We learn in the haggadah, \”B\’chol dor v\’dor, chayav adam lirot et atzmo k\’ilu hu yatzah mi\’mitzrayim\” — \”In every generation it is one\’s duty to regard himself as though he personally had come out of Egypt.\”
Conducting the family seder, attorney Robert Hirschman became frustrated with commercial haggadahs, so he made his own.
At Jewish Family Service\’s Freedom Seder, participants read from a haggadah that was just a little bit different. Instead of reading of the four sons, those at the Freedom Seder read about the \”four community members.\”
\”The wise community member asks, \’How can we, as individuals, and a community, address domestic violence?\’\”
When newer, color versions supplanted the 1923 Union Haggadah Revised, Tamar Soloff\’s brother and father hoarded enough copies of the original to ensure that their extended families would have a supply of their own.
Some people like their Passover seders just as they remember them: the same lines recited by the same relatives with the same emphasis, the same songs, jokes and foods, the same delicate glassware that picks up the light in a certain way, reflecting past and present.
While Israeli artist Avner Moriah was creating \”Haggadat Moriah\” (Moriah Haggadah), his wife, Andy, was undergoing chemotherapy treatments for leukemia.
\”I sat next to her when the chemicals were dripping in,\” said the 50-year-old artist, in Los Angeles this week for an exhibit opening of his work at the University of Judaism. \”In Israel everyone davens and says \’Tehillim\’ when someone is sick, but I came up with images for the haggadah. When I started, the images were really small but as she got healthier, they became more colorful and more lively. When I finished [and Andy recovered] I realized that I had painted my own journey from Egypt.\”
There\’s something very ironic about Pesach. Why is it that getting ready to celebrate our liberation from slavery involves so much hard work?
It may be the season for planting trees, but Yosef Abramowitz is pushing for sundae-making this Tu B\’Shevat. In what he calls a \”revamped\” and \”recast\” seder in honor of the New Year of Trees, Abramowitz and the staff of BabagaNewz, an educational magazine for Jewish kids, are teaching would-be arborists to plant \”seeds of hope\” in the form of nuts and candy, using cookie crumbs instead of dirt, and wishes instead of water.
Spiritually devoid? Downright ridiculous?
Too much driving and dreaming makes me practically a native here, I suppose. When I complained to my friend Stuart back East, he said: \”Slow down. Pull over. Take a class.\”
Once a year, soon after Purim, my parents lug down the hydraulic press from their attic.
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