Q&A Noam Zion: The Haggadah is a leader’s guide

Noam Zion, author of the Haggadah A Different Night.

Noam Zion is a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and the author of A Different Night: The Family Participation Haggadah and A Night to Remember, which he wrote with his son, Mishael Zion. He was at Toronto’s Beth Tzedec Congregation March 26 to 28, speaking about Passover.

How has the seder changed over the years?

There have been three great generations of the model of the seder, and I’m hoping that my Haggadah promotes a fourth model.

These three models I call them the zaide seder, the Maxwell House Haggadah seder and the Jewish Catalogue and its influence on the seder. And what I call my Haggadah is the Starbucks Haggadah.

The basic patterns of the zaides who came over is they knew Hebrew and they read it aloud very fast with a heavy accent. There was no attempt to have an intellectual discussion or to dramatize it or to talk about contemporary issues. The children had their standard role, which was Ma Nishtana and the afikoman, and women had no roles to play in the official part of the seder at all.

The next generation looked back at the seder as what they thought was authentic, but they wanted something in English.

So beginning in 1934, Maxwell House began producing the Haggadot translated into English but translated into English that was an imitation of the King James Bible. So it was not an English translation that made the text more accessible. It was an English translation that made the text sound sacred.

The notion of participation began, but participation only meant that everyone had a turn reading, so the women finally had a role.

What happened, of course, was the seder became much longer. But people didn’t want their seders to be longer, so you began with every family finding its own solution, often during the evening itself, a battle between traditionalists and non-traditionalists as to what they were going to skip and how they were going to make it faster.

Or, the way I put it, it’s the public recitation of a sacred text for as long as you can until hunger overtakes you.

The next stage was the Jewish Catalogue. It added something special, it was a ‘‘do it yourself’’ kind of thing. So people would add games and activities and drama, which were lovely for making it more fun and more participatory and, at the same time, because this was the ’60s and ’70s, you have the production of partisan Haggadot. There’s the Liberated Lamb for vegetarians. There’s the Freedom Seder for new, left Jews, there’s the women’s Haggadot. And in the 1970s and’80s, the Conservative and Reform movements rewrote their Haggadot. They were very Zionist, very Jewish People oriented.

However, with all the changes, the attitude toward the text stayed the same in the sense that people were still going around and reading something.

In all these cases, the Haggadah was the libretto of the seder. What my son and I tried to do is to give a different conception to the function of the Haggadah at the seder. 

Until the end of the 19th century, people didn’t have multiple Haggadot in their houses. So, the rabbis’ notion of the seder was not the reading of a book. What I came to understand is the Haggadah is a leader’s guide. It’s supposed to help the leader do a series of oral activities, not reading out loud activities. And those oral activities are asking questions, not the Four Questions, but asking your own questions, telling the story… and they meant for people to have a rabbinic-style symposium taking the section, “My father was a wandering Aramean,” and beginning to expound on it. And part of the oral activity was eating those symbols, explaining those edible symbols, not reading the explanation.

The new conception of the Haggadah that I have done is, when you buy a Haggadah, you have not bought a libretto that you’re supposed to follow. You have taken up a menu where you have to pick and choose from the various categories in the menu. 

Which is why we created for each Haggadah the seder planner that lists the elements in the seder and encourages you to pick and choose which ones you want to do according to your family, it doesn’t matter whether you’re Orthodox or not Orthodox, and then it has suggestions depending on the age group you’re most interested in.

 When you ask for a Maxwell House coffee, there are very few choices involved, but when you ask for Starbucks, there are multiple choices and you’re not always going to order the same kind.

My notion is these books serve the function of home-made Judaism, helping people to make their own Judaism, and when you make your own, then you’re making it meaningful for yourself.

It’s been noted that Jews are more likely to attend a seder than do any other Jewish ritual. What is the attraction of the seder? 

[First of all] it’s a family covenant renewal ceremony. It’s like how you re-up your membership in the family.

The second thing is the way the Haggadah has been interpreted in the modern world is to identify it with values that are not problematic in the modern world, like freedom or sensitivity to poverty or hope for a better world. You might have an objection to Yom Kippur if you don’t believe in God and you think sin is overrated. And further, Pesach doesn’t require a synagogue.

As Jews have higher levels of intermarriage, very often the intermarried person, whether they convert to Judaism or they continue to be loyal to Christianity, they tend to have a positive attitude toward religiosity, and they’re interested in the seder. 

And of course, if there are children, and it’s so child-friendly as a holiday the way we’ve restructured it, it’s very important for the kids to have that experience. At the very least, you’ll have parents who are doing it for the children.

Have we made seders too much fun?

I think the rabbis clearly were interested in making it fun. You’re supposed to play the game with the afikoman, which goes back to the Talmud. The songs… Chad Gadya and Echad mi Yodea, all of those are about fun, which serves a purpose. 

 The seder is extremely difficult to orchestrate precisely because it should be a three-ring circus. The three rings, however, are the rings of making it fun and using edible symbols, but from that fun, going back to what the things stand for, what their symbolic meanings are. Part of the ring is that you want to appeal to adults and older children having an intellectual discussion about freedom and slavery and part of it is you want to have a ritual order. 

Doesn’t the leader need a lot of Jewish education to lead a symposium?

The rabbis put very, very high expectations on the regular Jew. That’s why I understand people retreating to the reading of the book, so at least they get it right, or they think it’s right.

I don’t think you need so much knowledge. You need a paradigm shift. You need somebody to say there’s a do it yourself part of the seder where you’re going to have to pick and choose what’s most important. You need to delegate responsibility, not just who’s going to read, but delegating three or four people who will prepare in advance and bring something to the seder, whether it’s personal or it’s traditional. 

You don’t need lots of Jewish knowledge, because you’re not giving a lecture and because the book is there. Delegate responsibilities not to the most knowledgeable person coming to the seder but to the most extroverted person going to the seder, the people who like to be showpeople.

You are giving a lecture on 101 ideas for a more participatory seder. Can you leave us with one?

The larger purpose of the Haggadah is intergenerational storytelling – the story of going out of Egypt – and telling it to our children. But it’s also the principle of other forms of intergenerational storytelling, from what my grandfather and my grandmother did down to the grandchildren.

[One way] to achieve that personal storytelling between generations is to invite people to have a second seder plate made up of souvenirs from the people who are coming. It can be a passport, it can be a ladle from the chicken soup. Each souvenir represents an important stage in their Jewish journey.

Getting people to tell those personal stories is one way you get people to use the Haggadah as a springboard to go beyond the book into the conversation, the oral activities.