Re: RE: progressive haggadah

>>>>> "niel" == Niel M Bornstein <niel-eVhvBAtfTHk423YV9hPXO9/[email protected]> writes:

  niel> Since they're symbolic things anyway, expanding on the
  niel> symbolism that's already there is becoming fairly simple. For
  niel> example, the green vegetable is dipped in salt water,
  niel> traditionally to remind us of the salty tears of the Jews in
  niel> Egyptian slavery. Well, it's not much of a leap to have the
  niel> salt water represent the tears of any oppressed person or
  niel> people. Pick Afghan refugees, and you have an instant
  niel> discussion point: what responsibility do we, as Jews, have to
  niel> prevent the suffering of other people?

I take it that the order of the Seder is fixed in part because it has
a kind of narrative structure that is meant to symbolize the Exodus
story itself. (Which suggests a direction for a modernist Haggadah, of
course, since transposing and rearranging narrative time has been a
major theme of modernist art, perhaps especially painting, drama, and
film.)

The other, rather implicit factor that impels a lot of Haggadah
contextualization is that in many cultures the Exodus narrative has
become a kind of trope of liberation and redemption; i.e., a cultural
template and vocabulary by means of which many oppressed groups have
tried to tell and, so, understand their own story. The most obvious
example in the U.S. context is the way Exodus got taken up into
African American spirituality very early.

Given that oppressed groups have seen in this particularly Jewish
story (which appears to have no historical basis) something of
universal significance, it seems perfectly reasonable for people, for
whom retelling the story is still part of their own religious
experience, to also see in it hints and implications and connections
(Philo of Alexandria would have said "prefigurings and
foreshadowings") of the experiences of others.

Which I find v. interesting since Christianity from early on looked
backward to the Exodus story (and other parts of Jewish scripture) for
foreshadowings and prefigurings of its own central and founding myths
-- a hermeneutical strategy which eventually, given the dominance of
Christianity in Europe, became a kind of cultural colonization of
Judaism and Jewish culture, one which aided and abetted the general
oppression of the Jew as Other in Europe until at least 1950, if not
longer.

Kendall