This week is Passover. Christians everywhere are saying, "Great, I love Passover! Matzoh’s so fun!" Meanwhile Jews lament eight days of indigestion.
What’s kind of interesting, if you’re into this sort of thing, is that more than any other (Jewish) holiday, Passover is based on a narrative. If one were to try and place the narrative in a genre – other than "Religious studies" – it would be a pretty difficult task. The story has the literary elements of an epic saga, magical realism, an immigrant tale, and contains the best car chase in (fictive) history.
But the Seder isn’t simply about re-telling the book of Exodus. It’s an analysis of and an embellishment on it. We don’t use the Old Testament to guide ourselves through the evening, rather the story is transplanted into our Haggadot, or prayer books. This distancing of the text from its primary source immediately opens the story up to interpretation. If you search for Haggadot on Amazon, there are over one hundred different entries — one hundred different interpretations of the same story.
The old joke is, if there are two Jews having a conversation, then most likely there are three opinions. Not to stereotype my own religion, but it seems we take and make our theologic meanings by letting our separate sentiments disperse and then converge, rather than everyone working from the same origin.
A few years back, my father found this fairly esoteric haggadah compiled by Gérard Garouste and Marc-Alain Ouaknin, and we’ve been referring to it on-and-off at our recent Seders. Perusing it last week, I found this kind of incredible passage on the meaning of re-telling the exodus story, which I think has ramifications for writing and reading in general (N.B. – the portion of the Seder specifically designated for relating Exodus is called the maggid):
"Maggid" means, "he tells." Maggid is the most important part, at least qualitatively, of the Haggadah. It is the account of the Exodus from Egypt, an anthology compiled from texts chosen by the Sages of the Talmud.
Maggid is preceded by the breaking of matzoh. The words of the telling emerge from that break, from the empty place left between the two pieces of matzah. That breaking is an invitation to the reader to enter the text to say his own word there. That is why the following part is called maggid, "he tells," rather than "the account." The two pieces of matzah indicate that there must be two in order for the text to exist – the author and the reader. The reader of the Haggadah is not merely the keeper of the text, but also its co-author. The break thus comes to draw the readers out of passivity to make them enter the play of writing, to give them access to the enchantments of writing. The reader is not the dazzled or bored spectator of a story made elsewhere, with which he or she has only a distant relationship. The text speaks to us, about us, and about our own history.
This duality thus becomes that of the text and its commentary. To read is always to comment.
"To read is always to comment." — Isn’t that great stuff? I feel like they’ve nailed down the magic of reading a great book — those moments when you feel a bit more connected to the text, as if you’d predicted what would happen before you read it, as if it was something you’d wanted to say, that a particular author happened to say for you.
Speaking of — to take this post in another direction, I thought I’d just mention a couple books that have come out of Seder literature. First of all, the character of Merry Levov in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral re-enacts the Exodus. During the Vietnam War, she bombs a post office to protest U.S. Policy, much as Moses was protesting Egyptian policy when he murdered a harsh slave driver. Soon thereafter, Merry goes into underground exile, just like Moses, to hide from her would-be punishers. I’m making it sound a bit blatant, but Roth, as per usual, establishes this subtly and beautifully.
Second, though I won’t expound on it, I’m pretty sure Saul Bellow’s epic The Adventures of Augie March can be read as an Exodus journey.
Lastly, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot could be said to come out of the tradition. At Seder, we are commanded to set an extra place for Elijah, the prophet, whose coming signals the coming of the Messiah. We leave our front doors open (neighborhood depending), and fill the extra plate with those symbols so central to the holiday. But he never comes. Obviously.
Unless you happen to be in my family. Around sundown on the first night of Passover, we are visited by Elijah, who happens to be four-foot-ten, maybe ninety pounds. He sports a cotton-ball beard, and a caftan my grandparents picked up on an elder hostel to Morocco about a decade ago. He brings wishes of peace and brotherhood, and then disappears into the bathroom from where, five minutes hence, Superman-like, my grandmother emerges.
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