Passover Thoughts

Each year, reading the Haggadah raises new questions. Is this good, because it demonstrates the depth of the text and the tradition? Or is it bad, because it shows how silly so much of it is? The answer to that one is beyond me.

This year (having tired of thinking about how the glorification of the plagues is outmoded in this day and age of instant communication, when one can fly from Cairo to Tel Aviv in thirty minutes, and how the entire story of the escape from Egypt cannot help but hurt Jewish-Arab relations), I thought about other things.

For one thing, I was thinking about the "fleshpots of Egypt" that some people wanted to return to. I had always assumed that a fleshpot was like a nightclub, with girls and hashish (sort of like Studio 54), but an article I read said, 'no', the concentration should be on the 'pot', not the 'flesh', and that the fleshpots were the pots in which meat was cooked, which is just what the Israelites, who were stuck eating manna, would have wanted.

A new way of looking at this!! I had always been mistaken as to what a fleshpot was!!

So, I went to dictinary.com, and merriam-webster.com, etc. to get the precise definition: Studio 54 was a fleshpot.

Oh, well, so much for trying to learn more by reading.

In additional to fleshpots, I thought about time and place.

The Haggadah has apparently been pretty much untouched (except by the modern versions) since shortly before 900 C.E. And it was compiled in Babylonia by Amram Gaon, although much of it is based on much older sources.

So, here in Babylon (actually Sura), present day Iraq, Amram is telling the story of Abram (Abraham), who left present day Iraq with his family, and went to Canaan, where he was promised that the land would be the homeland of his progeny, who would be numerous, like the sand on the beach. And he is telling the story when Canaan, present day Israel, was under Moslem control, and there was no chance that the Jews would ever return there.

So, Abraham's journey (maybe 2500 years before the time of Amram) and the unwanted journey of Abraham's great grandson Joseph to Egpyt is told, as well as the escape from Egypt by the Jews some 300-400 years later.

And, of course, the famous discussion of the four rabbis (Jose, Akiva and the others), which would have taken place about 800 years prior to the compilation by Amram, when following the destruction of temple and the desolation of Jerusalem, some were plotting a further campaign against the Romans, the misplanned Bar Kochba revolt, during which Akiva was to be killed.

So the story goes through time, the last event having taken place almost 2000 years ago, and the first one taking place almost 2000 years before that, and having been compiled and put into continuing use over 1100 years go.

It is impossible to discount the importance of something like this in Jewish cultural and religious history, whether it appears today to be relevant, accurate, humane, or even well written and well organized.

So, while people can put together "freedom haggadahs" and "feminist haggadahs" and "vegetarian haggadahs" and anything else, I don't necessarily think this for the best. I think rather the traditional hagaddah remains the best of all, but that the use of the traditional haggadah without commentary would be the equivalent of the bible without commentary, bound to lead - in this day and age - to misunderstanding, to fundamentalism, and to isolationism.