300 Ways to Ask the Four Questions from Zulu to Abkhaz

by Murray Spiegel and Rickey Stein

Such an important Jewish holiday, filled with family, big (breadless) dinners, and home ritual, deserves important books. Certainly, the self-published, oversized paperback 300 WAYS TO ASK THE FOUR QUESTIONS FROM ZULU TO ABKHAZ by Murray Spiegel and Rickey Stein (a Spiegel and Stein publication!), which comes with both a CD and a DVD, is hardly memorable, but it can provide hours of fascination: the long sub-title gives a hint: “An Extraordinary Survey of the World’s Languages Through the Prism of the Haggadah.” Seeing the “4 Kashas,” as my late grandparents would say, written in Middle and Late Egyptian, Tagalog (with its nearly 16 million Filipino speakers, making it rank the 64th most common in the world), Mayan (less than 3,000 speakers, ranking it 2,866th), and 297 more, is a remarkable obsession, and involves an intriguing amount of research. Is this book (over $60 discounted to less than $40 on amazon.ca) necessary? Hardly. Is it a lot of fun, and CAN it add some exotic charm to a seder? Perhaps.

See More Passover Resources

The Women's Passover Companion: Women's Reflections on the Festival of Freedom, and

The Women's Seder Sourcebook: Rituals & Readings for Use at the Passover Seder,

both edited by Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, Tara Mohr and Catherine Spector,
and published by Vermont's Jewish Lights Publishing, both $24.95 U.S.

Hold the Chametz! How to Prepare for your Best Seder Ever.

The most exciting news of this publishing year is the new, 2-volume set of MY PEOPLE’S PASSOVER HAGGADAH (sub-title, “Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries,” both edited by two very intelligent and thoughtful scholars, Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman and David Arnow—both Ph.D.s as well.) The publisher is the essential and major Jewish publisher of our time, Jewish Lights, which insists (on its website) that they do not print haggadot. I am so thrilled that they changed their mind. These two large, hard-cover, $24.95 volumes of serious, eclectic scholarship will never replace on our Pesach tables the inspired A DIFFERENT NIGHT by the Hartman Institute (“The Family Participation Haggadah”), which is far less costly, in paper, easier to handle, and overflowing with gems of insight as well—and a centre of my own family tradition for over a decade. But what a welcome addition to every English-speaking Jewish home and library! What a way to prepare for your best Seder ever!

The introduction (“How to Get the Most Out of This Book”) lays it out perfectly: “[The Haggadah] is a book we all own, handle, store at home, and spill wine upon! Even more than the Siddur, then, it has attracted commentary—and not just words, but songs, illustrations. . . .”) “What is the Haggadah Anyway?” asks co-editor Hoffman in Part I of the first volume, and he answers his question beautifully and poetically, noting that “Seders are meant to be lived experiences, not historical treatises, and metaphors are things we live by.” Then, we get a few brief paragraphs from the same men and women who will comment, often inspirationally, nearly always profoundly, over the hundreds pages to come: “The Haggadah is a Cubist Composition” argues co-editor Arnow; “The Haggadah is a Textbook,” insists the marvelous scholar, author and professor Rabbi Neil Gillman; “The Haggadah is The Script for a Sacred Drama,” declares Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman.”

I can imagine some traditional Jews who will leaf quickly through these two superb volumes, utterly (and foolishly) rejecting the feminist commentaries by some of the finest female Jewish thinkers and professors of our time(Carole Balin, Alyssa Gray, Wendy Zierler), or simply not interested in such irresistible chapters as “This Bread—Christianity and the Seder,” which recognizes that “Judaism and Christianity are like a double helix, swirling around each other through time.” Who cares what the Gentiles think? many religious Jews may say—and I’ve heard dozens ask this—but any Jew who loves her/his faith and its history, and is aware of the centrality of Passover, the Last Supper, the Eucharist, “This is My Body,” and “Passover/Easter Challenges” in our shared history, will treasure these insights.

I like, admire, and welcome these two volumes almost beyond description, and have found myself quoting entire sections to my wife of four decades. Alas, if I did that in a book review, even on the web, I could be hit for copyright violations (a rather hypocritical, glass-house act by an author and journalist). I long to print here the entire chapter (by Dr. Arnow) called “The Seder Plate—The World on a Dish.” And the sociologically-crucial “Peoplehood with Purpose: The American Seder and Changing Jewish Identity” (by Rabbi Hoffman), which recognizes that even the most non-Jewish Jew in North America today lights Chanukah candles and keeps the Passover seder, even if every other aspect of Judaism (including marrying within the faith) is alien to them. And the history of how the “Pour out Your wrath” section of the Haggadah has been treated by different sects of Judaism over the years! As a committed feminist for decades, I loved the section called “Where Have All the Women Gone? Feminist Questions about the Haggadah, by Professor/Dr. Wendy Zierler. A good question! And some fine answers.

My space for this Passover review is nearly gone, and I haven’t even gotten to the best thing about MY PEOPLE’S PASSOVER HAGGADAH: the several hundred pages in which our entire, beloved Haggadah is laid out in English (and Hebrew) like a page of Talmud, with quality Jewish thinkers/scholars commenting (in English) on nearly every line, surrounding the original text: “The World of Midrash,” by one commentator, “Theologically Speaking” by another, “”Personal Spirituality” by a third, “History of the Haggadah “ by another, “Chasidic Voices,” “The Halakhah of the Seder” and “Feminist Voices” (and more) by other major rabbis and professors.

Jewish Lights Publishing (from that hotbed of Yiddishkeit, Woodstock, Vermont!) has published many dozens of quality books on Jewish subjects over the years, and has become one of the most important “houses” since Schoken Books of New York. MY PEOPLE’S PASSOVER HAGGADAH is truly a must for every English-speaking Jewish family in this new millennium, to help us all make THIS years’s seder a truly memorable one. And the illustrations throughout are excellent, and often heartbreaking: the black-and-white line-drawing depicting Avodim Hayeenu (“We were Slaves”) from The Kibbutz Haggada in 1951, showing a young Israeli chalutz teaching his young son, his wife nursing her baby by his side, with the nascent state of Israel behind them—filled this reviewers eyes with tears, as his mind was flooded with other images of the Shoah, only recently ended. What a blessing these volumes are!

Allan Gould is a long-time Kolel student and supporter, who writes frequently in this space. His latest book, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES VS. G.I. JOE, is a political satire on Canada/U.S. relations.