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New Seattle Haggadah intro
Contributed by Marit Wilkerson

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

Preface

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(1). 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.

As you read these words — as our people's ink-stained fingers turn its wine-stained pages — new Haggadahs are being written. And as future Jews at future tables read those Haggadahs, other Haggadahs will be written. New Haggadahs will be written until there are no more Jews to write them. Or until our destiny has been fulfilled, and there is no more need to say, "Next year in Jerusalem."

--From The New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, with a new translation by Nathan Englander. Copyright 2012 by Jonathan Safran Foer. Translation copyright 2012 by Nathan Englander. Excerpted without permission from Little, Brown and Company.

We want all who sit at our table to be comfortable. It doesn’t matter if you are a believer, an agnostic, or an atheist. Nor does it matter if you are a Jew or a non-Jew. The story of Passover transcends these differences.

1“…just like there isn’t a singer who doesn’t think he can cover a Bob Dylan song better than Dylan himself, the haggadah remains the book that everyone thinks they can improve on. The “Maxwell House Haggadah” might be good enough for the White House, but at homes across the country there are any number of printed and self-stapled versions, including egalitarian, feminist and vegan versions with prayers writ special for women, children, Russian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and for the liberation of a wide variety of groups and causes, even those without benefit of 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable status.” – Tom Teicholz, Jonathan Foer’s ‘New American Haggadah’:  Extremely unsurprising and incredibly similar, JewishJournal.com
haggadah Section: Introduction

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