The Seder is, by design, interminably long. It delays gustatory gratification for its attendees every chance it gets – a sprig of salted parsley here, a horseradish-smeared shard of crumbling matzo there – and insists upon strict adherence to the Haggadah, the story of the Jews’ Exodus from Egypt, before you even sniff something resembling a warm meal. It demands your attention, or at least your acquiescence, as it bombards you with a spree of psalms and asides and questions and the ensuing answers. It is a self-consciously daunting ritual, to the point that it includes a children’s game – the hiding of the afikoman – to distract any present kids (and, probably, their older cousins, happy to flee the table in the name of supervision) while we recount our ancestors’ alleged 40 years of wandering in the desert. It is a slog, especially for the secular, like me. And yet this year, for probably the first time ever in a lifetime of annual appearances, the liturgy resonated. It was not exactly (forgive the phrasing) a “come to Jesus” moment, which is not to say it was not mildly epiphanic: Out of all that religion, out of all that tireless trembling before the Lord, our God, King of the Universe, a story emerged. I love a good story. And nothing puts a good story in perspective like hearing it told poorly.

 

I went to two radically different Seders this year, which is to say I went to Seders that used two radically different Haggadahs. The chain of events stays the same: Four glasses of wine spread out over an evening, mixed in with the washing of hands, the eating of bitter herbs, the breaking of matzo and the telling of the aforementioned Exodus. That much is non-negotiable. On the first night, though, with one set of family members, we read from Roots and Branches: A Humanist Haggadah for Passover by Sandi Horowitz, Barry N. Olshen and Lisa Wright from Toronto’s Oraynu Congregation for Humanistic Judaism. Before Friday, I didn’t realize Humanistic Judaism existed, but no less ordained a body than the United Jewish Communities recognized it as the legitimate fifth branch of the religion in 2000. (Though, if I had to guess, I would wager Judaism’s more conservative branches are, at best, indifferent to its inclusion.)  

 

Faithful in its retelling of the Exodus, “Roots and Branches” also embraces the story as a metaphor, and that is what makes it such a compelling text. Passover obliges you to view yourself as if you, too, had just been freed from bondage in Egypt. Here, the authors augment biblical history with first-hand accounts of the Jewish diaspora to America, of living like a king in the early 1900s making two dollars a day pushing a Manhattan fruit cart after fleeing the Bolsheviks. The idea is not “Next year in Jerusalem,” but rather that Judaism is pluralistic: That its history can edify you; that you can be whole without claiming Israel as your birthright; that your ultimate destination after escaping that which binds you is one of your own choosing; and that you can build your own blessed kingdom wherever you land. 

 

This rewriting of the Haggadah is permitted and encouraged. Many families build their own, piecemeal, from editions they’ve enjoyed; even Maxwell House Coffee prints its own version. Over the last few years, authors Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander teamed to produce the “New American Haggadah,” which Little, Brown and Company finally released a few weeks ago. But where “Roots and Branches” seeks to modernize the story and doesn’t shy away from its fictions, this edition (produced, ironically, by two novelists) is almost obsessively observant to the original telling – despite the fact that Englander, the translator, identifies as a “proudly and radically secular” Jew. In a three-year-old New York Times op-ed, though, he explains himself thusly:

 

“The Haggadah advises us to venture-off and learn but when it comes to choosing a liturgy, I don’t venture far. I came to discover that there’s no one more fiercely traditional than a fallen Jew, and found myself recoiling in horror when an ancient Hebrew word-puzzle was absent from the text I’m using as a guide (don’t worry, I put it back).”

 

In other interviews, Englander has plainly said this is consciously not a modernization, and that his primary loyalty in this project was to the language itself. That doesn’t stop my skin from crawling when I come across a paragraph imploring a vengeful God to “shed [his] wrath upon the nations” that do not recognize Him, but under Englander’s guidance, the text at least revels in its difficulties and contradictions; it is meant to be questioned and argued about. “That’s the whole point,” he says. “The dinner should take 50 hours.”

 

With a lesser text, with a lesser guide, it sometimes feels that way. On the second night of Passover, with a wholly different group of people, we read from Rabbi Nathan Goldberg’s Haggadah, various editions of which have been part of the vast majority of the Seders I’ve been to. It’s an economical, artless document, one that paradoxically encourages readers to rush through it and yet drags on endlessly. If this were the only Haggadah you’d ever known, you would be excused for a lack of curiosity. 

 

Here is the part where I am accused of being a fair-weather Jew, where I am told I have no ground on which to stand because I have claimed secularism over religiosity, where I am scolded for prizing context and self-awareness over old-school biblical thunder. It’s a common refrain, one that springs from the conservative wing of a religion that rests on a foundation of meticulously recorded and assiduously studied laws, and it’s not entirely wrong. With so few Jews left in the world – we make up less than one per cent of the Earth’s population – those survival instincts never really cease, and for many, burgeoning secularism seems like a death sentence. About 35 per cent of the planet’s Jews live in the United States and, according to Harper’s, only 27 per cent of Jewish Americans believe in God. Jews who identify only culturally or ethnically – i.e., own several seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on DVD, love smoked salmon, buy presents for every night of Chanukkah – invariably incur the wrath of those who think they’re living in the endtimes of their beloved religion. And the religious are right about one thing: There is a sort of pervasive complacency at hand. But in his own New York Times op-ed, “New American Haggadah” editor Jonathan Safran Foer zeroes in on its real effect:

 

“The integration of Jews and Jewish themes into our pop culture is so prevalent that we have become intoxicated by the ersatz images of ourselves. I, too, love “Seinfeld,” but is there not a problem when the show is cited as a referent for one’s Jewish identity? For many of us, being Jewish has become, above all things, funny. All that’s left in the void of fluency and profundity is laughter.”

 

I am the Jew in front of whom my friends feel comfortable telling Jew jokes; contrast me with another friend who sometimes Googles the word “Jew” in his spare time and reports any anti-Semitic search results. My lack of seriousness about my background has let me take a carefree approach to it, but largely because I gave myself no reason to think deeply about it. Foer touches on this, too:

 

“I felt satisfied with how little I knew. Sometimes I thought of my stance as a rejection, but you can’t reject something that you don’t understand and that was never yours. Sometimes I thought of it as an achievement, but there’s no achievement in passive forfeiture.”

 

This gets closer to why Friday night’s “Roots and Branches” service was so revelatory: It told the story in a way that was impossible to reject, and it was impossible to reject because it was impossible to ignore. That feeling only intensified after Saturday’s impenetrable effort, whose accompanying text was less “Ulysses” and more braided carpet. There’s no shame in seeking out and relying on stories, especially when you’re dealing with fictions. After all, there likely never was any Exodus from Egypt; modern historians and scholars find the biblical claims of Jewish slavery grossly overstated. The subjugation to which the Haggadah refers probably, categorically, did not happen. 

 

But we know histories that have happened, definitely, and we know of persecution that is ongoing. The Exodus may just be a story, but the story has endured. It has, as Foer says, “changed the world more than the events ever did.” Why, then, not give it the finest treatment possible? Why not give it the audience it deserves?