"How is this night different from all other nights? On all other nights since we came to this country we were under foreign, hostile rule that reined us in malevolently, and this night in our own state we are celebrating and we are able to redeem the wilderness and dry [swamps] ... On all other nights we are scattered in two separate camps - fathers from sons, and we all engage in the great work of building. This night we all recline at the same table."
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This quotation, which is taken from the Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael Haggadah for 1949, typifies an outstanding aspect of the Passover Haggadot that were written in the kibbutz movement: the use of the traditional text, with "adjustments" to the spirit of the age - in this case, the first year of the establishment of the state.
In the same spirit the Beit Ha'emek Haggadah of 1951 inserted a new text into the story of the four sons: "The wise son, what does he say? What are all the political parties, movements and factions that boast in our young country and interfere in matters of state at such a fateful time? ... The wicked son, what does he say? What do you need this work for? Every day there are new immigrants, who eat our bread and take our apartments ...- and just as he has removed himself from the community, you too must remove him from the community: In principle he is the type who loves only himself, the person who does not remember his own condition as a new immigrant."
To the part about "Pour out Thy wrath upon the gentiles," in 1945 Kibbutz Ein Gev added a sentence to mention the Holocaust that had only just ended and to say that the best thing to do is to drop the accounting with the gentiles and turn our backs on them: "And those who have survived the terrible upheaval have resolved no longer to be in the shadow of the gentiles and to set their sights on the land of the Patriarchs that is being reborn."
All of these quotations are taken from a luxurious album that has just been published, "Yotzim behodesh ha-aviv" ("Going Out in the Month of Spring") in which there are selected extracts and photographs from hundreds of kibbutz Haggadot that were written in this country since the inception of the kibbutz movement. (The publication is a cooperative project of four research institutes named after fathers of the labor movement: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi, the Ben-Gurion heritage Institute, Yad Tabenkin and Yad Ya'ari.)
Muki Tzur, a leading researcher of the kibbutz movement, is responsible for the contents, and the design - which is no less important - is the work of an artist and curator from Kibbutz Hama'apil, Yuval Danieli, who has also added a brief analysis of the graphic element in the kibbutz Haggadot.
During the research phase, Tzur combed through a number of the major archives of the labor movement, among them the holiday archives at Kibbutz Beit Hashitta and Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan, the archive of Hakibbutz hadati (the religious kibbutz movement) and the National and University Library in Jerusalem. He discovered more than 500 Haggadot, all of which were written during a relatively short period - between the 1930s and the 1960s.
In his estimation, the total number is more like 1,000 Haggadot: "We know that there are many kibbutzim that put out a lot of Haggadot in limited editions, only a few dozen copies, which never got to the major archives."
For the sake of comparison: In the catalog of traditional Passover Haggadot prepared by Avraham Ya'ari in 1960 that maps all the period from the invention of printing to that year, there are altogether 2,717 Haggadot.
A short look at the "sample pages" from the Haggadot that appear in the boom explains the plenitude: Many of these Haggadot were not at all intended as sacred texts to be read year in and year out in the same way. Indeed, they look like a series of festive skits for Passover - and in any case they vary from kibbutz to kibbutz and from year to year at a given kibbutz. Only at later stages, when the kibbutz movement became established, did its various branches begin to publish standard Haggadot for all the kibbutzim that belonged to the same stream: the Kibbutz Haartzi Haggadah, the Kibbutz Hameuchad Haggadah and more.
In fact, the production of the Haggadot themselves was already a relatively established stage of the movement. Tzur's research found that the first kibbutz Haggadah was written in 1928, about 20 years after the kibbutz movement was founded, and even it was not written by kibbutz members proper, but rather by members of a training group in Kolosova in Poland, who were waiting to immigrate to Palestine.
The kibbutz Haggadot that were written here appeared only in the 1930s (first at Ein Harod). Before that, the kibbutz Seders where characterized by anarchism: The traditional text was open in front of them and here and there they even read from it, but the main thing was not the text - traditional or new - but rather the experience of togetherness, the singing and the dancing.
The kibbutz Haggadah was in effect a symbol of the entire process of the Zionist revolution, and especially that of the labor movement: the creation of a "new Jew," one who gives new and secular meaning to the Jewish tradition, its values and its holidays. Thus, they created new and timely versions of the traditional text, just as they inserted into the Haggadah completely new texts from the literature of the period.
Tzur: "The assumption was that Hebrew literature was a continuation of the canonical holy literature and therefore extracts from the new Hebrew literature are prominent in the Haggadot."
The Passover Haggadah was especially apt for the labor movement people because it symbolizes the two freedoms they upheld: national freedom and social-human freedom - from the chains of enslavement. Tzur notes that the "innovative" Haggadah was indeed characteristic of the kibbutzim and the bodies that were influenced by them, like the training farms abroad or the soldiers of the Jewish Brigade during World War II, as well as the Jewish leftist movements in general, even those that were opposed to Zionism.
In other branches of the Zionist movement, innovations was less striking, apparently also because the mass Seders in the kibbutz movement made it possible to create the authority for the absorption of new texts, while in the urban movements the familial nature of Seder night was maintained along with its traditional text.
One of the main questions that faced the shapers of the Haggadot was of course the religious nature of the traditional Haggadah. In this matter, there were differences among the kibbutzim themselves. At kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair, a movement with an emphatic anti-religious outlook, they tended to remove any mention of God from the text. At other kibbutzim there was debate, and Kvutzat Degania, for example, decided after such a debate that the traditional text would not be changed, because of its national moral value.
The nature of the new contents also varied, in accordance with the changes of the times. At first, the longings for parental homes in the Diaspora were evident, longings that the familial nature of Passover amplified as compared to the rest of the year. In the testimony of one woman pioneer from the Second Aliyah (wave of immigration), it is related that the sight of the set tables, as was the custom in their parents' homes, made the pioneers feel not festive, but deeply sad: "The comrades began to enter the hall. As a comrade entered, the sight aroused longings in him, his face glowed and he would move off into a corner with tears falling from his eyes. And a second one and a third one, too. Everyone saw the set table from the home across the sea, the faces of the bereaved father and family members, his own place empty at the table, their prayers and their longings for him at this moment."
The moments of tears and homesickness were so prolonged that A.D. Gordon, the "great patriarch" of the collective decided that no one had the strength even to read the text and in the end they went straight on to the meal. In this spirit, in later years many Haggadot added the poem of longing by Fanya Bergstein of Kibbutz Gvat: "You planted melodies in me, my father and my mother, melodies of forgotten hymns ... In me your distant voice will sound, I will close my eyes and now I am with you beyond the darkness of the depths."
Eventually, all the events of the times also entered the Haggadot, in a way that transformed them into the collective literature summation of "the situation." Thus, for example, the Shefaiyim Haggadah of 1939 documented the kibbutz's first fatality; the 1938 Maoz Haim Haggadah documented the founding of the kibbutz at that time, the days of tower and stockade, as did the Haggadot of many other kibbutzim.
Often the Haggadot were even prophetic of the situation: On the cover of the 1939 Maoz Haim is the heading "In the Days of the Holocaust," even though World War II had not yet broken out. After the slaughter began of course reference to it was common in many other Haggadot. Thus, for example, the Mahanot Olim movement Haggadot from Kibbutz Yagur in 1943 added next to the verse "When they torture him he shall multiply and burst forth" the story of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt.
(As the revolt broke out during Passover of that year, Tzur suggests that the Passover Seder to which the Haggadah appertains was apparently held after the holiday, something that was apparently common at the time: The Seder was not always held on its traditional date, but rather close to it on a date when it was convenient for all the members to gather.)
With the establishment of the state, this dramatic event was also added to the Haggadot: Natan Alterman's poem "The Silver Platter," "anthems" of the War of Independence or extracts from the Declaration of Independence. Thus, for example, the 1950 Ein Harod Haggadah included an extract from the Declaration of Independence after Vehi sheamda lavoteinu (translated as: "This is God's promise to our ancestors and to us"), under the common heading "Redemption."
The religious kibbutzim also did not disdain innovations, although naturally there the approach was more cautious: not changes to the traditional text, but an addition that was called Miluim lahaggadah (Inserts for the Haggadah).
In Kvotzat Roas (which became Kvutzat Yavneh), in 1937 an appendix of this sort was published that tried to cover all the travails of the Jews throughout human history: from the Crusades, the Marranos (crypto-Jews in Spain of the Inquisition), Shabtai Zvi and the Kishinev pogroms through the pogroms in Eastern Europe after World War I. In these inserts, the editors also dared to introduce modern versions of the traditional contents (not instead of the original test, but after it), like a version of the four sons as "the illegal immigrant," "the faithful," "the assimilated Jew" and "the quarrelsome person."
But the establishment of the state also marks the waning of the revolutionary spirit in the text of the Haggadah. Tzur attributes this to the combination of two factors: "First of all, the Holocaust changed something in the negative attitude towards Diaspora Jewry and towards the need to change the traditional text. And secondly, new `national days' emerged - like Holocaust and Martyrs' Memorial Day and Independence Day - into which the current texts flowed, and the Haggadah again `made room' for the traditional text."
However, he stresses that the return to the traditional character of the Haggadah was not total: "They returned mainly to its biblical elements, but all the ritual exegeses from the rabbinical era dropped out and apparently will not return."
With the waning of the kibbutz movement as a whole, it is clear that its revolutionary literary zeal also faded, and today a "secular conservatism" has become the standard, whereby in the various movements they customarily read the Haggadot that have been shaped by the movement philosophers and educators.
Not by chance, the revolutionary textual fervor still prevails where there is still a collective avant-garde spirit - in the urban kibbutzim and communes. The last page of the book is devoted to such a Haggadah, written at an urban commune in Migdal Ha'emek in 2002: In this Haggadah there is a return of the revolutionary song "Our Face to the Rising Sun" that had been so common in the kibbutz Haggadot of the 1940s and the 1950s, and alongside it there are texts that reinterpret the traditional texts in a current way.
Tzur relates that "recently, I visited Givat Hakibbutzim in Rehovot, where two collectives of young people who are engaged in education live. And it turns out that this young group has already managed to put out three different Haggadot. The encounter of them was very moving, because they themselves did not know that they are part of a long tradition of writing new Haggadot - that is, perhaps they knew in a general way but they were not actually familiar with this tradition."
The four daughters
Parallel to the waning of the revolutionary kibbutz Haggadah, in recent years a new genre of Haggadots has flourished: faithful to the traditional text but with various additions. Even among the religious public such Haggadot are not uncommon now. Thus, for example, three years ago the Israel Defense Forces Rabbinate issued an elaborate Haggadah in which, alongside the traditional text there are riddles, commentaries, Hassidic tales and even pictures from the IDF experience.
But if the addition of traditional texts from later periods has already become commonplace even in the religious community, this year, in the spirit of the "new religiosity" that stretches the boundary between religious and secular identity, this genre has climbed another, daring rung.
Mishael Zion, a graduate of the hesder yeshiva (combined religious study and military service program) at Ma'aleh Gilboa and his father Noam (who is associated with the Shalom Hartman Institute for Jewish studies) have published a Haggadah called Halayla hazeh ("This Night"). It is defined as "an Israeli Haggadah," accompanied by drawings by Michel Kichka; alongside the traditional text there are spring songs and a wide range of texts - from poet Haim Gouri and novelist Amos Oz to Czech writer Milan Kundera and black American leader Martin Luther King, and even a text by a female Conservative rabbi about the "four daughters" mentioned in the tradition.
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