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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Annotated Passover Haggadah ed. by Zev Garber and Kenneth Hanson Richard Libowitz The Annotated Passover Haggadah. Edited by Zev Garber and Kenneth Hanson. Denver, CO: GCRR Press (imprint of the Global Center for Religious Research), 2021. Pp. 365. $19.99, paper. For those of a certain age, their first Haggadah, the guide to conducting the Passover Seder, was a slender pamphlet bearing an advertisement for Maxwell House Coffee, testifying to the product's quality and its certification as being "Kosher for Passover." The story and rituals of Pesah were presented within but lacked explanation as to their origins or rationales. A multitude of more recent Haggadot have supplied those explanations, adding new materials, reflecting Hasidic, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Secular, Feminist, Vegan (or other) viewpoints and blending interpretations, contemporary references, and modern additions with the ancient text, filtering the holiday observance through each group's particular lens. This is, after all, the purpose of the Haggadah, to explain Passover—but how is one to explain the Haggadah? The editors have created a volume combining the traditional contents of the Haggadah with both theological and secular insights into the text. Garber, Emeritus Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies and Philosophy at Los Angeles Valley College, has been a significant figure within the Jewish academic world for many decades, his hundreds of publications covering the waterfront of Jewish life and thought. Hanson, Coordinator of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Central Florida, has written extensively on the Second Jewish Commonwealth, the historical Jesus, and Jewish Christianity. Their volume has its roots in a 2018 meeting of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew on "the connections or disconnections between the Jewish Seder and Christian Communion." The text is divided into two sections. Part One, written by the editors, presents some of the rules and traditions of the Seder from a "traditional standard [End Page 459] of Passover Halakha," while Part Two, Supplementary Readings that include historical and theological studies, interreligious investigations, artistic analyses, and personal testimony, takes up more than two-thirds of the volume. Peter Zaas launches the commentaries with a comparison of researchers to the traditional "four sons" of the Haggadah, asking what question(s) "a simple scholar" should ask pertaining to Eucharist and Seder. Garber discusses the inclusion of readings about the Holocaust during the seder, their significance for Jews and Christians, and appropriate understandings of traditional haggadic passages in light of the Shoah. These issues are also raised within other essays. My personal favorite within the collection is David Patterson's "Haggadah, Shoah, and the Exigency of the Holy." His depth of erudition and literary skill are matched by few scholars. His discussion of the analogy of darkness/light and forgetfulness/memory should be a topic for discussion at every seder table. Nathan Harpaz discusses "Sample Haggadot and Sedarim: Artists' Perception of the Last Supper and the Passover Seder." Since the acceptance of representational art came late in Jewish history, it should not be surprising that the primary topic of this essay is depictions of the Last Supper, the most famous being that painted by Leonardo DaVinci. It was not until the nineteenth century that Haggadot began to include illustrations, many of them patterned after "Last Supper" artworks. Harpaz details how various artistic trends have altered presentations of both events over time. Moving from visual arts to fiction, Susan Garber has adapted her short story, "Ziva: The Warrior of Light," for this volume. Her tale of the daughter of Aaron, whose soul moves through time and space, begins with the suffering in Egypt and rebellion in the Wilderness, before moving into supernatural fantasy or, perhaps, religious science fiction. As the one literary contribution to the volume, "Ziva" acts like a soulful sorbet, refreshing the palate after so many pages of academic and theological offerings. Four essays present aspects of Passover observance among differing regional and ideological communities. Yitzchak Kerem ("Romaniote and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Passover Haggadah: Excerpts and Related Customs"), well known for his scholarship pertaining to Greek Jewry, reviews some of the prayers, customs, songs, and foods of the different Judeo-Greek and Judeo-Spanish Sephardic communities in Greece, comparing them to...