Here we are. Here we are, gathered to celebrate the oldest continually practiced ritual in the Western world, to retell what is arguably the best known of all stories, to take part in the most widely practiced Jewish holiday. Here we are as we were last year, and as we hope to be next year. Here we are, as night descends in succession over all of the Jews of the world, with a book in front of us.

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem, or palimpsest—and yet it is all of these things. The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human life—our lives—dignity.

Here we are: Individuals remembering a shared past and in pursuit of a shared destiny. 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.


haggadah Section: Introduction
Source: New American Haggadah, ed. Jonathan Safran Foer, trans. Nathan Englander