadot. The great thing about the 1935 Haggadah? It's written in the most simple, plain English -- a stark contrast from the haggadot of the more recent (by this I mean 1980s-ish) Maxwell House versions that are chock full of "thou" and "thee" and "thine."

Over the coming weeks you'll get some beautiful glimpses into this project, because, although some might view these books as extremely modern and not worth a second glance, they are definitive pieces of literature for modern, American Judaism. And in our day of e-this and e-that, to hold a book from 1861 and smell the history and feel the cover sandpapering your hands is something priceless and beautiful.