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New Union Haggadah
returns to creative past
A PASSOVER HAGGADAH
Edited by Herbert Bronstein. A
Penguin Book. j$5.95.
Penguin Books has published A
Passover Hfggadah: The New
Union Haggadah in time for
the Passover holiday season. The
liturgy committee of the Central
Conference of American Rabbis
especially prepared this Haggadah
to summon up for our time the joy
and meaning of the Seder, the
ritual feast of Passover. A large
format book, A Passover
Haggadah has over twenty
beautiful full-color illustrations by
Leonard Baskin that capture the
joy and the pathos of the Seder.
In preparing this Haggadah, the
liturgy committee aimed not
merely to revise the previous
Union Haggadah but to restore the
classic form and elemental
structure of the ancient service in
order to allow the genius of the
original to speak to us again. It is
meant to be “a return to the
creative beginning so as to bring
forth what is utterly new from
what was present in the old.” The
basic text is given in both English
and Hebrew, and there are also
Passover songs and interpretive
readings from which the leader of
the Seder may choose according to
circumstance and mood.
A Passover Haggadah is edited
by Rabbi Herbert Bronstein. In an
historical introduction, Lawrence
A. Hoffman writes, “If one should
desire to compress time and space
so as to distill and preserve the
accumulated Jewish experience of
centuries and relive it yearly, he
would do well to turn to the
Haggadah. The Exodus from
Egypt, the seminal event in Jewish
history, is related here; and here,
too, lie the successive commen
taries of the ages on that formative
event.
“For Jews at every time and in
every place, seeing themselves in
the Haggadah's story, have added
their own unique contribution to
the annual recounting of the
miracle of old. .. The Haggadah
mirrors the Jews who composed it.
It is not so much recited as
experienced. It is hoped that this
Haggadah may prove to be an
authentic extension of its
predecessors, providing an image
of our past, a portrait of our
present, and a testimony to our
faith in the future."
Bitterness of war
A teacher’s sense
Nechemia Meyers
My wife Adeerah is walking
around with a terrible sense of
guilt.
She just can't forgive herself for
the way in which she talked about
Nissim, for the grades she gave
him.
This is not to say that Nissim
deserved better grades. Not at all;
he wasn't a good student or even a
very diligent one. And his mastery
of English, the subject which my
wife teaches at a local vocational
school, was extremely limited,
improving somewhat towards the
end of his studies when he began
going out with Orna, a girl from
Canada.
But all this seems irrelevant now
that Nissim is dead, killed during
the fighting in southern Lebanon.
It wouldn’t have been as bad
were it not for the fact that
Adeerah remembers Nissim so
well, because less than a year ago
he was in her classroom, when he
could be bothered codling to
school. For often enough he was
absent, perhaps because he had
better things to do, or perhaps
because he thought his
considerable boyish charm would
make teachers overlook his
academic shortcomings.
In normal circumstances Nissim
might have taken himself in hand
after the Army, as many
youngsters do, going on to obtain
his high school diploma and even
studying at university.
But circumstances in Israel are
seldom normal, and boys like
Nissim do not always have a
second chance.
This thought was certainly in the
minds of Adeerah’s pupils, many
of whom knew Nissim, on the day
when his death was announced.
Indeed, one of them said as
much when my wife tried to stop
him from staring morosely into
space and begin paying attention
to the lesson.
“Why should IT' he blurted out.
“What difference does it make
whether I learn English? It
certainly didn't make any
difference to Nissim!”
Adeerah finally managed to
calm him down, pointing out that
the great majority of Israeli boys
go on after the Army to seek a
further education or a good job,
and without a reasonable
knowledge of English both are
difficult to obtain.
She is not sure whether she
convinced him. particularly since,
on that day at least, she wasn’t so
of guilt
convinced herself.
In any case, classes finally
ended, just in time for Adeerah and
her fellow teachers to go to
Nissim’s funeral in the military
section of the Rehovot cemetery.
There, with thousands of others,
they watched Nissim’s flag-draped
coffin being brought in on a
command car and then lowered
into the ground to the
accompaniment of sobs from his
large family.
Adeerah, on the other hand,
kept her emotions bottled up
inside, but they were none the
weaker.
How could they be 1 After all, my
wife teaches only 12th graders,
youngsters a few scant months
away from military service.
Each one of them reminds her of
Nissim, and of the other Nissims
who came before.
. This is why she finds it so hard to
be objective, to berate them when
they don’t do their homework, to
give them low marks when they fail
their tests.
In fact, it is only with enormous
effort that she puts out of her mind
the thought that her students, now
struggling with English, will all too
soon be faced by far more severe
tests than any she can give them.
r
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P*|« If THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE April 7, 1978
