I have begun the research and writing to create a new, modern Pesach (Passover) haggadah, with a new order, new structure, new histories and midrashim, new questions, new questions to answer questions, new portraits of personality types, while still embedding much of the traditional haggadah. This one will be a looking back, a looking forward, a looking at the turbulence and clarities within. Here granular, there sweeping vistas. Now personal, now transitional, now transformational. Thus…
(translated back to old English from my poetic voice…)
Here. The Crystal Haggadah begins. Hear. The seder, its orders retold.
For something like three thousand years or more this tradition, this ritual has been observed yearly in Yisroyel. This, and Shabbat, continuously remembered and observed longer than any other ritual in any other religion or culture in the world.
Observed and honored, festively (or furtively where hate prevails, where laws are writ, where knives are drawn, afraid of us, afraid of our God)…
in Sinai’s shadow; in Judea’s fields; in hovels and mansions in Babylon; in Elephantine ‘way down the Nile, and far up the Euphrates in Pumbedit; in Athens, Rome, and Byzantium; in Medina, Baghdad, Tashkent, Kabul; in Cochin, Calcutta, and Kaifeng; in Kathmandu and Timbuktu; in Algiers, Tangiers, and Tripoli; in Aden, Addis Ababa, and Muscat; in Europe, every shtetl and stadt; in Australia, Sydney to the arid outback; and across the oceans to the New World, in the Caribbean, on every isle, and from Patagonia and Concepcion to Goose Bay and White Horse and Denali Park.
Pesach, the call to liberation; the path to revelation.