Free Passover Seder Haggadah Online Download

Here are several of the best places you can go online to download a Passover Haggadah for your Seder.

• The Jewish Agency Haggadah Links
• About.com Online Haggadah Links
• Wikisource Hebrew Haggadah Page
• The Union Haggadah (CCAR Classical Reform)
• Haggadah According to the Rite of Yemen: with the Arabic-Hebrew
• The Kol Menachem Haggadah: Nusach Haarizal, by Chaim Miller

We give Chabad credit for a great resource if you want a wide selection of Hebrew Haggadahs.  
Download Hebrew Haggadahs here.

Library Makes 1,000 Rare Haggadahs Available Online

An illustration of King David praising G-d in a rare Haggadah published in 1710 in Frankfurt am Maine, Germany

By Dovid Zaklikowski

The central Chabad-Lubavitch library in New York made 1,000 Passover Haggadahs, many of them rare, available on the Internet for browsing by the public. The Agudas Chasidei Chabad Library has one of the largest collections of the Passover orders of service in the world.

Housed at the Lubavitch World Headquarters, the library's Haggadah collection began years ago with a nucleus of some 400 volumes purchased on behalf of the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, by renowned collector and bibliographer Shmuel Wiener in 1924.

The posting at ChabadLibraryBooks.com represents close to half of the library's total Haggadah collection and is part of chief librarian Rabbi Sholom Ber Levine's goal of making the library more accessible to the public. All told, the library possesses more than 2,200 editions of the Haggadah. Although the rarest of the books, all handwritten, are not yet available, Levine is looking for ways to post them next year. Hebrew Books, directed by Chaim Rosenberg, collaborated on the project.

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Top Ten List for Seder Leaders

Passover is coming... Time for our top ten tips for your Seder...

Most folks consider preparing and eating the festive meal to be the central focus of their Passover Seder. There's not much advice that we can offer to help improve upon that.

However, we have always had fun conducting the reading of the Haggadah. We learned this art as a child by watching our father masterfully conduct the communal synagogue Seders as the rabbi of the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan.

Sad. We will miss dad this year. Happy. We greet a new grandson this year. Barak and Miriam just had a boy!

So in the spirit of the season of rebirth and freedom, let us try to help free you from the dread of the task of conducting your family Seder this year.

If you follow these ten tips you will get rave reviews of your Seder from all of your guests. Guaranteed.

1. Know your Haggadah. This year, spend an hour before Passover reading through your favorite version of the Haggadah. Sort out the rituals (like Kiddush), the liturgies (like the Hallel) and the learning (like the ma nishtanah and what follows). Make marginal notes or use a highlighter.

2. Know your guests.
Find out who is coming (yes, Seder leaders need to know that). Think through what their skills are and what role they can play in the Seder. Remember some guests may be simple, some wise, some won't know how to ask a question. Try to meet the needs of everyone assembled.

3. Make a recitation assignment list (in your head or on paper).
The Best Ever Seder will be a collaboration of all the guests. Those who can't read Hebrew can read a passage from the Haggadah in translation (English, Russian or otherwise) or perform another essential task.

4. Prepare props for colorful explanations.
The matzo, maror, haroseth, shank bone, egg all have familiar symbolic meanings worth mentioning. You can include other props of your choosing for added flavor to the event: use miniature pyramids, toy or paper or chocolate frogs, relevant family memorabilia or a special illustrated Haggadah (hold it up to show it off or pass it around).

5. Buy toys for the children. Give them something nice at the retrieval of the afikomen or distribute something small anytime they start to lose interest.

6. Tell a (short) story (or two). During the reading of the Haggadah tell about how your family matriarch or patriarch conducted the Seder or prepared the meal. Reminiscing in small doses adds great flavor to your production.

7. Be dramatic.
The Seder is a drama. The guests are the actors. Yemenite Jews have the custom to dress up and walk around the table to reenact the exodus. Even if you are not much of an actor, at the very least, you can talk about how other people are dramatic.

8. Don't be melodramatic.
You and your guests all are on stage. This is not the time to bring up old family arguments. If you do, your Seder might become the "last supper" that you eat together.

9. Have the matriarchs (of the families) greet Elijah at the door.
Watch as the wine in Elijah's cup changes color as he sips from it. Talk about loss and the mystical redemption.

10. Sing the songs with gusto.
Sing the closing songs in all the ways you can remember. You can sing Chad Gadya in Yiddish, if someone knows how, or you can add the animal sounds. Have fun -- these are supposed to be rowdy songs that you sing after drinking four cups of wine.

These tips may be self evident to you -- or they may be new. Whatever the case, good luck and have a happy and kosher Pesach. [annual repost]

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The Sarajevo Haggadah -- the most Expensive Haggadah in the World

We have posted here about all of the free Haggadahs for Passover Seders that are available on the Internet. That led us to consider asking -- what is the most expensive Haggadah in the world?

The answer is -- the rare illuminated Sarajevo Haggadah which also is said to be one of the most beautiful manuscripts and one of the most valuable books in existence.

Our facsimile of The Sarajevo Haggadah that we bought a while back is awesome.

If you are at all interested in this Haggadah, you must read People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.

Wikipedia explains:

The Sarajevo Haggadah is an illuminated manuscript that contains the traditional text of the Passover Haggadah which accompanies the Passover Seder. It is the oldest Sephardic Haggadah in the world, originating in Barcelona around 1350. The Haggadah is presently owned by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, where it is on permanent display.

The Sarajevo Haggadah is handwritten on bleached calfskin and illuminated in copper and gold. It opens with 34 pages of illustrations of key scenes in the Bible from creation through the death of Moses. Its pages are stained with wine, evidence that it was used at many Passover Seders. It is considered to be the most beautiful illuminated Jewish manuscript in existence and one of the most valuable books in the world. In 1991 it was appraised at US $700 million....more...

You can view quite a few pages from the Sarajevo Haggadah here.  

Or you can purchase a facsimile edition of your own here: The Sarajevo Haggadah  or see this web site here.


More posts about the Haggadah...

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Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik's Haggadah for the Passover Seder by Rabbi M. Genack

Rabbi Menahem Genack published, The Seder Night: An Exalted Evening: The Passover Haggadah: With a Commentary Based on the Teachings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. A Haggadah in English and Hebrew (2009).

We think it's a great book and happily added it both to our collection of Haggadahs and to our library of works about the teachings of my teacher, the Rav, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. It is a handsome and professional volume, clearly written and packed with content based on the Rav's torah teachings.

Genack was known as one of the best students in the class when I was in the Rav's shiur back in college and in rabbinical school. He's pursued a career of Jewish service and teaching and continues over the decades to shine as an exemplary disciple of the Rav.

Like most books that present the Rav's torah, this one approaches the task with great reverence and nostalgia. Those are great characteristics for me and for the other several thousand students who personally sat at the feet of the Rav and gave themselves over to him as his uncritical disciples. Genack writes his condensed accounts of the Rav's lectures with the clarity that I need to hear again the Rav speaking. He was a charismatic teacher with a wealth of learning that he imparted in many ways.

In his public talks, the Rav emphasized the experiential side of Orthodox Judaism. He often spoke poetically, I think to prove two important points.

First, he wanted to prove a personal point, to show the world that he was not a cold Litvak, not just a product of the Lithuanian Yeshivas who valued only factual erudition and cold logic.

Second, he had a program in his work, to create and express a form of Orthodox Judaism that was on par with the other great religions of the world. For him that meant in his time and place and out of his training in Europe that he had to demonstrate the validity and fecundity of Orthodox Jewish religious experience. He believed that he was the Jewish Rudolph Otto or William James and that from his teachings the world would see that Orthodoxy stands proudly next to any form of the esteemed Protestant religions of the Old or New World.

The Rav had another mission in his teaching and preaching. That was to transmit the Brisker Torah, the innovative conceptual insights of his own and his family's heritage of learning. So the Rav sought to investigate the phenomenology of Orthodox Judaism, to seek out and abstract the core idea from each performance of the numerous commandments and from each recitation of the many prayers.

Rabbi Genack succeeds in presenting all sides of the Rav in his publication, though he does so without the kind of self consciousness that I have just evoked above.

But now for the other question. How does this book play in Peoria? How will people who were not long-time students of the Rav react to this book? This book is not for the ordinary Jew who never studied with the Rav and it's not for the non-Jewish scholar or layperson. A Reform or Conservative or even an Orthodox Jew who never knew the Rav would need much more translated from the insider's notes and nostalgia of this book to the vocabulary and syntax or religious discourse in its more common and less private forms.

All told, this is a very good work in its genre. //repost from 2009//

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Book Serialization Part 13: Six People You Meet in Synagogue

Book Serialization Part 13:  Six People You Meet in Synagogue

For 2013. We present our book in serial format on our blog - God's Favorite Prayers...

Mythical Discourse

H

annah left me with this thought, reminding me that only one letter changes the “mystical” into the “mythical.” I ought to spend some time investigating the role of the mythical in the synagogue, she suggested. Maybe I will find another identifiable archetype, like Moshe the Mythic.

Hannah is quite right that I need to explore myTHical synagogue discourse, that mode of thinking, which is indeed related to—but not identical with—the mySTical.

I don’t, however, endorse Hannah’s suggestion that the mythical element in the synagogue is archetypal. I see that the mythical is a pervasive underlying mode of thought that religious Jews who attend the synagogue accept as a given. You may rightly ask, if it is such a given, then please explain already what you mean by the mythical.

I employ the term “myth” in a manner that is common in the academic study of religions, not in the way it is used in popular culture. In the latter, a myth is a fantasy, a far-fetched untruth that other people wish you to believe, often so they can deceive you or, perhaps, entertain you. By contrast, in the disciplines of the study of religions, a myth denotes a narrative that is truer than true, a story whose details are not just interesting, dramatic or entertaining. The elements of a mythic narrative bear special deep and timeless meanings for those who retell them.

In the prayers that I’ve considered, I’ve provided examples of mythic thinking and speaking. My descriptions of the mystical in the section just above in this chapter is based on a cosmic mythical understanding of the universe. The shared narrative, to which we made reference, presumes that heaven exists, that angels dwell there and that God also does. Those are essential components of a Judaic cosmic myth based on biblical and rabbinic teachings.

More familiar to most of us are the historical myths, the familiar biblical narratives revered in Judaism, such as the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and the miracle of the splitting of the Red Sea, the revelation of the Torah by God to Moses at Mount Sinai, the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert, the conquest of the Promised Land by Joshua, the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple and the exile from the land. 

Again, by calling them myths, I mean that these are accounts of events that I deem to be more than historical, true or factual. They contain spiritual meanings of great consequence.

As we saw in the previous section, these myths can be referenced and they can be relived. For instance, the mystic refers to the cosmic myths of heaven and angels so she can learn how to pray. The mystic relives the myths of heaven and of the angels and (in one way that we interpreted the Kaddish) she sees herself rise to stand in heaven and, there, to beseech God for entry for the soul of the deceased.

In Judaism, historical myths are referenced and relived frequently in the synagogue and in the rituals of the Jewish home. In the synagogue at the end of the morning Shema service, the berakhot that are recited right before the Amidah make reference to the song that the Israelites sang after they were brought forth from slavery and saved from the Egyptians by the miracle of the splitting of the sea.

That is a perfect example of how, by making reference to the mythical narratives of Judaism, the people in the synagogue find the right words to praise God. It is as if in the prayer that I cite now, the archetypes of the synagogue turn to and ask an Israelite who has been freed from bondage and who has crossed the Red Sea on dry land, “What should I say to thank God for his saving graces?”

You have always been the help of our ancestors, Shield and Savior of their children after them in every generation. Your dwelling is in the heights of the universe, and your judgments and righteousness reach to the ends of the earth. Happy is the one who obeys your commandments and takes to heart your teaching and your Word. You are the Master of your people and a mighty King who pleads their cause. You are the first and you are the last. Beside you, we have no king, redeemer or savior. From Egypt you redeemed us, Lord our God, and from the slave-house you delivered us. All their firstborn you killed, but your firstborn you redeemed. You split the Sea of Reeds and drowned the arrogant. You brought your beloved ones across. The water covered their foes; not one of them was left.

For this, the beloved ones praised and exalted God, the cherished ones sang psalms, songs and praises, blessings and thanksgivings to the King, the living and enduring God. High and exalted, great and awesome, he humbles the haughty and raises the lowly, freeing captives and redeeming those in need, helping the poor and answering his people when they cry out to him.

(Stand in preparation for the Amidah. Take three steps back before beginning the Amidah.)

Praises to God Most High, the Blessed One who is blessed. Moses and the children of Israel recited to you a song with great joy, and they all exclaimed: “Who is like you, Lord, among the mighty? (Exodus 15) Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, doing wonders?” With a new song, the redeemed people praised your name at the seashore. Together they all gave thanks, proclaimed your kingship, and declared: “The Lord shall reign forever and ever (Exodus 15).”

Rock of Israel! Arise to the help of Israel. Deliver, as you promised, Judah and Israel. Our Redeemer, the Lord of hosts is his name, the Holy One of Israel (Isaiah 47). Blessed are you, Lord, who redeemed Israel. (Koren Siddur, pp. 104-106)

These prayers convey to me some important insights, which they derive via a mythical mode of expression. As I suggested, if you want to know how to pray properly, sure, you can ask the angels. But, also, you can recall the mythic redemptions of the history of Israel. The Israelites who crossed the sea on dry land understood firsthand the greatness of God. Therefore, we also may learn from them the best way to pray, and we may follow their lead.

The two conceptual modes of religious thinking that I treat here are related. The mythical is most often a horizontal means of imagining backwards and forwards in history. The mystical, by contrast, is usually a form of vertical visualization upwards to another dimension, towards the heavens.

Both modes have their entry level and their advanced forms of application. As is the case for the mystical, for the mythical there is yet a more advanced form of imagining and reenacting. For example, the Exodus from Egypt is relived in the Seder ritual in the Jewish home ceremonies at the Passover meal. The Haggadah could not make it clearer that a goal of the evening is for the participants to relive the redemption from slavery: “In every generation, a person is obligated to regard herself as if she personally left Egypt.” The text spells out the religious obligation for every Jew to relive the miracle of redemption:

We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord, our God, took us out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm. If the Holy One, blessed be he, had not taken our ancestors out of Egypt, then we, our children, and our children’s children would have remained enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt. Even if all of us were wise, all of us understanding, all of us knowing the Torah, we would still be obligated to discuss the exodus from Egypt; and everyone who discusses the exodus from Egypt at length is praiseworthy.

The mythical mode of expression is commonly used by all the archetypes we meet in the synagogue. Each of them shows us how to reference and relive their narratives in the different ways that make the most meaningful sense to them. 

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The Haggadah as an American Best Seller

So we do not really care about what is inside of the New American Haggadah by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander and two other popular writers. 

The watershed event of this Passover season was the appearance of a Haggadah in the top 100 best sellers at Amazon.com - today at # 39 and 34 days in the top 100. What the hey?

We had guests at the Seder who had the NAH but it turns out that they had no contributions to make to our table based on the contents. 

Who cares if the NAH is quirky or a masterpiece? As a result of the NAH's popularity we do expect many other popular writers and celebrities to publish Haggadahs next year. That is a good thing for Jewish books, and so that is a perfectly good result, from our perspective.

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Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah - a Star of the Seder

Passover once again. We will soon open our Haggadahs and find the familiar prologue stories to the Maggid section of the Seder. And soon we all will wonder, Who was Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah?

Maggid is literally the "telling" of the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the event that we celebrate in our evening of dramatic activity. My teacher Rabbi Soloveitchik always underscored that this is not a mere retelling of a story. The Maggid is an archetypal session of rabbinic Torah study. The major section that we read is a classic rabbinic midrash that expounds upon a few condensed biblical verses. This is the exodus story as told by the rabbis, not by the Torah of Moses. To make the point unmistakably clear, the rabbis go so far as to omit the mention of Moses altogether in the Haggadah.

The rabbis do mention several of their own rabbis by name and top among them is my favorite, Eleazar ben Azariah. He was a second century rabbi in Israel who also held the highest political position in his community.

He teaches (in the name of Ben Zoma, another rabbi) that we recite at the Seder because it provides us with the license for our gathering at home at night to perform all of our Seder rituals. Otherwise, we might still be celebrating our Seder during the day in accord with the practice of the anonymous Sages.

We mention the exodus from Egypt at night.
Said R. Eleazar ben Azariah, ``I am now like a seventy year old and was not worthy [of understanding] that the exodus from Egypt be said at night, until Ben Zoma expounded it:
``As it is stated: `So that you may remember the day on which you left Egypt all the days of your life (Deut. 16:3).'
`` `The days of your life' [would have implied only] the days. `All the days of your life' [includes] the nights.''
 And the sages say, `` `The days of your life' [would have included only] this world. `All the days of your life' [includes] the days of the messiah.''
[M. Ber. 1:5; Sifré, ed. Finkelstein, p. 188; Tos. Zer., Lieberman, p. 4, ls. 40-46 (Mekhilta, Horowitz-Rabin, p. 60 omits attribution to Eleazar)]

Later rabbis delve into the meaning of the cryptic phrase, "I am now like a seventy year old." Some take it to mean that a young Eleazar turned grey overnight to help him gain respect as the new political leader of the Jewish nation, to facilitate his ascent in Israel.

In the narrative of the deposition of Rabban Gamaliel from his position as Patriarch which led to Eleazar's elevation to the post, we have two variants on this element -- the quasi-miracle that Eleazar's hair turned grey.

Yerushalmi Berakhot 4:1 says:

They went and appointed (mynw) R. Eleazar b. Azariah to the academy (yšybh).
He was sixteen years old and all his hair turned grey (ntml' kl r'šw sybyt).

Bavli Berakhot 27b-28a informs us that Eleazar's wife had observed his deficiency:

She said to him, ``You have no white hair.''
On that day he was eighteen years old. A miracle befell him and eighteen rows of his hair turned white.

All this is discussed -- in the context of the exciting agenda of critical and analytical questions that we were asking of our rabbinic sources at the time -- in my doctoral thesis from 1977, which you can now purchase for your Kindle, "Eleazar: Rabbi, Priest, Patriarch" .

Yes, I did my thesis on Eleazar ben Azariah (at a time before I had any white hair). And each year at the Seder I bring a copy of my book on Eleazar to the table and hold it up - to add a personal touch at the outset of our annual Seder dissertation. /reposted/

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iPad Haggadah, Passover and Seder App and online Seders

Update; WSJ has a nice article about online Seders and the digitalization of Judaism: "Matzo Ball Soup, Check. iPad, Check. For Passover, Jews Try Techie Seders"

Now our review.

The Rambam says that it is a mitzvah for every Jew to write a Sefer Torah. To us it seems that there is a mitzvah lately for every Jew to write a Haggadah. We like that idea. And we have a tall pile of different editions of the Haggadah which we draw upon for the Seder.

Oh and by the way just about everyone we know is writing an iPad app or wants to write one. That is an urgent technology mitzvah of its own.

And so now this year David Kraemer, professor at JTS, is the author of a new Haggadah multimedia app for the iPad. The Haggadah includes eloquent introductions and commentary by Kraemer.

Here are some of the excellent additional features of this app. You can toggle between English and Hebrew in the Haggadah text. There is a cute Seder plate page that you can spin around - and see explanations of each item.

There is an oral commentary by Rabbi Irwin Kula, and nu, it could have been better and more insightful but we will take it for now as long as he redoes it for next year with more preparation and depth.

There is an oral commentary  that is a bit hard to find by Sharon Liberman Mintz, curator of Jewish art at The JTS Library, on the artwork. Featured are images of historical Haggadot from the Library’s collection, awesome. If you expand the art images that have a gold magnifying glass icon, you can hear her intelligent explanations.

There is an alternative “Sayder” by Amichai Lau-Lavie, rabbinical student at JTS, which is a bit hokie and uber-current, but we liked it. Your mileage may vary.

There is audio with transliteration of the Seder's most popular songs, very nice.

There are games for children, but we must critique the coloring pages. They seem to us to be too detailed for iPad coloring, even with small fingers. And we know this because? Because we have a three year old grandson who loves to color on our iPad. More user acceptance testing for next year please.

There are really bad jokes, sort of related to the Seder, and some fine recipes, which we have not tried so don't go by our generous opinion, and other features that we would discover if we had more time, we just got the app to evaluate, quite late in the season. 

David Kraemer and his crew have fulfilled with great aplomb the dual mitzvahs of writing a new Haggadah and of writing an iPad app. Bravo. Link.

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Henry Frisch's Maxwell House Haggadah Beats out the new one by the Trendy Novelists Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander

Our neighbor Henry Frisch (he lives mamash on our block in Teaneck) has beaten out the two hoity toity hotsy totsy novelists who have published a really strange new Haggadah this year.

According to the Times, none other than the President of the United States, Barack Obama, has considered the Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander Haggadah and has rejected it in favor of Henry's translation in the Maxwell House Haggadah.

Boo-yah to Henry. Way to go man!

Two Novelists Take on the Haggadah
By ALEX WILLIAMS
AFTER a lengthy interview with President Obama in the Oval Office two weeks ago, Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for the Atlantic, had one more question, and it had nothing to do with Iran.

“I know this is cheesy ...” Mr. Goldberg started, but before he could finish, the president interrupted him. “What, you have a book?” Mr. Obama asked. Turns out, Mr. Goldberg did, but “it’s not just any book,” he replied.

Mr. Goldberg reached into his briefcase and handed the president an advance copy of the “New American Haggadah,” a new translation of the Passover liturgy that was edited by Jonathan Safran Foer and contains commentary by Mr. Goldberg and other contemporary writers.

After thumbing through the sleek hardcover book, Mr. Obama looked up and asked wryly, “Does this mean that we can’t use the Maxwell House Haggadah anymore?”

Mr. Goldberg was impressed. “Way to deploy the inside-Jewish joke,” he later said. Since the 1930s, Maxwell House has printed more than 50 millions copies of its pamphlet-style version of the Haggadah. It has been the go-to choice at the Obamas’ White House Seders, though Mr. Goldberg hoped the president would consider using their version this time around.

In the end, the White House decided to stick with the Maxwell House next month...more...

Cheesy? More like dumb to report that your president rejected you. Or not, the book is the #7 best seller on Amazon! Utterly amazing all around.

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