Welcome to the Haggadah

In the Winter 1986 issue of Grand Street, Columbia University professor Edward Saïd took aim at progressive political theorist Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution. Walzer’s book documented recurring references to the Israelites’ escape from Egypt along “a well-marked trail” over centuries and continents. In Walzer’s telling, the Exodus inspired the American founding, medieval thinkers and revolutionaries across the Third World, to say nothing of the re-establishment of the Jewish state.

Saïd, by then the undisputed palsgrave of academic hostility toward Israel, advanced what he called a “Canaanite reading” of the Old Testament story. In it, Israelite becomes oppressor, guilty of “dehumanization of anyone standing in Moses’ way” akin to “the murderous Puritans or … the founders of apartheid.”

Saïd’s broadside claimed Walzer’s “small and apparently modest book” feigned “an appealing simplicity” to mask its sinister involvement with “more complex issues.” Among them, Saïd counted contemporary liberation politics, biblical interpretation, Jewish identity, and Western history writ large. Snipping quotes from years of Walzer’s work, Saïd accused Walzer of “extremely problematic” conduct, of twisting fact and fable alike to portray Israel as “progressive” and “admirable.” The attack earned Saïd the plaudits and controversy he so craved, and a reproduction of the review in Arab Studies Quarterly some months later.

Yet Walzer’s slim volume won the affection of the American Jewish community and The New York Times alike. Saïd’s calumnies notwithstanding, Walzer’s work endured for its unpretentious writing and the catholicity of its Exodus account. In style and substance, the same can be said of Mark Gerson’s “The Telling: How Judaism’s Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2021).

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If minds can be divided into what Charles Darwin called “lumpers” and “splitters,” Gerson’s is resoundingly the former. Citing Walzer, Gerson heralds the Exodus story at the heart of the Haggadah as both particular to Jewish identity and universally inspiring. For Gerson, the Haggadah, derived from Old Testament texts and Talmudic parables applicable to “all circumstances,” is Judaism’s “essential book.”

Dancing between disciplines, Gerson puts the Haggadah in conversation with Nabokov and neuroscience, Burke and behavioral economics, Marx and the Mayflower Compact. Echoing Walzer, Gerson concludes the sheer “number and composition of subjects aroused in the Haggadah demonstrate just how pervasive, complicated, ambitious, and intersecting the Jewish questions around freedom are.”

More puzzling is Gerson’s insistence on shoehorning texts—the Torah, the Haggadah, his own book—into a “guidebook” genre, rather than a sort of wisdom literature. He calls the Torah “the ultimate guidebook,” the Haggadah “the original guide for life,” and his own book “a guidebook to the Haggadah.” Not everything precious need be a guidebook. The Haggadah (literally: “the telling”) is neither guide nor executive summary. It is one account of the Jewish exodus, read only once per year. If it is a comprehensive guide, it fails badly, with hardly a mention of Moses or the Patriarchs in its pages, and no discussion of life upon exiting the desert. 

And, if the Torah was itself a guide, why compile the Haggadah, which itself requires a Gerson guidebook? The categorical move seems to Gerson a necessary one. Had the Haggadah been a mere “holiday manual or a dinner program,” he reasons, “it would have disappeared a long time ago.” Yet this defies much of the Jewish tradition, which lacks the perlocution and performance endemic to Passover. After all, Jews eat year-round, reciting routine blessings and other ancient texts. Myriad Jewish strictures and structures endure without claiming to answer ultimate questions. 

One could hardly consider the Haggadah a sufficient guide to the richness of Jewish thought or to life in its entirety. And no one can read “The Telling” and think oneself ready for the elaborate ritual and recitation that comprise the Haggadah. That Gerson fits such varied wisdom in his evocative text redounds to his credit. But it does not a guidebook make.

Yet Passover need not answer all life’s mysteries to remain the lodestar of the Jewish lunar year. The Passover meal is an immersive experience, an invested retelling of the seminal moment in Jewish nationhood and affirmation of God’s dominion on Earth. All are welcome, because tonight all can learn. “All who are hungry come and eat,” the Haggadah bids us to say. Those observing the holiday are commanded to bring foreigners into the fold and proclaim God’s sovereignty over mortal forces. They deviate from their regular routine to arouse curiosity in their children, with every answer fueling further questions.

In keeping with that spirit, Gerson offers something for everyone, always saying “Yes, and,” so committed is he to demonstrating the universal relevance and widespread applicability of the text, that it has lessons. Across fifty-some chapters, several hardly longer than a page, “The Telling” churns a reservoir of observations into a torrent of conclusions. It raises many of the right questions and always several answers. Every alternate reading of the text is another insight, an addition at no cost to prior possibilities. No reconciliation is required, Gerson insists; “there can be multiple interpretations of the same thing that are all different, each true, but none contradictory.” This makes for a poor guide, but rich inquiry. Which way through the desert, left or right? “Yes, and,” Gerson always seems to answer, committed as he is to continuing the conversation.

Through it all, three recurring themes put “The Telling” firmly on one side or the other of ongoing debates. They bear mentioning.

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Freedom

Passover is known as “zman cheruteinu,” the time of our freedom. Gerson recognizes freedom as more than an end, no mere libertine license. The Haggadah’s core “purpose is to renew, educate, and deepen our commitment to freedom,” in order to give Jews opportunity, Gerson argues, to become “a holy nation” in God’s service. “The point of freedom, the Torah teaches, is not liberation itself,” he elsewhere says. “Life, unlike a gift, comes with substantial obligations to the giver.” (That connected claims like these appear hundreds of pages apart is a recurring frustration for a book with dozens of standalone chapters and no index.) 

In this vein, Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel is more properly understood as suzerainty. “For the land is mine,” God says in Leviticus 25:23, “for you are as resident strangers and settlers with me.” The Israelite claim over the land is contingent on their compliance with God’s covenant, not least the proper treatment of the resident stranger. As Gerson stresses, the “most mentioned commandment is to love the stranger,” for the Israelites were themselves strangers in Egypt. So long as the Israelites honor their duty to the stranger, God will honor his duty to their inheritance of the land. And what is it they are to do with that land? Gerson is clear: “The purpose of Israel is not to escape Jew haters. It is to serve God.”

God sent Moses before Pharaoh to demand the liberation of the Israelites, a revolutionary act in its own right. But not so each could “define one’s own concept of existence,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote. Rather, God demanded Pharaoh “Let my people go, so that they may serve Me.” (Exodus 8:1) Invoking Edmund Burke, Gerson avers, “Freedom, properly exercised, is not an accomplishment to be celebrated. It is an opportunity that needs a purpose.” Emancipation from Egypt meant covenantal servitude to God, not autonomy.

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Family 

Gerson identifies the nuclear family as the Haggadah’s “fundamental unit of society.” He observes that the Haggadah’s two great villains, Pharaoh and Laban the Aramean, attack the Jewish people in different ways. “The Pharaoh wages a war against the Jewish nation,” he says, “but Laban does so against the Jewish family.” It is Jewish relationships, more than Jewish bodies, which they seek to destroy.

The Israelite occupies neither a purely monadic position, nor is he entirely subsumed by the nation. Prior to the tenth plague, God commands the Israelites to sacrifice the Pascal lamb, eating it as a household. Unlike the other ritual sacrifices, the Pascal lamb is neither fully individual nor communal. It is obligatory on all Israelites, but must be eaten as a household. Further, since the lamb must be burnt and eaten in its entirety, Gerson observes, multiple households would come together. When God soon after strikes down the firstborn in every noncompliant household, Egyptian and Israelite alike, he is meting out punishment at the family level. This mutual interdependence within and between households satisfies Gerson’s larger point: “the authors of the Haggadah considered neediness a key to wholeness.” It is only as a family, each reliant on the other’s compliance, that Passover can be observed.

This is a communitarian reading of the Exodus, and a manifestly sensible one. At no point is the Israelite born alone into a state of nature. He enters a world more resembling a state of nurture, with rights and duties, reliant on social arrangements to which he never consented, ones which never underwent constructivistic design. He finds himself in caring hands. Each year, the youngest attendees learn the Hebrew language and ask the Four Questions, taking part in reliving the Exodus. The “success of education as memory,” Gerson shows, has “enabled Jewish survival.”

The Passover miracle occurred above all within the household. The event is commemorated within the household, where the next generation takes shape. Amid current cultural and market assaults to this core institution, efforts to strengthen and promote flourishing families are reasons for cautious optimism that the Bible’s “fundamental unit” may endure.

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Jew Hatred 

Pharaoh, in Exodus 1:9, distills and detests in one breath the Jewish people. Through him, a person in the Bible for the first time identifies the Jews as a nation. That hatred, and its attendant paranoia, spurred Pharaoh to worsen conditions for the Israelites under his command. 

That ancient animus today includes a more academic, urbane, and otherwise sophisticated form. It has been noted that Jew hatred, “like all conspiracy theories, mimics a politics of emancipation.” The Jew, we’re told, is provoking Middle East turmoil, causing coronavirus outbreaks, and leeching off the government. It at once steers and sinks the system. This hatred can come under progressive banners, comport with critical theory and hardly raise an eyebrow under intersectional frameworks. It festers in faculty lounges and admissions committees, shaping the next generation of elites. Jews will continue to pay for the hate with their blood. Gerson repeats the injunction: Stop Being Shocked.

“Jew haters with any sophistication say that they are fine with Jews, speak warmly of Jewish friends, and even drop a phrase in Hebrew,” Gerson says. Yet they “work to delegitimize, weaken, or destroy the country where more than half of the world’s Jews live and where the Jewish dream is being lived.” More than a few Jew haters might well pick up a copy of “The Telling”, keeping in character. One wonders if they’ll recognize themselves in its pages.

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Several months after Saïd’s polemic and its reproduction in Arab Studies Quarterly, Walzer offered a measured rejoinder in a letter to the editor of Grant Street. Rejecting Saïd’s insinuations and misrepresentations, he said: “I prefer my sentences whole; my politics too.” (Unsurprisingly, Arab Studies Quarterly did not reprint Walzer’s reply.) Walzer had been more modest in his book than Saïd could admit, recognizing his own account was “not, of course, the only way of reading the biblical account. It is an interpretation.”

That same modesty of manner pays Gerson great dividends in his study of the Haggadah's “endlessly generative” text, with which he fell in “love.” (emphasis his) One can imagine Gerson in the salon discussions from which the book emerged, hearing competing ideas, excitedly exploring each, assiduously incorporating them all. The finished product reflects the labor. He has less written a book than compiled one. The snippets of Haggadah which open each chapter springboard into rich and varied discussion, at levels of complexity suitable for engaging children and department chairs alike. (The endnotes are an achievement in themselves.) “The Telling”—though neither guide nor substitute for a proper primer or a comprehensive Haggadah—shows plainly the capaciousness of Jewish text and tradition. As a supplement, it is superb.

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Edward Saïd was reported to cross the street to avoid visibly religious Jews while walking Princeton’s campus as a student. One wonders what faint praise Saïd would have mustered for Gerson’s book before questioning his loyalties, as he did Walzer’s. Yet would not Gerson have made him welcome at his Passover table? Yes, and. 

Mikhael Smits is a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School currently living in Colombia.