The Seder as a (Children’s) Literature Festival

A Story That Rings True

Slavery is a fact of human history. Emancipations have occurred, too. The Jewish People have known no end of persecutions, and it matters that our people have chosen to quarry its bedrock of morality from a collective story of slavery and emancipation. It matters that we stubbornly and creatively envision a telos to our story that entails caring for the plight of others. Our Exodus story tells of being liberated not to anarchy but to religious and social responsibility. The mitzvah of lesapper beyitziat mitzrayim (of engaging immersively in Passover telling) is an expression of this duty-bound liberty.^[1]

I have never needed the Exodus story to pass some muster of historical verity, rather for it to ring true as a sub-story of our Jewishness and our humanity.

As a teacher of literature, a writer, translator and interpreter of stories and poems, one way I read the Haggadah is as a primer on storytelling and interpretation. I see this approach not as secondary or antithetical to history; after all, history also entails storytelling, translation, and interpretation, albeit with greater disciplinary constraints. In my view, however, literature, untethered to the demands of facticity, allows for an even wider-ranging practice of storytelling, and by extension, freedom.

Haggadah: Between Adults and Children

For those who read these remarks as too easily dismissive of the Enlightenment value of history, let me provoke you further and differently.

Another way I view the Haggadah and the Seder is as a Jewish Children’s Literature Festival, with a full program of literary genres, all designed to narrate and teach the Exodus story of freedom: to engage, amuse, drill, and thrill the Children of Israel in matters of peoplehood and its religious / moral mission. This Seder Literary Festival for Kids includes Bible storytelling, acrostic Aleph-Bet poems, number games, songs, fantasy, folktale, historical fiction and immersive hands-on narration.

Like most great works of children’s literature, the Haggadah employs a form of “dual address” – that phenomenon in children’s literature wherein “a text moves between speaking to imagined child readers and imagined adult readers, or when child and adult readers might understand the same passage differently based on different age-based knowledge or experience.”^[2]

A Ladder for Jewish Literacy

And its address goes beyond those in the room or around the table. In an essay about the importance of libraries and of reading fiction, (Jewish) children’s writer Neil Gaiman writes about reading as a way of getting beyond ourselves and learning “lessons from those who are no longer with us.” The Seder Children’s Literature Festival does just that. “We need our children,” writes Gaiman, “to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy.”^[3] At its best, the Seder Haggadah is a reading ladder for Jews of all ages, inspiring and moving each of us progressively higher up the rungs of Jewish literacy, identity and empathy.