Passover Haggadah

As I was setting out the haggadahs for our second night seder tonight, I was contemplative. Pesach is a holiday of comtemplation, so I was doing what is required. We have had these haggadahs since they were published over a decade ago, and we bought dozens of them. Our reasons were many fold. Our children were young, we wanted a haggadah that had pictures and was aimed at them. But not too much so--we didn't want a new age haggadah or a feminist haggadah, we wanted one that had all the original hebrew test, and didn't soft sell all the violence associated with the story of slavery in Egypt. We wanted to be able to do a long drawn out seder or a "hit the high points" ceremony, all using the exact same book. The pictures make it easy to get to the right page, and we like being able to assign a child to read a particular passage in Hebrew without much fuss. Finally, they were very affordable in hard cover--so having 40 of them is possible without making it part of the children's inheritence.

The question arose this year: when will we get adult haggadahs? Our collective children are ages 10-21 with a mean age of 16 1/2, so it is a fair question. Never, I think is the answer. This is the haggadah of our children's youth. It is a brutal tale told in vivid detail. One of my friends had nightmares after reading it the first time. So not the sugar-coated Passover story by any means. But that is the story, after all, and the duty to remember is a repeated theme throughout our tradition. So I see us, at 80 years old, leafing through this picture book haggadah, planning the seder.