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At the Jewish New Year - Adrienne Rich
Contributed by Aimee Walker

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

For more than five thousand years,
This calm September day
With yellow in the leaf
Has lain in the kernel of Time
While the world outside the walls
Has had its turbulent say
And history like a long
Snake has crawled on its way
And is crawling onward still. 
And we have little to tell
On this or any feast
Except of the terrible past. 
Five thousand years are cast
Down before the wondering child
Who must expiate them all.


Some of us have replied
In the bitterness of youth
Or the qualms of middle age:
'If Time is unsatisfied
And all our fathers have done
Can never be enough,
Why, then, we choose to forget. 
Let our forgetting begin
With those age-old arguments
In which their minds were wound
Like musty phylacteries;
And we choose to forget as well
Those cherished histories
That made our old men fond, 
And already are strange to us.


Or let us, being today
Too rational to cry out
Or trample underfoot
What, after all, preserves
A certain savor yet-
Though torn up by the roots-
Let us make our compromise
With the terror and the guilt
And view as curious relics
Once found in daily use
The mythology, the names
That, however Time has corrupted
Their authenticity,
Still burn like yellow flames, 
But their fire is not for us.'
And yet, however we choose
To deny or to remember-
Though, on the calendars
We wake and suffer by
This day is merely one
Of thirty in September-
In the kernel of the mind
The new year must renew
This day, as for our kind
Over five thousand years,
The task of being ourselves.
Whatever we strain to forget,
Our memory must be long.


May the taste of honey linger
Under the bitterest tongue.
haggadah Section: Commentary / Readings

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