Beginning to envision Pesach
January 23, 2008
It's been a few years since I last released a new edition of the Velveteen Rabbi's haggadah for Passover. I spent last winter and spring working on the siddur for my niece Emma's bat mitzvah, which was an awesome project but meant there was no way I could create a revised haggadah, because (alas) there are only so many hours in a day. I promised myself then that I would spend this winter working on a haggadah revision, and made a mental note that I ought to begin after Tu BiShvat. The sap is rising; it's time to think ahead to the festivals this divine flow will feed into.
Of course, this is a year with a leap month -- the Jewish calendar operates on a Metonic cycle of 19 years, wherein 12 are "regular" years and 7 are "leap" years with an extra month added in (this page explains it neatly, with a spiffy piano keyboard diagram to make it easier to visualize) -- so there's an extra month between Tu BiShvat and the spring festivals that follow it. This is excellent news for me, because it means I have some room to breathe before I need to be thinking about Purimspiels and haggadot! But I went ahead and opened up the haggadah file this morning, and now it's all I can do to keep myself from dropping everything else on my to-do list and just playing with the haggadah.
Over the last few years, I've received a handful of requests. Several people have asked whether I might consider adding more of the traditional Hebrew text to my haggadah, not instead of but in addition to the interpretive material and the poems and all that good jazz. (The short answer there is: yes, absolutely, I can do that quite happily! The haggadah is a kind of anthology of great texts; adding more interesting stuff just gives the users more options in the choose-your-own-adventure experience that is the seder.)
I've also been frustrated, in recent years, with the limitations of the Hebrew text that I typed, laboriously, backwards in Microsoft Word some years ago. There are no vowels, the font isn't very pretty, and every year we find a new typo or two, so it's clearly time to overhaul the Hebrew entirely. These days I use Mellel/Davka as my bilingual word processor (and oh, man, it is so useful to be able to toggle easily between languages; how did I ever do any of this work before?) so I decided to pony up twenty bucks to download the Haggadah texts from DavkaWriter. Now I have at my disposal the complete text of the traditional haggadah, in Hebrew and in (predictably old-fashioned) English.
Step one of the haggadah revision process was porting the last version of my haggadah over from Word to Mellel, which has created some intriguing formatting issues. (Most frustrating, so far, is the realization that all of my endnote numbers have been stripped from the text; that's going to take a while to fix. So maybe it's a good thing I'm getting started now, well in advance of when I'll want to put the haggadah out into the world!) Step two is folding in some traditional texts from the download I got from DavkaWriter, and beginning to think about creative interpretations and the good questions those texts push me to ask.
And step three is, actually, making this post. I figured I'd ask, since I know many of the folks who use the haggadah also read this blog: are there changes you want to suggest? Additions, interpretations, readings you like to include in your own seder that you think might be a good fit for this one? I can't promise I'll take everyone's suggestions, of course, but I'd love to know how you think the haggadah can be improved.
It's early, yeah, but -- for me, at least -- on a cold winter day like this one, there's something satisfying in thinking ahead to the light and liberation of spring.