ON THE CUTTNG EDGE: A Hipper Haggadah
When The Stiletto attends the Pesach (Passover) Seder at a friend’s home next week, we will be reading from an updated Haggadah that is more user-friendly. The New York Times reports that the English version of the venerable “Maxwell House Haggadah” has been updated for the 21st Century:
Why is this Haggadah different this Passover from all other Passovers?
On all other Passovers, this Haggadah describes God as a King. This Passover, God is a Monarch.
On all other Passovers, the Haggadah tells of the Four Sons, including one who is wise and one wicked. This Passover, the Haggadah talks about “four different sorts of children.”
Changes to any religious texts are noteworthy. But these changes are sure to be the talk around many Seder tables this Passover because this particular Haggadah - a retelling of the story of the Exodus, along with commentary and prayers - is by some estimates the most popular in the world. …
Over 50 million Maxwell House Haggadot have been published since the 1930s, said Elie Rosenfeld, chief executive of Joseph Jacobs Advertising in Manhattan, an agency that specializes in marketing Jewish products and that arranges for the Maxwell House Haggadah’s publication. One million of the 58-page Haggadot are being printed, and on the first night of Passover, which this year falls on April 18, many of the more than five million American Jews will be reading the revised Haggadah, though many copies wind up in Israel and other countries. …
Until this year, the Maxwell House version contained a traditional translation of the immutable Hebrew and Aramaic that referred to God in male terms; although Jews do not attribute a gender to God, the Hebrew uses the male pronoun. The Haggadah also spoke in the thees and thous of a flowery Elizabethan that in the 1930s seemed to give religious texts their proper reverential tone.
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