Table Of Contents:
A Passover Unlike Any Other: Adam Kirsch, WSJ, Apr. 3, 2020
Who Compiled the Pesach Haggadah, and Why?: Moshe Dann, Algemeiner, Apr. 2, 2020
The Meaning of the Afikoman: Helen Plotkin, Tablet, Apr. 2, 2020
‘Holocaust’ Haggadah’s Cynical Illustrations Still Bite: Rene Ghert-Zand, Times of Israel, Apr. 15, 2014
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A Passover Unlike Any Other
Adam Kirsch
WSJ, Apr. 3, 2020
How is this night different from all other nights? That question, which Jews ask every year as part of the Passover celebration, will get a new answer in 2020. When the holiday begins on Wednesday night, for many Jews it will be the first time in their lives that they cannot attend a Seder—the ritual meal that commemorates the Israelites’ journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom in their Promised Land.
According to a 2013 Pew Research Center poll, the Seder is the most widely practiced Jewish tradition in the U.S.: Only 23% of American Jews regularly attend a synagogue, but 70% go to a Seder. In the age of Covid-19, however, bringing together old and young people in a small space to share food is simply too dangerous. In Israel, where all gatherings of more than 10 people have been banned, the Health Ministry has urged Jews to limit their Seders to their nuclear family. Chabad, the international Jewish outreach organization, has posted a list of frequently asked questions on its website, including “Can I at least invite my neighbors?” The answer is “no, no and no!”
This advice is in keeping with the traditional Jewish principle that the preservation of life overrides almost any other duty. And a Seder is a religious duty, not just a chance to see extended family and enjoy holiday dishes.
Seder means “order” in Hebrew, and it involves an ordered series of ritual actions, prayers, songs and stories—15 steps in all, which are recorded in the Haggada, the Passover prayer book. The core of the Seder is a long script, usually recited by the guests in turn, which narrates the Exodus and draws out its meaning. One reason why Passover is the quintessential Jewish holiday is that you celebrate it by talking about it. As the Haggada says, “everyone who discusses the exodus from Egypt at length is praiseworthy.”
In fact, the Bible implies that while the purpose of Passover is to remember the exodus, the exodus took place in part so that Jews could celebrate Passover. “And this day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the Lord throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance for ever,” God tells Moses and Aaron in Exodus 12, on the eve of the Israelites’ flight from Egypt. That Biblical passage is the origin of Passover practices that Jews still follow today—such as eating matzo, unleavened bread, in memory of the Israelites who had to flee before their dough had a chance to rise.
Over the last 2,000 years, Jews have managed to celebrate Passover in the face of far worse challenges than Covid-19. In the year 70, the ancient historian Josephus reports, the Roman general Titus besieged Jerusalem three days before Passover, at a time when the city’s population was swelled by the vast numbers of pilgrims who came to offer a Passover sacrifice in the Temple. The result was pestilence—or as we would now say, an epidemic—and famine, which according to Josephus’s estimate killed 1.1 million people. Yet the holiday went on—as it did even in Auschwitz during World War II, where some survivors recalled clandestine Seders conducted without a Haggada. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Who Compiled the Pesach Haggadah, and Why?
Moshe Dann
Algemeiner, Apr. 2, 2020
Although Jews have been retelling the story of the Exodus from Egypt at the Pesach seder for millennia, the Haggadah as we know it was compiled during the Gaonic period (8th-9th century CE) in Babylon, with additional songs probably written during the Middle Ages.
Based on Torah, Mishna, and Talmud, the Haggadah’s editors, leaders of the Jewish community in the Diaspora, sought to provide a compact guide for Jewish survival. With few precious hand-written texts available, often running for their safety and unable to carry volumes, Jews needed to teach their children the basics of the holiday and Judaism.
Using stories and songs, focused on family units, the Haggadah provides concise educational tools needed to instill Jewish historical awareness and identity. And, built on a prophetic vision of Redemption, it is focused on the Jewish homeland, Eretz Yisrael.
The Haggadah, however, is not chronological; it jumps from one episode to another without a clear line of development. Full of metaphors and historical events, it’s strange that the critical figure in the Exodus — Moses — is mentioned only once, in passing; Aharon and Miriam are missing entirely. Instead, the Haggadah focuses on rabbis from the second and third centuries, parables about committed and alienated children — insiders and outsiders, and Lavan the Aramean — providing our first clue to why the Haggadah that we use was compiled.
There is a deeply disturbing pattern within the anti-Zionist movement of devaluing Jewish and Israeli lives. Wholly convinced of the irredeemably…
Aramean civilization began in what is now northern Syria and became part of the Assyrian and later Babylon empires. After the destruction of the First Temple, Jews were exiled and taken to Babylon where they built a vibrant and cohesive Torah-based community. Towards the end of the Gaonic period, however, with their communities plagued by assimilation and threatened with destruction, Babylonian rabbis assembled a code-book for Jewish survival that could be used in impending and future exiles.
The Haggadah reminds us that Jewish history begins in Mesopotamian idol worship, exile, and Egyptian slavery. The Exodus from Egypt, however, not only demonstrates God’s power and expresses human freedom, but is only the beginning of the story; in a generation, Jews became a nation and a people, and went on to conquer and inhabit Eretz Yisrael and build the First Jewish Commonwealth. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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The Meaning of the Afikoman
Helen Plotkin
Tablet, Apr. 2, 2020
If you ask a Jewish kid to name the best part of the Passover Seder, chances are they’ll answer, “The afikoman!” It’s one of the final rituals of the long evening, coming at the end of the Seder meal, and it tends to involve presents for the children. This custom gives the children something to look forward to, and the anticipation helps them stay awake. But there’s more to it than that. Here’s how it works:
The Seder unfolds between two halves of a broken matzo. At the beginning, we hold up a stack of three matzos. We take out the middle one and break it in half—but matzos never break exactly in half. We put the smaller piece back into the middle of the stack. We wrap up the larger piece in a napkin and put it aside to distribute among the guests as the very last bite of the Seder meal: the “afikoman.” (The origin of the term is obscure; a plausible explanation is that it comes from a Greek word for dessert.) The various afikoman customs in different Jewish communities share a common theme: It is the children who have the job of delivering the second half of the middle matzo to the table at the end of the Seder.
The symbolism of the three stacked matzos taps into deep Jewish imagery. The bottom matzo represents the earthly realm; the top is the heavenly realm. Below, pure physicality; above, pure spirit. The middle matzo represents the human story, straddling above and below. The role of humans is to become the bridge, bringing holiness down into the nitty-gritty stuff of life and, at the same time, elevating the mundane so that it takes on spiritual meaning. When we lift the three matzos on the Seder table, we are holding a schematic model of all reality.
We focus on the middle matzo, representing the human situation. First, we acknowledge that the center does not hold: The middle matzo is broken. We put aside the larger half; what remains is small and ragged. We call it lachma anya—the bread of affliction, the bread of impoverishment and enslavement. We begin the Seder by recognizing that, like the Israelites in Egypt, our need for redemption is great. The world that we inhabit is broken, incomplete, full of suffering and despair. With our first bite of the middle matzo, we internalize this truth.
Food is not simply a background feature of the Passover Seder. The Haggadah guides us through the process of eating a story. We taste the bread of affliction. We put the salty tears of the enslaved Israelites on our tongues. We eat vegetables that evoke the bitterness of forced labor, and we interpret our condiments as mortar on bricks. We lay out the entire story on a plate, creating a mandala of symbolic foods.
That first bite of broken matzo is meant to put us into the story in the most visceral possible way. Like the Israelites at the first Seder, described in Exodus 12, we are in a place of brokenness. And like them, we are standing in the doorway, we are setting out on a journey. In the central section of the Haggadah, called Magid—Telling, we relate the story of a people once confined, held back, going nowhere, stuck in bricks and mortar, now transformed into a nation on its way, with a vision of a promised land. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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‘Holocaust’ Haggadah’s Cynical Illustrations Still Bite
Rene Ghert-Zand
Times of Israel, Apr. 15, 2014
For world Jewry today, what could be a more contemporary take on the Exodus story than portraying the Egyptians as Nazis and the Hebrew slaves as European Jews? This vision, Arthur Szyk’s illumination of his Haggadah for Passover, is widely acclaimed as the famed Jewish activist artist’s masterpiece.
First published in 1940 in London during the Battle of Britain, many around the world own a copy of one of the handful of subsequent Israeli and American editions of the book, and many more have seen reproductions of its artwork.
However, until a new exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco opened on February 13, more than 60 years had passed since the public last saw all 48 of the Haggadah’s uniquely stunning and powerful water color and gouache paintings displayed together.
Although the artwork has changed hands several times since the Polish-born Szyk’s death in 1951 in the United States, the paintings were preserved amazingly well by their various owners over the decades. But they were rarely shown publicly, and never as a complete collection.
In 2006, the paintings were purchased by Bay Area Judaica collectors Paul and Sheri Robbins, who have lent the 48 pieces, along with many other Szyk Haggadah-related artworks and documents in their collection, to the museum to mount “Arthur Szyk and The Art of the Haggadah.” The show runs through June 29.
“We have owned an original 1940 edition copy of the Hagaddah since 1993,” Sheri Robbins tells The Times of Israel. “It is a prized piece of Judaica in our home that we would regularly take out and look at with our children on Shabbat.”
“Then when the couple that owned the original pieces [Richard and Lois Janger of Chicago, who bought all of them as a single lot at a Sotheby’s Judaica auction in 1982] was selling them, we decided to buy them. We wanted to make sure they would all be kept together. After that, we began acquiring Szyk Haggadah-related pieces from other collectors or at auction,” Robbins explains.
Irvin Ungar, curator of the Arthur Szyk Society and the person responsible for introducing the Robbins to the art of Arthur Szyk, calls the Szyk Haggadah “a Jewel of the Jewish people” and “a gem of giving insight into Jewish history and survival.”
He regrets that most people appreciate Szyk’s recognizable Haggadah artwork merely for its vibrant colors and precision of line. With this new exhibition, however, visitors can look closely at the 48 true-to-book-size paintings displayed on the walls of a large gallery on the museum’s first floor, and see for themselves that they pack a very strong political punch.
In a political sense, the Haggadah resembles a large part of the rest of the Szyk’s oeuvre, especially the popular caricatures of the Axis powers he did during World War II. A fighter against injustice and anti-Semitism, he viewed his art as a tool for achieving social and political change. “Art is not my aims, it is my means,” he is quoted as having said. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
Rabbi Sacks Shares Some Ideas Ahead of Shabbat HaGadol and Pesach: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, YouTube, Apr. 1, 2020 –– Rabbi Sacks shares some ideas ahead of Shabbat HaGadol and as we approach Pesach.
