Everyone has his or her favorite part of the seder — apart from the meal. Polling my household, votes were cast for the “Hillel sandwich,” the Four Questions and singing “Dayenu.”
How about the Ten Plagues, a climactic moment in the telling of the renowned story of the exodus?
“These are the ten plagues that the Holy One, Blessed is He, brought upon the Egyptians in Egypt: Blood, frogs, lice, a maelstrom of beasts, pestilence, boils, and hail-full-of-fire, locusts, a clotted darkness — too thick to pass. The killing of the firstborn.”
The preceding passage (with a couple of variations) will be familiar to most Jews. The text is from a new translation of the traditional Haggada by author Nathan Englander (What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank). The New American Haggadah (Little, Brown and Company), which is featured in this Passover special edition of the Jewish World, is edited by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). Oded Ezer, an Israeli, designed the handsome volume and created the typographic illustrations.
In addition, the New American Haggadah includes commentaries by Nathaniel Deutsch, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Lemony Snicket (a.k.a. Daniel Handler).
Forward columnist Leonard Fein recently gushed that this addition to the Jewish bookshelf is a “visually gorgeous and utterly contemporary book…. It is a labor of great love and of much work and, above all, of brilliant artistry — verbal, graphic and intellectual.”
The AJW cover is adorned with the New American Haggadah page on Elijah the Prophet, for whom a cup of wine is poured and the door is ceremonially opened during the seder. In his commentary on Elijah, Deutsch cites a Bible verse that is a cornerstone of Jewish ethics: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20).
Deutsch then notes that Elijah “is the beggar on the side of the road, the servant, and the harlot. He is also the Roman official, the Persian, and the Arab. He is, above all, the stranger.”
Elijah wanders the world in various guises; Deutsch writes, “he shows up where we least expect him, often becoming the object of our insults before his true identity is revealed.”
I often heard a similar story, in my travels in Greece many years ago, regarding Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, and the hero of Homer’s poem, The Odyssey. I was told that the extraordinary Greek hospitality stemmed from the legend of the shipwrecked king: the Greeks never knew the exact identity of the bedraggled stranger on their doorstep, so they treated every visitor with respect and generosity.
It’s the same deal with Elijah, apparently. Deutsch tells the story, from the Babylonian Talmud, of Rabbi Shimon, son of Eleazar, “who was once returning from his teacher, full of pride at the amount of Torah that he had learned. On the way, Rabbi Shimon encountered Elijah, disguised as an exceptionally ugly man. ‘Peace be upon you, Rabbi,’ Elijah greeted the sage. ‘Empty one,’ the sage responded, ‘how ugly you are. Is everyone in your town so ugly?’ ‘I do not know,’ said the man. ‘Why don’t you go and tell the craftsman who made me how ugly is the vessel that he has created?’ Realizing his sin, Rabbi Shimon dismounted from the donkey he was riding and followed Elijah, begging his forgiveness.”
Perhaps this commentary can be introduced into your seder this year. It could prompt a discussion with threads encompassing many topical issues (in addition to general menschlichkeit, righteous behavior): bullying, LGBT rights, immigration, etc.
Deutsch concludes his comment on Elijah the Prophet: “For Rabbi Shimon, his encounter with Elijah revealed a different stranger — the ultimate stranger — God. Tonight, who is the stranger that Elijah reveals to us?”
Until Elijah actually appears to drink the fifth cup of wine at our seder and bring us news of peace breaking out in the world, there remains a great deal of work for each of us to do. As Rabbi Tarfon is quoted in Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers, 2:16), “It is not your obligation to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
We are the heirs to a great story — “arguably the best known of all stories,” Safran Foer notes, in his introduction to the New American Haggadah — the tale of our deliverance from bitter bondage in Egypt, wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, and deliverance into the Promised Land (which has become the focus of sharply contending narratives over the past century or so).
“Here we are: Individuals remembering a shared past and in pursuit of a shared destiny,” writes Safran Foer. “The seder is a protest against despair. The universe might appear deaf to our fears and hopes, but we are not — so we gather, and share them, and pass them down. We have been waiting for this moment for thousands of years — more than one hundred generations of Jews have been here as we are — and we will continue to wait for it. And we will not wait idly.”
The American Jewish World editors and staff wish all of our readers a happy and meaningful Passover.
— Mordecai Specktor / editor@ajwnews.com
(American Jewish World, 3.30.12)
