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What is the Maggid?
Contributed by Jesse Schreck

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

As we contemplate the journey to freedom — to a life released from burden — it's natural to have doubts and questions. But if we approach the Maggid in search of answers, we're in for a disappointment. Instead of dispensing advice, the rabbis fill the room with more (and more, and more) questions.

First, we're presented with the traditional "Four Questions," in which our attention is drawn to the minutiae of the Seder's rituals. We then move to the Four Children, each of whom is named and categorized by the question she poses. Finally, after all this interrogation, we get to the story of Exodus — only, in many traditional haggadot, we spend less time recounting the story than reading about a cohort of ancient rabbis parsing out the narrative's most esoteric and peripheral details. They ask, for example, "Were the plagues more severe at sea than on land?" One is tempted to answer that they're missing the point.

So what's the deal? Why all these questions, so many of which strike us as irrelevant, if not actively dull? Maybe the rabbis had exhausted their supply of other, more interesting questions. Or maybe they're trying to teach us something about the nature of curiosity. As each of us walks through the story a human life — a narrative of love and loss, dreams and disappointment, seeking and stumbling — the meaning we make is a product of the questions we ask.

Perhaps the rabbis are asking us: Are you paying attention? Are you noticing each day in its particularity ("How is this night different from all other nights"), and are you absorbing meaning from those details ("But why do we eat maror?")? When, like the Four Children, we're confronted with a new situation, what attitudes and assumptions do we bring to bear? Do we consider how our disposition might shape the answers reflected back to us? And when we look back at a significant episode in our lives — a breakup, a graduation, a new job — from the perspective afforded by distance, are we able to uncover new details, and, with them, new dimensions of meaning? The endless recounting of Exodus is an invitation to curiosity: how would a new interpretation of my past alter my trajectory in the present?

At the end of the day, each of us is limited to one life. One story. But there is no limit to the questions we can ask that story, no end to the work of interpretation. And perhaps, like a dust-covered skeleton key, a hidden question can unlock a door you never knew existed — and suddenly, from this new vantage, everything you ever knew looks different.

Through questions, we get to shape our point of view. This is a radical proposition. Could it be our vision of freedom?
haggadah Section: -- Four Questions

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