I was thinking about the Passover Seder, as I do at this time of year, and how the Haggadah chooses to tell the Exodus story. One of the things I often think about storytelling is the choice of when in the story to start telling it, and when to stop. If we take a different story\u2014you could decide to start telling, say, the Alexander Hamilton story at his birth, or at his arrival in the US, or at the start of the war, or even start at his death and fill in the earlier stuff later. And you could stop it at his death, or at Burr\u2019s death, or Eliza\u2019s death. It changes the story you are telling.\r\n
When the Torah tells the story of the Exodus, it starts\u2026 well, it starts with the creation of the world, really. But the Book of Exodus, and the story of Exodus, starts with the Israelites being fruitful and multiplying and filling the land, and the rising up of a new king who knew them not. But the Haggadah doesn\u2019t really start there, does it? The Haggadah, really, starts with\u2014well, where does it start?\r\n
In a sense, the Haggadah starts with the seder. The first thing we recite, or at least the first thing we recite in my end of the tradition, is the order of the seder: Kadesh, urchatz, karpas, yachatz,<\/i> etc. The story<\/i> of Passover starts with the observance<\/i> of Passover, and then progresses, naturally, into the questions of what<\/i> we are doing and why<\/i>. It doesn\u2019t progress in any sort of chronological way, but by symbols. We move backward and forward in time, talking about the Rabbis at Bene Barak and then back to Jacob and Laban, and then about Gamliel and Hillel in Temple times, always coming back to our table and the seder itself. Modern Haggadahs include modern incidents\u2014the Holocaust, the movement for Women\u2019s equality (and the backlash to it), current aspects of slavery and oppression\u2014often explicitly drawing attention to their inclusion in or exclusion from the seder. The story of Passover is the story of the seder, the story of the story of Passover.\r\n
In another sense, the Haggadah starts the story of the Exodus with the description of our bitter enslavement. We begin (after the order of the seder and the Kiddush over the wine) with dipping a leaf in salt water and eating it. We don\u2019t explain it yet, but we do it: the tears of slavery. To the extent that we reconstruct the narrative story of Exodus in the seder, in a fractured way, it does not start with Joseph but with the enslaved generation. And we move forward through the plagues to the parting of the Red Sea, and pretty much stop there. We don\u2019t even get to the other side, in any significant way: we don\u2019t sing the Mi chamocha<\/i> or talk about the wilderness years. It starts just before the plagues do, and ends just after.\r\n