Gloria and I began to compile and write our own haggadah in the late 1960’s.
We have not completed it yet…and, hopefully will never finish our work, for we learn new things at every seder, discover new interpretations of parts of the service that have become routine or with which we have become too comfortable. Sometimes, we simply find a reading or a song that strikes our fancy.
There are changes in family dynamics, as well. With the addition of children and grandchildren, our creativity has been challenged, to say the least. When our daughters were growing up, we added readings from children’s books. And then took them out, until last year, when we began to teach the lessons of Passover to our five year-old granddaughter, showing a portion of a delightful video, in which the actor Robert Guilliaume narrates the story of slavery and redemption in song. (The video was made by the puppeteer Shari Lewis.)
Underlying everything, however, is our desire to pass the task to our daughters – to follow the dictum that is at the core of the Seder that is to look upon ourselves as though we, personally, came out of Egypt.
Last edited on Thu Jul 12th, 2007 01:32 pm by ggsilverman
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