This will be our first year hosting a Pesach seder. One of the things I realized I needed was hagaddahs. While I actually have an impressive hagaddah collection, most are scholarly works or rabbinic commentaries on the seder, usually featuring no English and one sentence of actual hagaddah text per page. Needless to say most won’t be great for actually using at a seder, especially by the assembled guests, some of whom may not read Hebrew. I set out to the local Jewish bookstore today to find a hagaddah that:

1. Had the traditional Hebrew text with an accurate English translation.
2. Was cheap enough to allow me to buy a dozen of them without breaking the bank.
3. Was something a little more than just the printed text. I realize I could get the plain boring yellow and brown ones we used in elementary school for about a dollar each, but they have no pictures, no commentary, and nothing to spark discussion. Passover discussions are amongst my favorite things in the Jewish calendar, and I’ve found that using a boring hagaddah is not inspiring.
4. Was still focused mainly on the text so a person could reasonably use it during the seder without having to turn the page every four words.

When I got there I could not find a single hagaddah that matched my criteria. When I asked the guy who worked there for some assistance he pointed me to the artscoll hagaddahs. Ugh. I explained that I wanted a translation that would be “accurate” and a commentary that would reflect “the truth” and he chuckled and sighed. There were some great hagaddahs there, including recent publications by Rb. Lamm and Rb. Soloveitchick, but none of those are really useable at a seder – they’re references for another time. I eventually found a hagaddah I liked – it was the Sinai Hagadah (their spelling, not mine), and it was published by Feldheim. The translation was accurate, the commentary was good and even used historical sources to make lucid points (shhh – don’t tell Artscroll). Unfortunately, it has been out of print for 20 years, and they only had 2 copies in stock. I’ve been searching the web and only managed to come up with five more copies available on my favorite used and Jewish book websites. The currently seder crowd is going to be between 9 and 15 so that won’t cut it.

The most infuriating part is that it just seems we’ve completely gone completely over to the artscroll side. The only people who read non-artscroll books are the minority who have a real passion and a desire to aquire a high level of Jewish education on the side. Mean while all our baseline MO Jewish practices – prayer in shul, participating in a seder, etc., have all been given over to artscroll. Grrrrrr.

Anyone have any ideas?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 5:39 pm by Ari and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.