So they decided to publish a full length Haggadah with what was then considered, you know, the most widely used text.
Schwab: So this big coffee company to say, let’s associate ourselves with Passover. This is like Coke inventing the figure of Santa and putting it on their bottle.
Yael: Basically
From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Yael Steiner.
Schwab: And I’m Jonathan Schwab. And at the end of what’s been a great season, you have a really special story for us today, right, Yael?
Yael: I do, and in many ways, it is a story that you’ve heard dozens, if not hundreds of times in your life, but I’m hoping that I can share it with you in a new way, and we are going to be discussing the Passover Haggadah. Just in time, yes, just in time for the holiday of Passover to sneak up on us. I’m very much not ready. I don’t know if you’re ready. It’s a little…
Schwab: very timely.
Nowhere close to ready.
Yael: It’s a little disingenuous of me to say that I’m not ready because my mother is a Passover hero and I help very little. I have a feeling you probably help a lot more than I do.
Schwab: I probably should be helping more than I am, but we are hosting most of my family this year, there’ll be a lot of young kids there, and I think that’s my favorite part of the Seder, as we might be discussing. Okay.
Yael: It’s amazing.
You are skipping ahead, yes, children are a huge part of the Seder and we are going to get to that. But first, we start in Egypt.
Schwab: well, that makes sense.
Yael: let me ask you a question. When you think of the Haggadah as an object, what do you think of?
Schwab: Ooh.
I think of a book and I always think of it as stained. There’s too much going on on the table. There’s never enough room. You always wind up with crumbs and grape juice and what?
Yael: So those are two really important elements of the Haggadah that you have touched upon and we’re going to get to both of them. What I find really interesting is the fact that you first say it’s a book, which is obvious to us. It is a book. What does the word Haggadah mean?
Schwab: Right, but Haggadah means telling, right? the, yeah.
Yael: The telling. The Haggadah is a printed artifact that is all about the telling. The commandment in the Torah to celebrate Passover is one of telling your children, Ve-hi-gad-de-ta-le-bin-cha, telling your children what God did for you at this moment of Exodus.
One of the things that I’ve grappled with the most while doing research for this episode is how this commandment, this Jewish ritual, which is one of the most observed across all denominations of Judaism among people who don’t identify with any denomination of Judaism, is an oral storytelling tradition, storytelling commandment. that has now been codified into this book. Like think about how interesting it is to have a book that is called The Telling.
Yeah, the telling, right? Yeah.
Schwab:hmm.
Right, how strange it is that we say, okay, now we’re gonna read the oral telling.
Yael: So the way that I want to structure this episode because there is so much in the universe of academia, anthropology, sociology, studies of different types of Jews across time and how they’ve interacted with this artifact and the Seder in general, the Passover meal .
Schwab: Yeah. Are you gonna structure the episode like the Seder? We’re gonna get up at a certain point, one person’s gonna wash their hands, and later we’re all gonna wash our hands. There’s gonna be dipping, a lot more dipping than you might expect.
Yael: So much dipping. So it’s interesting that you say that. I did not think about structuring this episode like the Seder, but I think one thing that’s great about this podcast and one thing that’s often great about the Passover Seder is that we’re not 100% sure where the narrative is going to lead.And that’s one of the great things about the Haggadah.
There are thousands of editions of the Haggadah in print and they are all vastly different from one another while sharing the same core
And at the same time, almost every Jewish Seder comes down to a core of Seder, the word Seder, which means order, and that is an order of events, an agenda. I think very few religious rituals open like a board meeting with an actual agenda.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Schwab: I always find it so funny that like the first thing we do is say, these are all the steps we’re going to do as if like just, know, like we’re gonna do them. We don’t do that with other things, right?
Yael: And the order that we are referring to and the reason why we call this dinner ritual, even though dinner is only one piece of it, the Seder, the order, is because of an order of events that was written down by Rabbi Samuel Ben-Solomon of Falaise in the 13th century in France.
Haggadot is the Hebrew plural of Haggadah, And Haggadah is really a printed instruction manual to get through all of those steps. But the crux of the evening, as I mentioned, there is a commandment in the Torah.
.Yael: The Higadzit Hala B’ncha Bayom HaHu that you shall tell your son on this day what God did for you in taking you out of Egypt.
Schwab: There’s like whatever it is, 16 steps or something like that.
Yael: I find the telling, the Maghid portion to be the lengthiest, maybe other than the actual eating. And it is notable to say that one of the steps is eating, which is very good. But even the other steps,
Yael: Are all very much a part of the telling of the story and of the remembering of the Exodus, maybe just not in a narrative manner. But one thing that I think goes to the nature of the book, which is fascinating, is that we have this narrative and it makes no sense.
Schwab: It’s not a narrative at all. It’s not a story. There’s a surprising amount of math. There’s a lot of math, there’s a lot of abbreviations and then alternative abbreviations when it comes to the 10 plagues. It doesn’t go in order.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yeah I’m curious if you’re gonna help me understand how all of this fits together because I’ve been at many Pesach Seder in my life and. I cannot for the life of you, for the life of me tell you what is the structure of Maghid, right?
Yael: So, the Haggadah is a bit of a scrapbook. It’s a pastiche or a collage of various different types of texts that are all supposed to give us the feeling of having been in Egypt on that fateful night. when the Jews were freed or liberated, I guess is the more common word that we would use right now.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
And yet, very little of it is actually telling the story of that evening.
Yael: So great, great point. I know you say that you didn’t pay attention and that you weren’t a very scholastically oriented student.
Schwab: No, this, this satyr is the perfect thing for me because it takes place at the time of day I am most awake, late at night.
Yael: Amazing, yes., the Seder has a casual formality, or a formal casuality. In my family, we often invite people who have not been to a Seder before. It is not a formal, know, suit and tie type adventure.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: In past years, we’ve all worn t-shirts that say matzah ballin or other, you know, kitschy accoutrement. What I personally like about the Seder and what you’re saying about how it suits you and your temperament and your personality is that it can be an outlet for people who like to explore and learn and talk and question, and that that’s very much encouraged.
And we are going to get into that momentarily because I want to talk a little bit about how the Passover night evolved from the night that the Jews actually left Egypt, wandered in the desert for 40 years to where we are today, which is, you know, the Bible tells us that the Jews had been slaves in Egypt for many hundreds of years.
Yael: There was a course of 10 plagues that afflicted the Egyptians and the 10th plague, which was the killing of the firstborn son of Egyptians, which is horrifying. Like we don’t often, we often talk about the plagues in a very, I used this word already, but I can’t think of another one that’s appropriate, like in a very kitschy way, you know, let’s have red jello shots for the blood or.
Schwab: Yeah. Finger puppets.
Yael: You know, in my house, yeah, my dad throws like plastic frogs and plastic bugs out at the table.
Schwab: Well, the frogs are the best part.
Yael: The 10 plagues, often is very, at least in modern times, gets very exciting to people. People wear masks and they act them out. And, but when you think about it, they’re all horrifying, but the killing of the firstborn child is particularly horrifying. So the Jews leave Egypt. They wander in the desert for 40 years. They eventually get to the land of Israel. In the land of Israel, they build the first temple, the second temple. During the temple periods, they bring a sacrifice on the first night of Passover, the paschal lamb.
And if you are familiar with the story of the sacrifice and then the blood on the doorposts of the Jewish homes, again, very gory, very dark, not, it’s something that we teach children in a very lighthearted way and hope that they don’t.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. They took. Taking the blood.
Yael: On a night when they are supposed to ask so many questions, hope that they don’t ask too many questions about that.
Schwab: Yeah. I have a son who is very sensitive about these types of things and is very distraught by this question. And I have not found the right answers for him yet.
Yael: A conversation for another time.
So in the temple period, the Paschal Lamb is sacrificed.
Passover is one of the three festivals in which people all over the land of Israel travel on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to do these sacrifices, at the temple. They eat of the sacrifices. They would have matzah and maror, the bitter herbs. And that is how they would commemorate the night on which liberation was brought to the Jewish people in Egypt. Once the temple is destroyed, the physical structure of the building is gone, but the structure through which they have become accustomed to celebrating this holiday is also gone. So that’s when the the text of the actual Torah, the telling becomes that much more important.I do wanna say the Manashtana four questions that we’re not gonna touch so much in this episode
Yael: But one of the four questions originally was why do we eat this roasted meat? And we don’t have that question anymore because we no longer eat the paschal lamb.
Schwab: Were there originally five questions?
Yael: I think it was replaced with the dipping question. I’m pretty sure. So the temple is destroyed and we need to start figuring out a way to commemorate Passover without this major piece of it.
And that is when Passover moves from a communally based celebration in the temple in Jerusalem to a home based celebration
Yael: And we extend an invitation out into the community, let all who are hungry come and eat.And so And I know that many people do make extra efforts to include those who may not have a robust…
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: community or a robust family to join them so that they too can be a part of this.
Schwab: Right. It’s unlike Hanukkah candles where, you if you live by yourself, you can light Hanukkah candles in your window. Other than in 2020, you shouldn’t be doing a Seder by yourself.
Yael: And 2020 was such a challenge for us, not only because the world was so crazy, but because we have no template of how to do Seder alone.
Schwab: Which is funny, we have no template for it, because we have this, as you’ve been saying, this exact written text thing, but it so needs multiple people, right? They’re supposed to be some sort of call and response, different participation.
Yael: There are people who wonder whether or not you are actually truly fulfilling the mitzvah if you do it by yourself. And I don’t like to delve too far into that because I think that that t enhances an otherness that people who don’t have large families already feel in the Jewish community.
Yael: So we get to the period of the Mishnah and the Gemara, which comes on the heels of the Greco-Roman period immediately post
Schwab: Mm-hmm. It doesn’t count, yeah.
Yael: Temple destruction and we begin to see these Seder nights evolve into a Greco-Roman symposium of sorts. If you think about the artistic rendering of Jesus’s last supper, which many say was meant to be a Passover Seder, you see the long table of
Schwab: Hmm. Yes.
Yael: many, many men sitting around and discussing the great issues of the day, much in the way that the Greek and Roman philosophers would sit around and enjoy the sounds of one another’s voices. So immediately post the destruction of the temple, we need to figure out how are we going to celebrate this holiday
without the sacrifice in Jerusalem.And it’s not clear when people started writing this down or
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: you know, putting it into a form that instructs others.
Schwab: I guess I haven’t thought of it that way. What it’s talking about is how do we reconstitute Passover as a holiday, as a commemoration without the temple. But at some point it turns from that conversation to a meta celebration of we are now just reading what their conversations were at some point.
Yael: And it does make sense that it took some time to figure out one, you know, an analogy that I saw in a book that I read was to the creation of the September 11th Memorial in New York about how it took almost 15 years to get to the culmination of what we wanted the official memorial to look like.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: because in the immediate aftermath of trauma, you cannot make a decision. It’s too raw, I don’t think it’s a perfect analogy, but it was interesting.
Schwab: yeah, but it’s really interesting, because I’ve always had this question of like, why are we reading stories of what rabbis did at the Seder once upon a time? What I’m learning here is we’re reading this because it was at a moment in time where the Seder had to be fully invented or fully reconstituted. We have commemorated this for a thousand, two thousand years. And now we need to create a new thing. And here’s one idea of it.
Yael: Yes. And I think that they weren’t sure they were doing it right.
Schwab: And then we did the most Jewish thing ever, which is rather than commit to one thing, what we committed to was discussing the discussion.
Yael: Exactly. we have those hundreds of years of the Mishnah and the Gemara and the discussions, many of those discussions which have now been transplanted into what we have as a Haggadah today.
Yael: A lot of our source material on the earliest versions of the Haggadahs comes from where else but the Cairo Gneza, where we have small excerpts of what we believe to be a variety of different Haggadahs with 10 times as much content coming from what we consider to be the Babylonian evolved Haggadahs. So 10 times more from that.
So the text Haggadah is not talked about in the Mishnah or in the Talmud because it hadn’t yet been set yet.
Yael: No, it doesn’t exist. Rabbi Gamliel staying up all night with his students in B’nai B’rach and Rabbi Lazar Ben Azariah and his interpretation of how we celebrate get passed along to the G’onim who say we’re figuring out a way to commemorate this event and rather than pull out those discussions we keep them as a reminder of
Schwab: So that’s the first time that we see some sort of like canonized text that has parts to it.
Yael: My personal opinion is that the canon of the Haggadah doesn’t really have an official closing, what I would say, lowercase O, Orthodox, or lowercase C, conservative Jews at this point in time. And I don’t mean that in a denominational sense, but in the type of people who aren’t looking to create their own feminist liberation Haggadah or workers’ rights Haggadah, which are things that are totally valid that happen all the time, but people who are not looking to personalize the text.
Yael: I think the canon closed when the printing press allowed a text to be disseminated widely. And some people say honestly, the canon closed with the publishing of the Maxwell House Haggadah. Because that Haggadah, which we will get to, had more than 60 million copies.
Schwab: once there was a standard text.
Mm-hmm. Right. I don’t know. Has become like the standard, right? Like American. Wow.
Yael: Of the Maxwell House Haggadah have been printed. It is by far the most widely disseminated Jewish book in the world.
Schwab: Yeah. Although, yeah. Wow. Wow.
Yael: But that’s what’s really fascinating about the Haggadah and why we have so many editions of it. Throughout the Middle Ages into early modernity, and there are, I’m sure, people who do this now, there are families who commission their own editions of the Haggadah. Now, anyone could do it. There are websites where you can create a Haggadah in five minutes. like in the 1800s, for instance, when modernity, wealthy families who commissioned their own editions of the Haggadah, which had the quote unquote canonical texts, but also had things that were unique to their own families. And that was not uncommon up until Maxwell House. And when Maxwell House became
Schwab: Mm-hmm. That’s so cool.
Yael: Ubiquitous. But yes there is no canon because the commandment and this
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Right? You should tell your children. Which means it’s a family thing.
Yael: We have the commandment to view ourselves as though we were taken out of Egypt and that it’s the individual has to feel it. And therefore the way that you process the trauma of the slavery and the jubilation of the exodus has to speak to you. So it isn’t crazy.
Yael: And it doesn’t run counter to anything mainstream to say that I want to individualize this.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: Okay, so, Ravsadya Gaon, Rav-Amram Gaon, in their liturgical books, their Sidurim, their daily prayer books for the entire year, we first see text meant to be used on Passover night as a Haggadah, but it is not a standalone document.
Schwab: Yeah.
Yael: Most of the other holidays don’t have this. Like we have a commandment on Sukkot to say the blessing for rain. Most people do not have a standalone book for the blessing for rain.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: it’s sufficient to have it within another text. But the Haggadah appears to be sui generis in this respect.
Schwab: I just assumed that that’s like a, I don’t know, like a particular artifact of like, you wouldn’t want to read the Haggadah out of your sidur that you use all year because you’re like concerned there’s going to be Chameitz in it.
Yael: Right, the same way it gets matzo crumbs in it, it would also presumably get crumbs from it. That is a valid point that I did not think about.
So we first see the Haggadah text there in the Sidurim of the Gaonic eraso that’s around eighth century, ninth century, 10th century. And then in the 12th, 13th, 14th century, we start to see these standalone Haggadot.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: That are beautiful illuminated manuscripts, which was very much the fashion of the day for the kings, the Bible, the Christian Bible, other holy books. The first one that we have, I believe dates to,
Schwab (38:41.52)
Mm-hmm.
Yael: to 1350. And the Haggadot from that era are really interesting because a lot of them are very similar to what we see today, but a lot of them are still clearly still developing.
A lot of the songs and PyutimI don’t even know what’s a good translation for the word P.U. It’s who know poetic song poetic composition. But the illustrations of these very old Haggadot from the Middle Ages are really interesting.
Schwab: poetic song? don’t know. Yeah.
Yael: A lot of the individual artifacts that are often the very famous Haggadot that people talk about, including the bird’s head Haggadah. But that is the time, the early Middle Ages, when we start to see these illuminated manuscripts of Haggadot emerge.
and it has the text of the Haggadah but it also has the illustrations of people celebrating Passover and every creature is a bird.
Schwab: I may be misremembering this, this I came across something mentioning this at some point. there was, I don’t know, some sort of idea of like not representing people.
Yael: Yes. So the second commandment is that you shall not create graven images. And I think we’ve talked about this. We talked about it in the Dura Europos Synagogue about how unusual it was to have murals on the walls.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: So there is a lot of controversy as to whether or not you actually are allowed to have illustrations of, or etchings of humans. So in order to not have these illustrations be graven images, we made everybody a bird. Another theory is that they’re actually not birds, they’re griffins.
Schwab: Hmm.
Yael: which maybe would mean more to somebody who had more familiarity with mythology or Harry Potter. But that is one of the oldest examples of a full-length Haggadah that we have. The Sarajevo Haggadah, which we believe…
Yael: was created in Barcelona in 1350. Now you will note Barcelona and Sarajevo are not the same place.
Schwab: Barcelona is not Sarajevo, yeah.
Yael: But after many years of traveling across the Jewish world, it was rediscovered in Sarajevo in the late 19th century and has…
Schwab: So this is a specific book or this is an edition?
Yael: This is a specific book that we believe was written in 1350 in Barcelona pre-expulsion in Spain when Barcelona was a thriving Jewish community. We believe that around the time of the expulsion or immediately prior to the expulsion, it was smuggled out to Italy where it was at one point inspected by officials of the Inquisition. We believe that
Schwab: wow. Yeah.
Yael: It was probably in Venice for some time in the 1500s. Rebe Leone de i Modena may have crossed paths with it, certainly possible. And we’re not a hundred percent sure after that where it went, who had it. We just know that at some point in the late 1800s, somebody had it in Sarajevo and sold it to the National Museum in Sarajevo.
Schwab: And that’s where it still is?
Yael: But in the last 120, 130 years, it has had a remarkable, remarkable story. This Haggadah was in the National Museum in Sarajevo during World War II. As you may know, the Nazis were threatening to create this museum of the completely destroyed Jewish race where they would have artifacts and they, because of that, they collected Judaica and paintings and books wherever they went. And sometimes they got together and burned all of them because I don’t think the museum was particularly the most important thing on their minds. But there was this risk that when the Nazis came in to Sarajevo that they were going to seize
Yael: and destroy this Haggadah or seize and save this Haggadah for their own nefarious purposes. And a Muslim employee at the National Museum in Sarajevo took the Haggadah home with him, eventually hid it with a friend of his who was an Imam of the Muslim community of a village outside of Sarajevo, hid it among a pile of Qurans where it would blend in.
And it was saved from seizure from the Nazis in Sarajevo when the Nazis ultimately came and asked for it because it was a very well-known artifact and treasure. It’s a beautiful, beautiful manuscript. They told the Nazi that came and asked for it that another Nazi already came and took it. And it was saved by a gentleman named Darvish Korkut. I am sure.
Yael: That is not how his name is pronounced. I very, very much apologize because he’s a very, very important upstanding human who not only saved the Sarajevo Haggadah, but actually hid a Jewish woman with his family and saved her life, brought her into his home and gave her a veil and told people that she was a maid in the house and saved her life.
The woman that was saved was named Mira Papo. And because she was saved, many years later, her family approached Yad Vashem about recognizing Darwish. As the righteous among the nations. And they were for their immense sacrifice of taking in this woman during the Holocaust.
Okay, so Middle Ages, we get these beautiful illuminated manuscripts. We start to get the drop-in of different songs, different Pyutim, these poetic essays and compositions. And that is basically how things go along until the invention of the printing press, when some more standardized texts begin to be disseminated widely.
And then we get into the modern era of make your own Haggadah, the Mrs. Maisel Haggadah, which was released a few years ago when that show was really popular. And to go back to what you’ve said about the stains was released pre-stained. Like the illustrations in the Haggadah had illustrations of wine stains on it because that is so important. Actually is important to note the Sarajevo Haggadah.
Schwab: So funny.
Yael: has wine stains. That goes into modern times where, you know, we have all these different versions of Haggadas , and I personally find…
The fancier they are, the more unwieldy and the harder they are to use. I have a beautiful, beautiful leather bound Haggadah that I received as a gift for my bat mitzvah. And it’s lovely. And a few times I have tried to bring it to the table with me, but I’m just like, this doesn’t work.
Schwab: impractical. Yeah.
Yael: And I would love to use it because I think that’s what gives it its meaning.
This is a good story. I told you this was going to be like the seder was just going to be a lot of rambling.
Yael: During the Civil War in the United States, Jewish Union soldiers from Ohio celebrated the Seder together. They were mailed copies of a Haggadah from Ohio to where they were stationed, And I don’t know what Haggadah it was that they were mailed.
We do have a written recollection by one of the soldiers who celebrated who talks about how they didn’t have a bitter herb. So they got a weed, which was definitely bitter. And they used that for the Maror. And they didn’t have haroset, which he spelled in an amazing way. But they had a brick. They put an actual brick on the table so that even though they didn’t have haroset to eat, they were reminded of what the harosek was there for. And I thought that was really cool and interesting.
Schwab: And I and I assume this is like why you brought it up also, but they are literally fighting a war again to like to end slavery, right?
Yael: Yes. To be fair, there were also Jewish soldiers in the Confederacy who celebrated Passover similarly. Just to make it clear that we’re not completely whitewashing history here.. They didn’t have the brick, I don’t think. So we get into the 1800s, we have these printed copies of the Haggadah.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: in the early 1900s, 1907 or 1910, the Union of Reform Judaism in the United States, print haggadah that’s widely disseminated and it makes a lot of changes. It does not have nearly as many references to the return to Israel from the diaspora because that was seen as less than patriotic and also maybe not as necessary.
And then we get to 1932, Maxwell House Coffee, not a Jewish company. I don’t know who it was at Maxwell House that was like, Jews aren’t buying our coffee during Passover. Maybe their regional
Schwab: Interesting. Yeah.
Hmm
Yael: Salesman was Jewish, but at the time, there appeared to be a consensus that coffee was a legume and that it was kitnyot , which is a type of food that mainstream Ashkenazi Jews, certainly outside of Israel, and Israel, things are changing a little bit now, that mainstream Ashkenazi Jews do not eat during Passover.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: Mostly because historically they were stored with grains and it was very hard to distinguish between what was grain and what was a legume and you didn’t want to make a mistake.
Schwab: Hmm.
Thank you for that clarification because we were just discussing this.
Yael: There has been some advocacy from within my family that we started in kitnyot.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
We’re not there yet. This conversation came up because quinoa, which would fit in the same category, but didn’t exist in Europe, right? It’s like a New World grain or something.
Yael: Right.
Schwab: the rabbis who made these rules like didn’t outlaw it like it it did not fit the qualifications for what was forbidden at the time.
Yael: I do enjoy a nice quinoa on Passover, I will say.
Schwab: You gotta get that quinoa sushi.
But we were talking about coffee.
Yael: So yes, so many people believed that coffee was kitnyot . And in order to dispel this notion and get Jews to keep buying Maxwell House coffee, you know, 52 weeks a year instead of 51 weeks a year, the Joseph Jacobs, advertising.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: company that worked with Maxwell House decided it’s located in Teaneck, New Jersey now.
Yael: Yeah.
So they decided to publish a full length Haggadah with what was then considered, you know, the most widely used text. And this was in 1932. yeah,six and it became super popular because you got a free one with your purchase of a can of Maxwell House coffee
You can still order Maxwell House Haggadahs from their website. They are free. They come in sets of two, but it is $6.50 for shipping and handling.
Yael: I think that my family has at least five different versions of the Maxwell House Haggadah in our Passover box of what we use.
Schwab: So this big coffee company to say, let’s associate ourselves with Passover. this is like Coke inventing the figure of Santa and putting it on their bottle. Yeah.
Yael: In the ensuing 90 years, over 60 million copies have been printed. It has become the standard bearer of American Haggadahs.
Yael: And Maxwell House Haggadah has been printed every year since, with the exception of two years during World War II when paper rationing was in force. It has gone over, you know, some changes have come to it over time, including the addition
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Hmm.
Yael: in the 50s or 60s of the Ashkenazic transliteration to make it easier to use for non-Hebrew speakers. When it was initially published, it was in both Hebrew and English. The English was somewhat unwieldy,for many years until 2011 when they redid the English to take out all the these and thou’s and thine’s.
Schwab: Mmm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yael: We still use some of the older ones and that language still comes into my Seder occasionally. But I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a look at the Maxwell House Haggadah but the Ashkenazic transliteration is hilarious.they use a lot of W’s. So for instance, in like the Maanishtana, it’s like Moanishtuonua, which
Schwab: Yeah.
Yael: Granted is how I sound all the time,
Schwab: No.
Yael: So modern times, Maxwell House is by far the most popular Haggadah. That being said, we have, as I mentioned, many feminist Haggadot. We have workers’ rights Haggadot. We have the New American Haggadot, which was put together by Jonathan Safran Foer, Rabbi Sachs, the late…
Schwab: Hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yael: Chief Rabbi of the UK has a really lovely Haggadah that has some beautiful commentary. Commentary is a new phenomenon in Haggadot. We’ve always had the instructions, the stage directions have always been there when you lift the matzah, when you cover the matzah, when you lift your cup.
So it really has taken on a life of its own
Yael: But one woman who was reflecting on her time with the Maxwell House Haggadah would say that every time she and her siblings would chug down one of the four glasses of wine, they would lift up their Haggadahs and say, good till the last drop. I was like, that’s adorable.
Schwab: Nice. Yeah.
Just as an aside, like as part of this conversation I was having recently, it is funny, especially given the Maxwell House connection, that we don’t drink coffee at the Seder.
Yael: Maxwell House wanted you to drink coffee with your Afikomen I could use coffee at certain points in the Haggadah , certainly.
Schwab: Hmm.
Yael: I think that would make things especially because I’m such a lightweight, but I really like red wine.
Schwab:
Yael: Listen, there’s so much to say
This is going back to like an hour ago. Rabbi Akiva, the famed Rabbi Akiva of Jewish history was so concerned that the children be…
Schwab: Yeah.
Yael: Interested in what was going on at the Seder because it is the story of Exodus but he was a big advocate of matzah snatching o keep the children engaged that is where the Afikomen
Schwab: Hmm. so that’s where that…
Yael: snatching comes from.
Schwab: Cool. we’ve got to mention that Hillel saying you should put the matzah and maror together is the first ever historical sandwich. I always thought that’s just a thing Jews say. no, my kids were listening to this kids history podcast about the invention of the sandwich which they were like, there’s this earlier story of this guy named Hillel.
Yael: So it really should be called a Hillel. You could be having a BLT Hillel instead of a BLT sandwich.
Schwab: Yeah. I don’t think a Hillel would approve of that.
Yael: One final thing that I think really. symbolizes how important the Haggadah is as the Jewish book. It is the book of the people of the book. People who have never looked at a Torah have looked at a Haggadah. Jews who celebrate nothing else throughout the year.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: The title right there.
Schwab: That’s so cool. mean, like, yeah. Like, I would have thought that going in, but like the story of the Haggadah is the story of the Jewish people.
Yael: The Haggadah truly is the book of the people of the book and it takes the larger story of Jewish history and reduces it down to this moment of nation building at the Exodus and it is.
It’s our or, it’s an origin story. And if you had to reduce us down to one artifact, we’ve talked about the menorah, we’ve talked about the Star of David. I do think the Haggadah would probably be up there on the list, especially because we are a people that is so engaged in the written word. So this is our book.
Schwab: Yeah, like it’s an origin story and it’s an, yeah.
Schwab: Yeah.
Schwab: And it’s so classically Jewish of it’s a written word that in its original form is not supposed to be written, right? Like we’ve taken something that is oral and made it a written text. And that’s the most Jewish thing there is.
Yael: This is our last episode of the season, but please don’t go anywhere. we’ll be back very, very soon with some really exciting bonus episodes
Schwab: And if you’re enjoying the show, please take a second to rate and review wherever you listen.