The Annotated Passover Haggadah ed. by Zev Garber and Kenneth Hanson (review)

A welcome addition to home collections as well as professional bookshelves: the essays collected here by Zev Garber and Kenneth Hanson offer a range of insights, background information, and personal experiences. This book has something for everyone looking to find out more about the Passover Haggadah—Christians as well as Jews, young and old, women and men, those interested in history, and those searching for a way to encourage families to participate in the festival celebrating the Exodus from Egypt. For scholars, there are technical analyses, historiographical discussions, and studies in iconography. For the children, there are stories about times past and times to come.

There are three main sections to this volume: (1) seven short comments by the two editors describe, define, and discuss the essential elements of the seder table; (2) a second section composed of the Hebrew/Aramaic text of the Haggadah, edited by Garber and Hanson, and a modern English/American translation; three excursions in background information, two by Garber and one by Hanson, followed by a rabbinical index, a source index, and a list of supplementary readings by Hanson; and (3) the longest section, which contains seventeen miscellaneous contributions.

In the first section, Garber and Hanson sketch out points of scholarly interest about the symbolic components of the seder. They raise questions, as if we were all sitting around the table, debating points and joking about them as families do.

Supplementary readings begins with Hanson's "Textual Issues: The 'Lost' Supper, Paul and Qumran: The Tail that Wagged the Dog." Hanson cautions against taking the ceremonial meal as a custom shaped after the development of agape communion, while Peter Zaas presents an essay entitled "Eucharist and Seder: What Should the Simple Scholar Say?" This is more scholarly and yet no less controversial than the previous essay. Garber asks "Inserting Shoah at the Traditional Passover Seder: Interpreting Anew the Five Cups and What Would Jesus Say?" In a living tradition, there is only an ambiguous response: don't worry about the answers, just keep asking good questions. Garber examines the way Christians try to take over our celebration from Egypt and other places of Jewish exile.

In Nathan Harpaz's "Sample Haggadot and Sederim," the argument is that depictions of the Last Supper derive from pictures true to the Gospel "event," since there was no Passover meal until much later. Then Yitzchak Kerem gives an overview of "Romaniote and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Passover Haggadah: Excerpts and Related Customs," which helps balance the attention given to Ashkenazi examples. A discussion by Diane Mizrahi of "A Chassidisher Pesach: Passover Traditions and Insights from Chassidic Perspectives" looks at the leading personalities and their philosophical differences, and thus how they influenced the customs from the sixteenth century to the present. Annette Boeckler asks "Why Is This Haggadah Different?" The answer: not all Jews approach the holy days in the same way.

In the section of "Select Haggadah and Exodus Topics," William Krieger opens with "Asking for Directions on Pesach: Should Archaeological Discoveries Change Our Views of the Exodus from Egypt?" These are different matters of truth: the first is how we evaluate what kind of an ancient culture Judaism arose from, with concern for who created the need for combining a tale of gods and heroic men; and second, how to discuss and describe the phenomena that constitute the Haggadah. Krieger suggests the Haggadah be seen as "a repository for the collective memory of the people, one that would be full of conflicts, anachronisms, and data points from each of those periods" (243).

Jonathan Arnold enters with "Exodus to Leviticus to Haggadah: The Dynamism of Torahistic [sic] Law." If the seder sets out the ground rules and the basic terms of a "participatory" approach to Exodus, then the questions of the four children are directed at the two parents or four, or any adults joining the discussion. Those four questions become the subject of Leonard Greenspoon's "The Memory of God and...